For you to lose weight, the total amount of calories you eat in a day, whether generated from carbohydrates or fat, should never exceed the total amount you burn that same day. But what if you really can't stop your craving for cookies? If you include high-fiber, low-calorie and low-fat cookies into your diet, you can have your cookie and eat it, too.
Fiber Sources
According to the American Dietetic Association, or ADA, high-fiber diets not only provide your stomach with more bulk to feel less hungry, they're also linked to lower body weights. And although the ADA says current scientific studies have yielded mixed results, the evidence so far suggests fiber may even decrease the incidence of cancer.
Among the foods the ADA lists as good sources of fiber are nuts, raisin bran, wheat bran flakes, oatmeal and fruits like apples, dried figs, peaches, prunes, oranges and bananas. These can be good ingredients for creating your own high-fiber cookies.
Biscotti
Biscotti are traditional Italian twice-baked bar cookies. They're delicious, and go very well with coffee. But, as Women's Health says, biscotti are dense and tough enough to make you chew at a much slower rate than your regular cookie, so you don't end up stuffing yourself with too many. Biscotti usually have nuts and dried fruit, which contain enough fiber you'll feel "expanding" in your tummy.
Epicurious.com gives a recipe for a low-fat, low-calorie Pistachio and Dried Cherry Biscotti you can make at home and store for weeks. Aside from the pistachio nuts and dried cherries, extra fiber is added via a half-cup of oats.
Oatmeal Cookies
If making twice-baked biscotti takes up too much of your time, try the usual oatmeal cookies, which bake in the oven within 10 minutes. You can lower the fat content and boost the amount of fiber in them by using almond butter, vegetable oil, skim milk and a high-fiber cereal.
The Food Network provides a recipe for High Fiber Oatmeal Cookies that use precisely those ingredients, along with a cup of oatmeal, whole-meal flour and Fiber One cereal. It even throws in a half cup of chocolate chips, to satisfy your sweet tooth without adding too much fat -- the chips are enough all 15 servings.
Bran Cookies
General Mills, the makers of Fiber One, also provide its own high-fiber recipes. One of them is for Honey-Bran Cookies, which contain 1 whole gram of fiber and only 90 calories per serving.
Their recipe calls for honey, butter, flour, brown sugar, Fiber One bran cereal, cinnamon and just one egg. The cookies bake fast, and are done in less than 10 minutes. There's even a sugar-milk glaze on top, to please anyone craving the taste of extra sugar.
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