Cooking to Burn Fat

As you can see, cooking to burn fat can include quite a few great tasting items to make your mealtimes more interesting.

If you are an American or European, looking to other cultures like the Chinese, Thai, Latin American and Indian can be a big help since many of these dishes are good AND good for your program to burn fat.

But be careful – many foreign dishes are also real Death Stars to your diet, too. Avoid the deep fried stuff and watch out for the lard found in some foods like refried beans – look for the beans made with oils or better yet, make your own with some olive oil.

Burning fat doesn’t mean eliminating all fats, it means keeping your total fat intake to below 30% of the total calories you eat daily. This sounds easy until you do some checking on just how many calories fats have: 3,500 per pound. There are 454 grams in a pound – grams are what the fat content of most items are measured in – a single gram of fat has about 9 calories. If your daily needs are 2,000 calories, you need to get less than 600 (30%) from fat or less than 60 grams of fat per day. Sounds like a lot, but one cup of premium ice cream plus a large fries and you’re over the limit.

Note that the 2,000 calorie daily intake is based on a 45 year old, 200lb. male. Your calorie requirements – and fat intake needs – may be much less.

You also need to remember that even the leanest foods normally have some content of fat, so just eliminating the pure fats & oils and obviously fattening foods will not get rid of all the fat in your diet. Chicken breast – for example, as one very lean meat – has 3.2 grams of fat per 100 gram serving. A normal person can easily eat 200 grams at a single sitting, so – with nothing else added – you just got 6.4 grams of fat or about 10% of you daily requirement. Deep fry those puppies and you’ve gone into the clouds in terms of your fat calorie limit.

Still, it’s easy to see why chicken breasts are great fat burner foods – you can eat one hell of a lot before hitting your 60 gram limit. Chicken thighs have 21g grams per 200 gram serving and less protein making them not as good, but well within your daily limits if you don’t splash on a bunch of BBQ sauce. Check the ingredients: If the first or second one is sugar or salt… well, you know what time it is.

And therein lays the key: what you put on food often has more fat calories than the food itself. By preparing your dishes with less fat, the food will also taste blander in the beginning making it easier to eat less. Latter on you will start to notice the food itself has fantastic flavors you never noticed before, so you won’t miss the fatty sauces so much.

Steaming is also an excellent choice over frying since it has three benefits: First, it requires no oils. Second, if you steam meat, some of the fats end up in the water below instead of the food.

Third, steaming tends to protect the nutrient value of the food better than boiling - fewer water soluble vitamins B an C are lost - so you eat higher quality calories.

Here’s a great link on how to steam

Here's a table to compare various cooking techniques:

Stir frying or stove top vegetable frying is becoming more popular every day based on the idea that it’s healthy, but that probably not the case – it’s not even very authentic, it turns out. Check out this interesting Wikipedia article on Wok Stir Frying

Also remember when preparing foods to make just enough to eat at one sitting. The problem with making more to have as leftovers later is it often doesn’t make it to the leftovers stage and gets eaten beforehand.

The Internet is a great resource – look for low fat recipes and you’ll find there are literally millions - burning fat and eating well does not have to be a contradiction in terms.

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