Cheat your Fast food

If you feel a takeaway craving coming on or don’t trust yourself to resist swinging through the drive-thru on your way home, create your own guilt-free fast food before you hit the town. You’ll thank yourself the next morning.

Chips

Use thick-cut sweet potatoes, which are rich in vitamin A, to cook up a healthy side of low-GI fries. Sweet potatoes not for you? Before cooking, soak thick-cut conventional potatoes in water – this will help keep them crisp and will require less oil to cook. Instead of serving with gravy or tomato sauce, serve with vinegar, which has been shown to reduce the glycemic index of foods containing carbohydrates.

Pizza

When baking a pizza, consider using Lebanese flat bread as your base, as it contains less fat than conventional pizza bases. Load up the base with low-fat cheese and top with a generous serving of your favourite vegies. Don’t want to settle for a meatless pizza? Choose a lean Italian chicken sausage, which is a low-fat substitute for the high-fat pork varieties that are often added to pizzas.

Burgers

Use ready-made lean meat hamburger steaks for your burger or, for the healthiest alternative, make your own with lean minced beef. Cook at a low heat to keep your low-fat hamburger steak juicy and tender and consider using a cooking method that eliminates some of the fat content, such as grilling or broiling.