Kitchen Hacks for a Healthy Lifestyle

There are two kinds of people, those who love the word “hack” and those who are physically repulsed by it. People who love hacks tend to enjoy the idea of beating the system, learning ways to save time and effort without losing out on quality and enjoy tips and tricks that are elegant solutions to common issues. People who hate the word, tend to think of “hacks” as cheating or something that lazy people do.Well, sorry to say this but if you think that you’re dead wrong. Making a long task simpler and easier is just being efficient and provided the end result is unaffected it certainly isn’t cheating. When it comes to eating healthy, most people need as many hacks as possible, because changing your diet is a difficult thing to do. Luckily this article is here to help you, with five excellent kitchen hacks for a healthy lifestyle.

Kitchen Hack #1 Calorie Swapping

Most diets start with the removal of all forms of junk food, which usually gives you great results for the first few weeks. Then after a particularly bad day at the office, everything falls apart. Out comes the junk food, and you’re back to square one. But what if instead of removing all junk food from your life immediately, you just limited it?Let’s say that you always eat a 200 calorie bag of chips, a normal diet would have you get rid of them completely. Instead what if you ate a 150 calorie bag of chips. Over 100 days you would have saved 5000 calories. Then you could consider splitting the bag between two days instead of having one every day. Now that’s only 75 calories per day, a saving of 10,000 calories over 100 days.You can do this with everything, swap higher calorie peanut butter with lower calorie peanut butter, swap full-fat milk for half fat, swap high-calorie soft drinks for zero calorie soft drinks. You’ll be eating the same foods every single day, but you’ll be dropping hundreds of calories. After a while, you can start making more drastic changes, but this is a great way to start a long-term diet change.

Kitchen Hack #2 Find Protein Replacements

Did you know that you can buy high protein cheese? What about high protein bread? Right now there is a huge drive to increase the protein of regular foods, to make it easier for people to hit their targets. Sometimes the products can be pretty poor (a lot of “high protein” alternatives actually have very low protein), but there are enough good ones out there to make it worth your while.Just like the last hack, it’s very easy to swap regular bread for high protein bread, meaning that your daily sandwich is now higher in protein – which often means that it is lower in calories, too! High protein is the way to go!

Kitchen Hack #3 Buy Frozen Fruit & Veg

What’s one of the most common complaints about vegetables? How long it takes to prepare them? How quickly they go off? Well, both of those issues can be immediately dealt with by buying frozen. Frozen broccoli, frozen peas, frozen carrots, frozen spinach, the list goes on and on. It’s great because provided you have the freezer space, you’ll always be able to add some vegetables to your meals, without having to add on another 30 minutes of prep.

Kitchen Hack #4 Roast Your Veg

In the last kitchen hack, we mentioned how long it can take to prepare vegetables, which is true. But there is one way that you can skip all of that. Roast them. Carrots, onions, and even Brussels sprouts can be tossed in olive oil and thrown in the oven. This works particularly well if you are cooking a large roast (turkey, beef, pork etc) and you place the veg around the meat in the same pan.

Kitchen Hack #5 Eat the Same Breakfast Every Day

And the award for least imaginative life hack of all time goes to kitchen hack #5. But you know what? It’s a damn good one. Lots of articles on the web talk about all of the awesome breakfasts you should be making. But who has the time? If you are interested in losing weight then you should be concentrating on 1) counting calories, 2) increasing protein, and 3) improving your health.How do you manage this? By finding a healthy, high protein breakfast that is repeatable. Something that you can make in 2 minutes while you get ready for work. Something that you know the calorie content of, that you know the macros of, something that you know tastes nice and works for you.Obviously, you’ll need to get out there and experiment to find the perfect breakfast for you. But here’s an example of one: Oatmeal with fruit and honey. Protein shake, banana, and black coffee. Buy the microwaveable oatmeal, either use frozen fruit, or dried fruit, and measure out the powder for your protein shake before you go to bed. You can have everything ready in 3 minutes.