Firstly, minimise the amount of empty-calorie foods in your cupboard. These are the ones that are high-calorie, low-nutrition and are typically sugary, like fizzy and sweetened drinks, cakes, biscuits, tarts, sweets and chocolate, ice cream and ice lollies, snack cakes and cereal bars, or contain lots of added fats and oil, such as mayonnaise, crisps, microwave popping corn, crackers, biscuits, tarts and snack cakes, and tinned soups. Don’t throw out the whole lot if you have the willpower to keep a few only, or else you may end up craving them more and overeat. Try replacing empty-calorie favourites with healthier alternatives such as light mayonnaise or a higher-fibre, less-sugary breakfast cereal.
Next, fill up the cupboards with yummy healthier foods you know and love. Tinned fat-free beans, diced tomatoes and soups that are high in fibre are great stackable staples, and tomato puree and bottled pasta sauce, as well as salt-free seasoning blends and individual herbs and spices can help you make fast, flavourful sauces when you’re trying to cook without a lot of added sodium, though remember to keep all your spices and dried herbs in a cool, dry place to maintain freshness. Other staples include brown rice, porridge oats, plain popcorn kernels to pop yourself in vegetable oil, and a can of spray oil to reduce the amount you use when cooking.
Your baking can even be bettered by replacing half the white flour in a recipe with wholemeal flour to increase fibre and nutrients without a big difference in flavour or texture, and you can also use sweeteners to replace half of the sugar in most bakery recipes, to cut calories without a noticeable difference in flavour or texture.
Finally, if there’s one thing to eliminate, it’s the saturated and trans fats in your cupboard. These fats hide in thousands of processed foods, like margarine, vegetable fat, crackers, biscuits, snack cakes, cereal bars, microwave popping corn and ready meals, so avoid words like ‘hydrogenated’ among the first three ingredients, as it very likely contains saturated and trans fats. You can add up a product’s, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat numbers, and minus that number from the total grams of fat listed on the label to find the rough amount of trans fat, but be wary because a food company can still label a product as having ‘zero’ trans fats if it has 0.5 grams or less per serving.