If you love to cook and are good at it, it's easy to get carried away enjoying your recipes and gain too much weight. If you need to cut calories from your diet, one of the more enjoyable ways to do it is to switch up what you cook at home. Try visiting an Asian market for sauces and marinades that go well on lighter dishes. They are just as flavorful as many other recipes and help you cut calories (and often fat) from your diet. Exploring new recipes in your home cooking can be as fun as it is delicious. Think about Korean, Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, and other Asian cuisines for lighter main course dishes.

It's common for vegetables and grains to make up the most significant part of Asian main course dishes, and meat acts as a flavoring rather than the main event. If you want to do things right, check the nutritional profile of the vegetables you plan to use and pick the ones highest in vitamins, minerals, and fiber. When you lighten up on the meat in your cooking, you'll be cutting calories, fat, and cholesterol from everything you make. Tofu, or plant-based protein, can replace meat or dairy products in some recipes with flavors that overcome its blandness. As you begin to learn more, you'll figure out how to do it.

As leaps ahead continue to be made in healthier food products, you'll find fewer sacrifices in taste and texture when you go lighter. You can also make intelligent moves on your own, such as doubling egg whites and removing the yolks from many recipes. Egg whites are an excellent protein source, and you cut the cholesterol from eggs to zero when you omit the yolks. Natural food stores also sell ingredients you can substitute to lighten up recipes. It's fun to find alternatives online and try your hand at adding them to your favorite recipes. Sometimes the result is a tasty variation on one of your all-time favorite recipes.

Making your own snacks at home also is fun and improves your eating choices because you control the ingredients. It's another place where Asian cuisine traditions can help. Try out crispy tofu bites, and you'll have a whole new perspective on healthier snacking. It's also a way to become more accustomed to eating tofu which is beneficial in several ways. Some of the techniques and choices of frying oil you'll learn with the tofu bites can be carried over to other recipes you're already making. Wiser eating choices aren't complicated and not that much of a sacrifice when you learn more about your options.