Staying Slim in the Kitchen

I came across this little list of tips from some of the most renowned chefs… who manage to find the balance between preparing, and tasting delicious meals at their restaurants but not allowing their eating styles to be thrown out the window in favor of eating rich, decadent meals in too-large portions as a norm.  What a concept!

• Enjoy what you love.   “Relish what is excellent, skip anything mediocre and stop when you’re sated”.   

• Cook at home often and keep it simple. “Every meal needn’t be a giant event”.

• Focus on Flavor. “Complex flavor profiles of spices, herbs, lemon and lime juice can amp up the pleasure and mitigate the need for mindless nibbling”.

I have to agree with all these pointers.  

Why would anyone eat anything that didn’t taste great?  Of course, there may be times when we eat a meal that’s so simple there are no other flavors present than that of the food itself- like the flavor of a piece of wild salmon or raw kale, but if those items didn’t taste good, they probably weren’t fresh and shouldn’t have been eaten!

While eating is indeed a multi sensory experience, it certainly doesn’t need to be a multi-hour procedure on a day to day basis.  Eat fresh, create a lovely presentation and enjoy it, but again, no need to assume you’re going to need three hours every day to do so.

Finally, the idea of mindless nibbling because what you’ve eaten just didn’t do  a good job at providing a properly balanced, portioned meal, is completely avoidable.  Don’t try and ‘save calories for later’ or drastically cut down on how much you eat in a frenzied attempt to drop weight fast.  It doesn’t work and it’s not good.

Eating healthy foods that also happen to be easy to prepare and taste good is actually very simple; simple to conceive and equally simple to execute…even if you are a chef surrounded by rich, decadent foods all the time!