Tempting Low-Calorie Recipes

Note: This edition of Tempting Low-Calorie Recipes has been updated to include Metric equivalents.

You can be slim—and you can become slim without giving up the foods that are especially dear to your palate! In fact, if you do become slim without giving up the foods that you enjoy, without punishing yourself every day by going without what you like by sheer will-power, the pounds you lose are far less likely to come back once you have achieved your goal—because there is then no reason for you to heave a sigh of relief, relax, and go back to your old ways of eating just a little too much.

Over a period of years, it is quite possible for anyone to put on ten, twenty, thirty pounds by eating as few as one or two hundred calories too much each day—and those extra calories may be accounted for by a dish of rich cream soup, a Manhattan cocktail, or even by a serving of buttered young “non-fattening” carrots! In short, there’s really a very small difference between the amount and kind of food that will reduce your weight, the food that will maintain it, and the food that will slowly but surely increase it.

This book is not designed to set a pattern for your reducing—that is a highly personal problem that should be dealt with by you and your physician, who can tell you how many calories you personally need to achieve the weight that is right for you, and to maintain it, once achieved. The purpose of this book is to give you recipes for preparing some of the foods you like, foods that will make your reducing regimen more enjoyable and even exciting, in ways that will supply far fewer calories than you ever thought possible. In it you will find desserts, soups—yes, even “cream” soups—salad dressings, main dishes fit for any gourmet.

For if you can cut out just 50 calories here, 50 calories there, 100 calories somewhere else, and one drink-before-dinner, you have taken the first step toward losing those unwanted pounds. Remember, when more calories are taken in than the body needs, the extra energy is stored in the tissues as fat. When less food is eaten than is required for energy, stored fat is oxidized by the body and weight is lost.

Remember, too, that weight lost gradually, a pound or two each week, is likely to stay lost because the dieting required to lose it need not be painful—and slow weight loss is usually more becoming, too, to say nothing of being easier on the clothes budget!

We hope that the recipes offered here will add spice and enjoyment to this new adventure. Try them—you have nothing to lose but weight!