Diet With the Seasons

Diet With the Seasons
By Denny Phillips

Now there is a crisp nip in the air and the leaves on the trees are beautiful with their changing colors. With autumn comes the time to settle back and snuggle up warm and cozy in your humble abode. And with autumn comes a different way to eat. Gone are the warm summer breezes and the lazy days where you can sit outside in the sun and enjoy the scrumptious backyard barbeques. Now is the time for the satisfying comfort foods to come out.

Each changing season offers new ideas for your diet menus and various fresh options for fruits and vegetables for you to choose from to help you lose weight. Each new season also offers you a different way to cook.

When you are on a diet, it is easy to become bored with eating the same foods over and over again. What you should do is to try take advantage of the benefits of the changing seasons.
When spring arrives, many new fresh vegetables and fruits become available. Your diet menus should change to reflect the natural goodness of this fresh produce.

You should include the newly growing plants that are available during that season. You should also take the opportunity to try new taste experiences that you may not have tried before.

For example, have you tried fiddleheads (which are available fresh only during the early spring)? Including a new produce like fiddleheads to your diet can increase your diet menu potential, helping you to lose weight and not become bored with eating the same foods time and again. It can give you new incentive to continue successfully on your diet path.

Of course, there are other options that you can add to your diet menus in spring, like asparagus (which is one of the first produce items that are freshly available), or strawberries (which are ripest and sweetest at this time of the year). You will not feel like you are dieting when you taste the goodness of these items at their freshest point. Also, including spring items in your diet plan can give you the option of picking your own produce, like scouring the countryside for wild asparagus, which can help you with your exercise program.

Summer always offers a multitude of fresh vegetables and fruits, and even helps you to change the way some of your traditional diet meals are cooked. Consider barbeque-ing your foods as a better fat reduced way of cooking your meats. You can grill the fresh available fruits and vegetables over a charcoal pit. Summer cooking offers a fun way to prepare low calorie diet meals.

Fall dieting meals can bring you back indoors to include warm, comfort foods in your diet meal plans. Here fresh pumpkins, squash, rutabagas, crisp apples and freshly available nuts can play a bigger part in your diet foods. Include hot soups (always a calorie reduced meal option) as a diet food that is filling and warmly satisfying. Make stews to include all the harvest vegetables, while your diet menus stay low calorie and hearty as the same time.

As the snow flies and winter sets in, again the warm aspect of cooking indoors is in play. Think of the foods of the season that you get to include in your diet menus. Turkey for Thanksgiving is a calorie-friendly meal option. Think of the canned vegetables you have stored in your fruit cellar to include in your diet meals. During the winter season your cooking habits can include roasting vegetables and stove-top cooking. You can also use your oven broiler or stove-top grill to add variety to your diet meals.

Changing your diet plans to suit the seasons is an option that can help you to avoid the trap of being bored with your diet menus. You can make the foods you are allowed to eat tasty and fun if you vary your cooking methods to suit the seasons as well. This can also aid you in helping you to stick to your diet to help you lose weight.

source : http://ezinearticles.com/?Diet-With-the-Seasons&id=1596041

Low Carb Fast Food

Low Carb Fast Food

When you are doing a low carb eating plan, it is important to cook for yourself to be sure you know exactly what is in what you are eating.

However, there are times when this is just not possible, and you may have a hard time deciding what you can eat when you are away from home.

Though finding low carb fast food might not be the optimal choice, it is better than eating something full of carbs just because you can’t find anything else.

You can find something at almost any fast food establishment that will help you stay on your eating plan, even it if is not your first choice.


When you look for low carb fast food, you have to think about taking the carbs off of things. Some places cater to those who are on this type of eating plan, but sometimes you are on your own.

One of the best things you can do is get a burger and take off the bun. Have cheese on it if your plan allows, and remember to add lettuce and tomato.

You should avoid ketchup as it always has sugar, but mustard is okay for low carb fast food if you like it.

Most places have a great salad you can have for low carb fast food. Just be sure you don’t have the carrots if you are not that far along on the plan, and also make sure you watch the carbs in the salad dressing they try to give you.

Most of the salad dressing you find in a fast food place has more sugar than the kind you are probably using at home.

It is hard to carry around your own salad dressing, but there may be times when you need to do this.

The ranch you use at home might have 2 carbs per serving, but the stuff you get at a fast food place might have nine or ten.

If you want to get a grilled chicken type of salad for low carb fast food, you have to ask them if they have marinated the chicken in anything that might have contained sugar, or if the sauce they may have added contains sugar.

This is very common. You may not be able to have the chicken if that is the case. Though low carb fast food might not be your first choice, it can be a life saver when you have no other choice.

Traveling and doing a low carb plan is not always easy, but you can do better if you know what to look out for and what to avoid completely.