That's Fit

For many people, when they change their eating habits in an effort to lose weight, their menu becomes a little limited. When you're used to cooking with butter and covering everything in cream sauces, your recipe box can become a little useless. But healthy eating certainly doesn't have to be boring and your options are limitless.

AOL Body's America Takes It Off program has been in full swing for a couple of weeks now. Have you decided to take the challenge? If you're hard at work trying to shed a few pounds before summer, don't limit yourself to the same old foods over and over. America Takes It Off has pulled together a great collection of healthy recipes that will tempt your taste buds and keep you on the right diet track.

A dear friend of mine has just been diagnosed with myriad food allergies. Eggs and gluten are among them. As a result, the thought of her future in the kitchen, let alone in restaurants and at dinner parties, has become somewhat daunting.

But there's a resource that might ease her transition. Cooking Allergy Free is an online community of food allergy sufferers and catalog of information and recipes just for them. We introduced readers to the site before. But a recent site redesign makes it easier to find recipes tailored to specific allergy-diets and allows users to create their own profile. Administrators have also added to the vast library of recipes.

Those who create their own profile can include personal information and a photo, allow others to see their allergies, and allow people to privately contact them. And those who create profiles during the month of May will be entered in a raffle for a free cookbook of their choice.

My favorite piece of cooking gear is my vegetable steamer. It can be used for more than just veggies -- like rice -- but I use is for one purpose only: Steaming the broccoli, peas, corn, and squash we rotate among our daily dinners. My steamer is easy to assemble, easy to use, and easy to clean. And it takes no longer than 10 minutes for our nutritious fare to cook. I also like my food processor -- it just doesn't get as much use -- and I really want a Crock Pot. I borrow my sister's when I need one, but I bet I'd be a bit more inventive with meals if I had one stuffed in a cabinet nearby.

Women's Health magazine recommends a few got-to-have kitchen gadgets. The food processor and steamer make the cut -- although the WH editors recommend not my stand alone steamer but a flexible silicone steamer that sits on top of a pan of boiling water. They also recommend a colandar, casserole dishes, mixing bowls, baking sheets, pots and pans, a hand mixer, a meat thermometer, an oil sprayer, nylon/rubber tools, wooden goods, a vegetable peeler, a shredder, kitchen shears, cutting boards, and knives.

A pretty good medley of stuff, huh? Click here and check out each item. Pictures, descriptions, and suggested brands are included.

I recently got married and moved into a new house, which means I'm cooking in a new kitchen and am all inspired to start trying new recipes. In the cabinets of a healthy kitchen, one of the most common players is olive oil (love a good stir fry) but getting what you pay for is isn't as easy as it should be. Many stores have bottles of oil that have been sitting for ages on the shelf (which diminishes not only flavor but also antioxidant benefits) and some companies are even fraudulently blending in filler oils like sunflower or soybean oil. For the best, healthiest olive oil, follow these tips:

• Go for the smallest brands -- smaller growers almost always produce higher quality oil than mass producers.
• Keep your olive oil cool and dark, and look for brands packaged in dark bottles.
• Read the label carefully, intentionally vague statements like "imported from Italy" can be deceiving (it wasn't necessarily made in Italy).
• "Extra virgin" isn't necessarily the best. To be labeled extra virgin, olive oil must have an acidity of 0.8% or less, which isn't that hard to do. For really good oil, look for 0.5% or less.
  

Most alcohol gets burned off during the cooking process. But if you have some recipes that require a cooking wine or liqueur and don't want to risk it on children or less-than-healthy guests, give these simple substitutions a try.

Replace one tablespoon of bourbon or sherry with:

• one tablespoon of apple or orange juice

Replace one tablespoon of coffee liqueur or chocolate liqueur with:

• 1/2 teaspoon chocolate extract or
• 1/2 teaspoon instant coffee in 2.5 teaspoons of water

"Kids in the Kitchen" is a program geared towards teaching children to make healthy lifestyle choices and to hopefully help stall or even reverse the current obesity epidemic. Created and supported by The Association of Junior Leagues International Inc., last year more than 255 local Leagues around country participated. Depending on where you live and the approach each individual League chooses the program may vary, but the principles behind it remains the same: teach healthy kitchen skills to kids. In my area, for example, grade school kids took part in a recipe contest and the winners spent the day baking and eating healthy goodies with a local celebrity chef. So keep your eyes and ears open for word of a "Kids in the Kitchen" event in your area, or check out their website to find out if something is happening near you.

Cat Cora, star of the Food Network's Iron Chef America and author of Cooking From the Hip writes in Parade magazine about her love for desserts and her lack of love for what desserts do to her hips.

So that she can have the best of both worlds -- decadent desserts and happy hips -- Cora has learned to create healthy dishes that still taste like the original sin. Her secret? Substituting lighter ingredients like yogurts, light puddings, soy, or light ice creams. Less fat and calories are the end result, with taste and flavor still intact.

Check out these four delights -- Kiwi Parfait, Affogato, Baked Apples, and Clafouti -- by clicking here. Read the recipes word for word or watch video clips of Cora as she prepares each one.

Want to have your cake and eat it too? Cora says it's possible. Just follow her lead.

Even with the best of intentions, as well as an admirable amount of effort, the weight sometimes doesn't come off!! Try as you might to get the needle on that scale to budge even the slightest bit, sometimes it's just not having it. This is especially true for people who have already lost quite a bit of weight and are now trying to take off those last ten pounds or so.

To help you shed those stubborn extra pounds, here is a quick tip from an article titled "Scale Stuck?", which appears in this month's edition of Self magazine. I'll be posting one of them a day for the next 10 days.

Hopefully these tips will help you figure out what's causing those pounds to stick around.

Quick Tip #8

Diet Flub: You taste while you cook - Now we're getting down to the minutia, I know. I realize it probably seems that way, but this tip does have merit. Even though those tastes of the pasta sauce, nibble of the chicken, sip of the wine, and handful off fruits may not seem like much, all together they add up to a fair amount of calories. If you're goal is to drop some of those extra pounds, the last thing you want to do is eat almost a meal's worth of calories before you even sit down at the dinner table.

Fix It: Occupy your mind with something else. Eating out of sheer boredom happens all too often, especially when our minds are free to roam about unsupervised. We mindlessly grab a bite of this, a handful of that, and a few nibbles of some of those. Making dinner, especially when done by yourself, can be a tedious process for some people. As a result, we snack. To that end, the best way to avoid this boredom-induced chomping from occurring in the kitchen is to keep your mind busy with something else. Try listening to your iPod, or working on a crossword puzzle (just don't get too caught up in trying to find a ten letter word starting with the letter C that is a beam supported only on one end*, or else you may accidentally start a fire). Also, according to the article in Self magazine, people tend to eat less if someone else is in the kitchen with them. Another strategy that may help is to keep a small dish of low-calorie vegetables handy for you to snack on, or even try chewing gum.

*Answer: Cantilever

I've never entirely trusted the microwave. For example? I won't stand near it while it's running -- something I heard years ago about radiation and microwaves really stuck in my head. And if I have a choice between using it and conventional oven, I usually choose the latter. But apparently, my hesitation towards the microwave has been unfounded. Studies show that using the microwave is one of the best ways to cook your veggies because it's the least destructive to the nutrients.

This news makes it even easier to enjoy your veggies. But make sure to not use too much water because some vitamins can seep out into it. 1-2 tablespoons is fine, and you don't need to use water when cooking raw veggies.

Ok, I guess I was wrong about the microwave. But I still like steaming my veggies -- what about you?

(Via Fitsugar)

To celebrate its 20th birthday, 'Cooking Light' magazine is enumerating 20 cities that best match its philosophy. The criteria included whether or not the residents where in good health, how many farmer's markets does the city have, and how often do they exercise. There were 15 benchmarks in total needed to make the list, so check it out to see which cities made the cut!

Bringing up the rear is Kansas City. This metropolitan community was found to have the purest water of any other major city in the country! Other hot spots included Atlanta, Georgia. Having over 50,000 people participate in their Peachtree Road Race makes them the host of the largest 10k run in the world.

Ever been to Minneapolis? Sitting pretty at number 4, this city's natural attractions and landscapes make it worth standing out. But which place holds the top rank? Seattle, Washington -- fresh food, pedestrian atmosphere, and "inclusive attitudes" put this city at #1. See which other locations made the list, perhaps you're living it!

Some claim that using microwaves is unhealthy, that these cooking contraptions are capable of killing the nutrients in our food and reversing the benefits of beverages like tea. This doctor -- the well-known Dr. Katz -- says microwaving may actually be the least damaging to nutrients. Microwaves ovens are not unhealthy, he says. They are, in fact, a very nutritious way to cook.

Microwaves allow for quick cooking and in most cases, the less time a food is exposed to heat, the higher its nutrient levels. As for tea, all you're doing is heating the water and adding the tea bag later. There's just no way nutrient levels can be adversely affected in this case.

The only argument Dr. Katz can identify against microwave cooking is this: It can leave food a bit dry or perhaps with a different taste. But it won't leave your diet any less nutritious.

You might sprinkle salt in your cooking water because you believe it speeds up the cooking process. But adding salt doesn't really make much of a difference. Add one tablespoon to five quarts of boiling water when cooking pasta, for example, and you'll save a half a second off your cooking time.

Salt does raise the boiling point of water slightly and in theory this means water will boil hotter and faster. But the change is just too small to count as a benefit. So if you're monitoring your sodium intake, skip the salt when cooking pasta, rice, vegetables, and hot cereals. It'll matter when it comes to your health. It won't matter at all when it comes to sitting down at the table any faster.

Ever heard about how cooking veggies can diminish the nutritional quality? We've covered microwaving them before, but this little gem of a study addresses how other cooking methods affect vegetable nutrients. Steaming, boiling and even frying certain produce can actually increase antioxidant levels!

According to the study, it all depends on the vegetable and the way you cook it. Levels of a cancer-fighting compound in broccoli were found to be higher after steaming, rather than just plain raw broccoli. And carotenoids in boiled carrots were higher than its raw counterparts as well.

Now, the claim concerning diminished nutrients after cooking was not unfounded. Certain methods did actually decrease the antioxidant count. But if you cook the vegetable right, it can maintain or enhance the nutritional value in the end! I just wish they had shared all the methods and their findings directly to the article. However, it says the results will be published soon in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Although it is possible to be perfectly healthy and still eat out all the time, it's not an easy thing to do. Studies have found a strong connection between people who eat healthier diets and people who eat at home the majority of the time. As a society we've really gotten away from the regular "from scratch" home cooked meal -- sadly they've become a complete luxury in many cases! But eating at home can help you avoid many of the temptations of dining out (I can't even count how many times I've gone out swearing to have soup and salad and ended up with a burger and fries instead!) and can save you money too.

One of the daily stresses all of us deal with is eating. How much, how often, and what kind of food to eat as well as shopping for it, going out for it, having it delivered or preparing it all take up a fair chunk of our time. Eating healthy helps reduce stress in myriad ways, but doing that can be stressful in and of itself. And winter is a time when it's often tough for many of us to make healthy choices.

Here's a solution: Make a big pot of healthy soup you can have for various meals all week long. Or you can freeze portions for later. I got the following recipe from a friend and it got me through last week feeling satisfied and energized.

1 whole chicken, boiled and then meat removed
1 bunch each of collard greens and Swiss chard, chopped and boiled separately, then added to soup
varied amounts of green beans, chopped carrots, corn and celery
1 chopped onion
1 or 2 cans kidney beans
ground turmeric, salt and pepper to taste

Enjoy!