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Make
over your dinner plate for better health
September 16, 2009
Suzanne Havala Hobbs
We
love our makeovers.
Whether it’s hair and makeup, home, closet or clothing,
comparing “before” with “after” makes
it easier to understand how to make the improvements.
Diets are no different.
I once wrote diet makeovers for a regular feature in SELF
magazine. Readers wrote in to say what they ate for lunch,
and I recommended healthy changes.
More recently, books such as Eat This, Not That by David Zinczenko
show how simple swaps can save hundreds of calories and improve
the quality of your diet. And in this column last year, I
explained how to make over your grocery cart to improve the
nutritional profile of the supplies you bring home. See: http://www.onthetable.net/grocery-makeovers.html.
You can make over your dinner plate, too.
Think about meals before you fix them – or at least
before you put food on your plate. Visualize what you are
about to serve, and fix it before you follow through.
Areas to focus on include calories and quality.
Three approaches can help. Aim for doing at least one of the
following every time you sit down to a meal:
* Reduce it. Cut the portion size of entrees by half, and
reduce the amount of other high-calorie parts of the meal
as well.
That includes wine, dessert, and the butter on your bread.
Trimming portion sizes of meals can easily save 250 calories
or more per sitting.
Do that just once a day and lose at least a pound a month.
* Improve it. Change the quality of your meals for the better
by swapping white bread and pasta for whole wheat.
Use trans fat-free margarine instead of butter, serve brown
rice instead of white, and skip the cheese sauce on vegetables
and cream sauces on pasta and in casseroles.
Eat less meat and more grain- and vegetable-based entrees.
* Dilute it. Push less healthful foods off your plate and
out of your diet by boosting the serving sizes of nutritious,
low-calorie fruits and vegetables. Double your helpings of
broccoli, carrots, and green beans.
Serve large salads. Add sliced fruit for dessert or as edible
garnishes for your plate.
Now let’s apply each of these approaches to a lasagna
dinner with a salad, vegetable, bread and dessert:
* Cut your usual portion of lasagna in half. Skip the butter
on your bread or cut it in half. The savings will total about
250 calories.
* Make the lasagna from scratch – it’s easy, no
recipe needed – and use whole wheat, no-bake lasagna
noodles instead of white for added fiber and trace minerals.
(I found the noodles in the grocery aisle at Target).
Skip the meat in the filling, use low fat cheese and pile
on the veggies.
Use Romaine lettuce or spinach instead of iceberg lettuce
in your salad, and add green onions, grated carrot and bell
pepper for added nutrients. Eat a whole wheat roll instead
of the soft, white kind.
* Eat generous helpings of the salad and vegetables. For dessert,
take a bowl of berries, sliced fruit or a cup of hot tea or
coffee in lieu of cheesecake or ice cream.
Think of your diet as a work in progress. Improve it one meal
at a time.
Suzanne
Havala Hobbs is a licensed, registered dietitian and clinical
associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and
Management and the Department of Nutrition in the UNC Gillings
School of Global Public Health. Send questions and comments
to suzanne@onthetable.net.
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