Eating healthily and exercising regularly are two important steps in someone’s quest to lose weight. If you’re cooking well-balanced meals, paying attention to how much you’re consuming, and making sure you have an adequate intake of required nutrients, you’re definitely on the right track.
While cooking, however, there is one crucial mistake you could be making that will ultimately deter you from your weight loss goals. While it’s easy to do without knowing, it’s also easy to fix. We reached out to health experts for tips on this one critical mistake, how to remove it from your cooking, and be one step closer to reaching your weight loss goals.
Using Too Much Oil
Delicious stir-fry dishes, sizzling meats, and countless other foods require cooking oils as a major ingredient. While whipping up anything with olive oil, vegetable oil, or canola oil is undeniably tasty, doing this could rack up extra deceiving calories that make it much more difficult to maintain a deficit for weight loss.
Health expert Jenny Branco advises looking into the following oils you might use daily, including processed vegetable oils, canola oil, and soybean oil. “One common cooking mistake that makes weight loss so much harder is cooking with refined oils that oxidize at low smoke points,” Branco says. She adds that these inflammatory oils can “damage cell membranes and throw off insulin sensitivity,” which causes blood sugar dysregulation and keeps you from losing weight.
Dr. Josh Axe, D.N.M., C.N.S, D.C., agrees that “hidden calories” such as “poor quality oils, dressings and butter” can hinder your weight loss goals. “These are sources of lots of calories and fat that may make your meals taste a bit better, but they ultimately aren’t very filling considering how calorie-dense they are, nor do they provide a lot of nutrients,” he says.
Since cooking with oils is convenient and often required for many recipes, it might be difficult to simply erase them from your routine. That’s why we asked the experts for healthier alternatives to these oils, and how you can still cook delicious meals either without them or by using smaller amounts.
What To Cook With Instead
Rather than drizzling processed oils into your pan, Branco advises to use "healthy fats with higher smoke points." These include "avocado oil, ghee, butter, coconut oil or tallow for cooking and overall health," she says.
Nutritionist Lisa Richards explains that using oil in the cooking process can be replaced with water or low calorie sauces.
"Most vegetables can be sautéed with water or liquid aminos rather than oil," says Richards. "This leaves you with a much lower-calorie food because you haven't introduced unnecessary calories from oil."
Overall, no matter how convenient cooking oils can be, excessive amounts can lead to weight gain. It's important to use accurate measurements when cooking with them, or to use healthier alternatives that won't sneak in any extra calories so you can lose weight with ease.
