1. Additional Calories on Your Veggies
We fool ourselves into believing that as long as we're eating a vegetable, it's good for us, right? To avoid the high-calorie vegetables, we have to avoid any vegetable that's breaded and fried. For example, fried okra is dipped in a batter of flour and eggs, then fried. The healthier option is to eat steamed okra or boiled. We love onion rings, fried broccoli and fried zucchini. Even worse, we dip that into ketchup and ranch dressing. All vegetables are healthier and lower in calories if eaten raw, steamed, baked, broiled or grilled.
2. Gravies, Creams and Sauces Add Calories
We add extra calories to healthy vegetables by topping them with sauces, creams and gravies. We go to the trouble to steam broccoli and cauliflower and then cover them with calorie-rich cheese sauce. We might as well have eaten macaroni and cheese. Gravies are full of flour and grease and cheese and cream sauces can be loaded with calories from sour cream, flour, eggs and milk. Any creamed vegetable is going to be high in calories like creamed corn or creamed spinach. To avoid high calories on vegetables, learn to adapt your taste buds to eating the steamed vegetables as is or with a squeeze of lemon juice.
3. Potatoes and Starchy Vegetables Can Rack Up Calories
The potato has been a vegetable staple in homes for a long time. It's a starchy vegetable just as corn, winter squash and sweet potatoes are. These vegetables do have health benefits, but you need to eat them in moderation to avoid adding additional calories to an already starchy food. An average potato baked without the skin, salt, butter or sour cream has an average of 145 calories. Adding cheese, butter and milk to make the potato au gratin, brings the calorie take up to around 325 for just a cup. Shredding and frying the potato into hash brown makes it 415 calories per cup. We don't even want to know how many calories are in a big plate of greasy French fried potatoes covered in chili cheese.
4. Toss Your Salad Vegetables With a Life Saving Dressing
Leafy green vegetables, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, radishes and other healthy salad vegetables are sabotaged with high calorie salad dressings, croutons and cheese. Use salad dressings that are low calorie, low fat or made with healthy oils, like olive oil. Don't pour the dressing directly on your salad, but rather slightly dip your salad in the dressing. The lite spray salad dressings help keep the calories of a salad in check, making the salad a healthy vegetable food option again.
