If you are following a healthy lifestyle, you already know the importance of healthy diet. Healthy diet need not be a strict diet-plan that restricts half the food choices, and makes you stick to a routine that’s practically not viable. Healthy diet can be as simple as choosing for low-calorie substitutes for your regular food.

Here’s a list of low-cal replacements for the usual food in your pantry.

Some important points regarding health food:

·         Choose broth-based soup over cream soup.

·         For anything in dairy, look for skimmed milk version or fat-free version.

·         Sugar = calories = health problems. Avoid sugar as far as you can.

·         Do not be taken for a ride by the label “sugar free”. Companies have devised clever ways to camouflage sugar under the name sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, barley malt, dextrose, maltose, rice syrup, sugarcane syrup, sugarcane crystals etc. All of these essentially mean sugar and in some cases more calories than sugar. Natural sweeteners are healthier than sugar so look for the phrase ‘no artificial sweetener’, or ‘no added sugar’.

·         In many cases, the fat-free or low-calories version of an item is just a few calories lesser than the regular version of the same item, but the price difference is huge. It’s always good to compare the regular food item with it’s fat-free or low-calorie version for the total calorie difference vis-a-vie the price difference.