If you ask me, I’ll say that the most difficult aspect of weight-loss, is dealing with the misconceptions! How does one filter the good advice from the bad, the practical suggestions from the impractical ones! Swimming headlong into the world of dieting without arming themselves with the right information, people often end up going overboard with their weight-loss measures. They strictly avoid their favourite dishes, go on crash diets, and end up spoiling their health and appetite in the long run!The wiser way to lose weight is to adopt healthy lifestyle practices, and cook and eat smart, accompanied by the required amount of exercise. Losing weight does not mean throwing away your favourite recipes it simply means modifying them by replacing the high-calorie ingredients with low-calorie ones! This involves not just replacing the ingredients, but also tweaking the cooking methods and procedure in small ways, in order to retain the nutrients while ensuring the authentic taste. So, the goal of a good diet-plan is to understand the role of each nutrient in the diet, make sure all of them are included, and at the same time produce the meal in such a fashion that it has minimal calories. That is precisely what we have done in this book on “Low-Calorie Healthy Cooking”. Considering that my low-cal recipe collections have been best-sellers, we have come up with a revamped version of my book on low-calorie healthy cooking, by including newer and more innovative recipes. The book includes variants of traditional dishes as well as new ones, covering the whole gamut of the meal spread, ranging from soups and snacks to desserts. Understand the various intelligent cooking methods we have used such as baking/steaming, observe how we have replaced high-cal ingredients with low-cal ones, and feel free to experiment on your own too. Plan your balanced meals from these recipes – which I would like to call as ‘smart’ rather than just low-cal, and enjoy good health!
