Day 20: Find Weight-Loss-Friendly Meals | 30-Day Weight Loss-athon
Welcome to Day 20 of the 30-Day Weight Loss-athon.
All tasks in the 30-Day Weight Loss-athon are adapted from my 52 Weight Loss Missions program.
Read the steps first, then take 10 minutes to complete them.
Move fast, act quickly and stop over-thinking. Ready?
What You Need:
- Recipe books
- Take-out menus
- (Online) menus for restaurants, cafes or other eat-in places you frequent.
Step 1
Today and tomorrow we’re going to focus on preparing meals that support your weight-loss goals.
Today we’ll expand the repertoire of healthy, weight-loss-friendly options on your menu. Then tomorrow we’ll set up a super-smart recipe system the whole household can use.
Note: Don’t worry if you don’t cook – neither do I. Toast is as Master Chef as I get. There’s help here for those of us who are domestically disabled, too.
First, we need to find a range of recipes that support our weight-loss efforts. This will probably mean recipes that are both:
- Generally ‘healthy’ – reasonably low in calories, high in nutrients, etc,
- Supportive of particular diet actions you chose on Day 4: Tweak Your Diet – such as eating more protein and vegetables or less fat.
How do you find recipes like this? You’ll need to do a little research and perhaps build up your library over time. But get started today.
Places to look include:
- Healthy-cooking or low-fat recipe books
- Healthy-cooking classes
- Healthy-cooking recipes from friends
- Magazines, especially health or slimming magazines
- Websites on cooking for weight loss
- Online forums
- Government health websites.
Step 2
Next, we need to short-list this range of choices by catering (ha ha – a little pun) to your cooking preferences.
If you’re something of a gourmand, then include interesting recipes that tantalize your taste buds. If you’re easily bored by bland food, then pepper (hee hee there’s another one – I’m on um, FIRE) your selection with spicy or exotic flavors.
Conversely, if you’re all about speed, make sure your recipes are simple and time-effective.
Step 3
Finally, if you have to take into account household members who are fussy or challenging eaters, then be prepared to get creative and take a little time to find suitable recipes. Or look for recipes that allow you to create two versions with relative ease.
Spending the time now will pay off in the coming weeks and months.
What If You Don’t Cook?
You could:
- Ring favorite restaurants and ask about meals that are consistent with your current choice of diet actions
- Investigate meal-delivery services for options that suit your needs, preferences and budget
- Research local take-out places and make a note of weight-loss-friendly choices
- Check out home-delivery options – eg pizza places that use lots of vegetables and thin crusts, or Asian restaurants that offer vegetable-rich stir-frys.
By not cooking you may save cooking and grocery shopping time, but you’ll still have to invest research time in order to assemble a weight-loss-friendly weekly menu. (Note for 52 Weight Loss Missions customers: we do this in Mission 21: Plan Your Meals).
Step 4
Collect your recipes, highlighted take-out choices, printed restaurant menus, etc. We’ll use them tomorrow.
Check in!
And you’re done!
Be sure to leave your comment below to check in and stay accountable. If you’re reading this by email or in a reader then please click here to leave your comment.
See you tomorrow!
I’m eating more vegetables and experimenting with different seasonings to change them up a bit.
Love love love recipes and finding healthy ones at that! This mission will be a fun one! I have found several really good healthy recipes on Pinterest lately as well.
This one is not hard for me…I love to cook and when we do eat out it is usually a place known to have salads. Will check my Fitness magazines for good recipes.
Have already consulted with a chef friend who’s given me a numbers of quick, easy and healthy meals that are family friendly.
My favorite cookbooks and they also make books for fast food and popular restaurants are from the ADA (American Diabetes Assoc) they are focused on low fat, low carb, and easy to find foods.
I like to take the ingredients of things I like, google them to find nutritious, lower calorie recipes. You can use the recipe as your shopping list so you don’t overspend.
Day 20: Find Weight-Loss-Friendly Meals | 30-Day Weight Loss-athon. this is a tough one as I am a plain eater. Nothing fancy. I have some of my favorite recipes ready and am looking for healthy tweaks for the stuff I love. I will try to add a new recipe a week.
We did a diet for my mother-in-law (1800 calorie diabetic diet) some years ago. We don’t cook any different, but tend to eat too large portions. I need to get my scale and measuring cups out again.
Been working on this w/hubby for a while. Reduced “condiments” like butter and mayo. Remove skin f/chicken. I skip the carbs as much as possible. We are adding more fresh veggies (love cucumbers as our evening vegetable!). Eating out I found out that my salad dressing was horrible, so we’ve changed dressings on our salad (sniff, sniff… I will miss you Ranch Dressing). And I got a great subscription rate to Whole Foods (it’s a Martha Steward mag, so it’s beautiful to look at). It has good recipes and reminds me to eat unrefined as much as possible, too.
definately like this idea. I was thinking of getting one of those plastic sleeve folders and putting the best recipies in the kitchen instead of my big file so they are right on hand and there is no excuse.
On the road again so will have to work on #20 on Monday. But did well at noon today- had a steak salad at a restaurant. Delcious! Freshly grilled steak with lots of green/red sweet peppers on a bed of lettuce and other raw veggies- fat free raspberry vignigette on the side. Water to drink. Tonight- well- decaf tea- no sugar but my small meal was a CHEAT- 4 mozarella cheese sticks. BUT I did walk up four flights of stairs to our room!
Menu planning with healthy meals is a must. I like to have menus that are put together in no time flat and are healthy. I like to have recipes that are low or no salt and fat. Husband is slowly getting used to it!
I called my two favorite restaurants for suggestions. Of course all my yummy favorites are best eaten never but maybe once a year would be okay…They gave me some suggestions for healthy alternatives. I also like to cook/prep food ahead of time to keep things on track. I researched healthy options on one of my favorite websites, onceamonthmom.com.
DH and I have already started changing our diet. Plain old boring iceberg lettuce, tomato and cucumber salads are a thing of the past. Exotic looking salads with yummy dressings (healthy of course) are a regular on our menu now. Sometimes we have mostly salad, a bit of protein and skip most of the carb part of the meal. Yummy!
Luckily I already have a huge collection. Just need to use them.
I am going to work on this more over the weekend.
well worth the time to do this.. glad tomorrow is a saturday so have time for research.
Already been doing it at home for awhile I’ts when I go out that’s a problem will try some of the ideas you suggested when dining out.
looking for some good meals to beable to follow my Weight Watchers diet plan…
Finding healthy recipes is easy… If only I liked to eat healthy as much as I like to read about it.