Samantha Mendoza

How To Change Your Meals a Little To Make Them Less Caloric

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Posted: Monday, May 10, 2010

by Samantha Mendoza
Lifetime Fitness Nutrition

By learning how to cook or how to choose the food you're going to combine and eat, you can get a great help for lowering your caloric intake, which is a great thing for your diet needs, and a good way to cut some weight if you're not too physically active.

There's no better way to show you how to cut some calories, but with an example.

Just to give you an idea of how you can change a recipe that would usually be a high calorie meal, I share with you this ethnic dish from a city called: Queretaro, right at the center of Mexico that I hope you can enjoy sometime.

Usually the recipe is called: Enchiladas Queretanas

Ingredients:

3 chilis called: wide chili (you toast them, put them in a bag to "sweat" and retire then the seeds making a little incision in one side).

24 mexican tortillas which will serve for 8 persons (not like the ones you see in the US which are hard, I mean tortillas that are soft and made of maize).

600 ml of milk.

1 garlic.

1 egg.

2 chicken breasts boiled (shred the chicken).

2 boiled potatoes (cut in little squares).

2 boiled carrots (cut in little squares).

80 gr. of striped panela cheese.

35 gr. of chopped cilantro.

120 ml of oil for cooking.

Chile guajillo

Cook the chicken with a little bit of salt in a pan and when it is boiled, shred it.

Cut in little squares the potatoes and the carrots. Cook the potatoes and the carrots in a pan with water.

Cook the chili in milk at very low heat, remove and blend with garlic, egg and salt.

Soak tortillas in the sauce, put the tortillas in a little bit of hot oil (keep them flexible).

To serve: Fill the tortillas with shred chicken. Put the potatoes and carrots squares in the top, spread cheese and chopped cilantro.

The little changes you can make to lower the calories of the recipe above :

Limit the serving of the dish to a maximum of 3 tortillas.

Cut to half the amount of potatoes.

Use low calories panela cheese (or any other white cheese very low fat).

Don't make the step where tortillas are put on the oil or, lower the amount of it.

There you go! Easy to cook and enjoy. I recommend a little jump to Queretaro someday, is a nice colonial town not far away from Mexico city but with the feeling of being in a calm, cultural and very warm place.

So, traducing this example into something practical:

1) When trying to control calories, foods more rich in nutrients are useful, because they're nutrient dense and sometimes not so high in calories.

For example: Ice cream contributes with 350 calories per cup. Same ice cream made with low fat milk will only give you 85 calories.

Foods that offer more nutrients per calorie are: Vegetables, specially non starchy ones such as tomatoes, mushrooms, etc.

2) Plan meals easier to cook. If you're going to spend some time in the kitchen, make every minute of value. For example: Which time was better used?

a) Washing, peeling and slicing vegetables for a salad or

b) Fixing a fancy high fat high sugar dessert.

I think you've got the answer. And also, vegetables are cheaper than the ingredients for the fancy high calorie dessert.

Check as well, busy cookers, that there are many packed foods ready to serve for example for salads or other foods and ingredients that are already half cooked and that can save you more time.

http://www.lifetimefitnessnutrition.com/

Samantha Mendoza has a degree on chemist-pharmacist-biologist from Universidad la Salle in Mexico. She's worked for more than 10 years on cellular nutrition, and has a masters degree in managment-marketing as well. For the past 2 years she's been an advisor and speaker for nutritional topics in different parts of Mexico which drove her to write and share her nutritional expertise by building a Fitness and Nutrition Website called: http://www.lifetimefitnessnutrition.com

Samantha has been as well a teacher at 2 prestigious universities in Mexico: Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and Universidad la Salle on subjects such as: Chemistry, Biology, Health Sciences, Science, etc. 

She has been a passionate sports person performing in a high competitive level all of her life and is certified as a SCUBA diving instructor from the Mexican Federation of Subaquatic Activities (FMAS) with approval of the CMAS (The international Federation).
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