One of the down sides to eating a healthier diet for weight loss is giving up many of the foods you love. Most healthy diets include lots of fruits and vegetables, high-protein meats and legumes, and whole grains.
If you love to eat cheese, you can look high and low, but you probably won’t find cheese in healthy weight loss diets.
But, luckily, that doesn’t mean you have to give up cheese entirely if you want to lose weight.
2 Steps to Enjoy Cheese and Still Lose Weight
Regular cheeses usually don’t make an appearance in healthy diets because they are ‘energy dense’. They have a higher than average calorie count per gram. Fruits and vegetables have a place in weight loss diets because they have relatively low energy density. The fibre they contain also helps take up more space in your stomach, so you feel fuller.
But if you take a simple two-step approach to eating cheeses, you can enjoy them without putting on extra pounds.
1. Use Moderation
Even if you ate too many fruits and vegetables you would gain weight. To make cheese part of your healthy diet, you need to use moderation in two ways.
First, eat moderate amounts of it. There are more than 100 calories per ounce in many popular cheeses. You can try low-fat varieties. But they often don’t have the same flavour as regular cheeses.
You should also be very careful with other energy-dense foods if you want to make cheese part of your diet. By itself, in moderate amounts, cheese isn’t likely to promote weight gain. But you can’t combine even moderate amounts of cheese with eating things like deli meats, other high-density dairy products, like butter, and processed foods.
2. Choose the Right Cheeses
One of the reasons why people love cheese is the wide variety of tastes and textures they offer. Fortunately, that means there are many delicious cheeses that are better than others for weight loss.
Brie
Brie’s high levels of vitamins B6 and B12 can give you added energy, which can help you burn more calories.
Cottage Cheeses
High in protein and relatively low in calories, cottage cheese can make you feel fuller than many other cheeses.
Feta
A favourite in Mediterranean diets, feta is a great combination of sharp flavour, energy and metabolism boosting riboflavin, and relatively low calories.
Goat Cheese
Some people love cheese, but can’t enjoy it due to lactose intolerance. Goat cheese is lower in lactose than cheeses made with cow’s milk. It’s also high in inflammation-fighting fatty acids.
Parmesan
At only 25 calories in a tablespoon, parmesan may be the best cheese for weight loss. It’s also a good source of vitamin A and bone-strengthening calcium.
Portioned Cheeses
Including cheeses like Babybel and string cheese, portioned cheeses are those that are packaged in small quantities. You can indulge your cheese craving with less worry about overeating.
You can enjoy a wide-variety of every-day, grocery-bought foods in a healthy weight loss diet. Talk to the nutritional consultants at your nearest Herbal One Centre to learn more.