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Posts Tagged ‘Cook Yourself Thin Recipe’

Are you listening to the buzz around the book Cook Yourself Thin: Skinny Meals You Can Make in Minutes based on Lifetime’s new show “Cook Yourself Thin” that has REAL women losing a dress size?

Forget drab diets – they don’t work because ‘healthy’ food tastes pretty grim. If you want to drop a dress size and still eat gorgeous grub then the Cook Yourself Thin team are about to come to your rescue. The average woman spends 30 years of her life dieting but 60% are still overweight. Clearly diets don’t work! Most of us are not obese, we don’t want to overhaul our diets, we just want to lose weight.

Join three cool cooks who regularly have their cake, eat it and still look gorgeous. Armed with their skinny secrets and a ballistic bomb calorie-counter, they prove that you can drop a dress size in six weeks and still stuff your face. The fabulous four are serious foodies who won’t make any compromises when it comes to flavor – their dishes first and foremost must taste great. They show you their tricks – how to double the taste while halving the calories. These girls don’t do denial. Burgers, curries, and chocolate cake are all on the menu and won’t pile on the pounds if you cook it their way. So if you want to streamline those curves, get yourself back into the kitchen and Cook Yourself Thin.

Allison Fishman of Cook Yourself Thin

Interview with Allison Fishman: I had the pleasure of speaking with Allison Fishman, one of the co-stars of Lifetime’s new show Cook Yourself Thin, which made its American debut just this past week. Allison is a passionate chef who owns The Wooden Spoon, a Brooklyn-based culinary school, who sharpened her own culinary skills while working for Martha Stewart, the Food Network and TLC’s Home Made Simple. She shared with us how she got her start cooking healthy (it’s a story, all working women can relate to) and some of her favorite slimming secrets in the kitchen.

Read the highlights from my interview with Allison Fishman.

Where did the idea come from for the show Cook Yourself Thin?

Cook Yourself Thin got its start in England where the show and the accompanying cookbook have proved to be a huge hit with British women. The producers of the show thought that the premise of Cook Yourself Thin would be a great hit with the American audience to learn how to cook healthy.

Have you always cooked healthy or is this a new way of cooking for you?

My story is similar to many working women out there. I had an executive level job in the dot.com industry and after a few years in it, noticed the weight creeping on after too many business dinners. I also noticed that even though I was a very successful business woman, I couldn’t poach an egg to save my life. I was a complete nincompoop in the kitchen. So I decided that I need to go to culinary school and that is just what I did.

I wanted to be able to indulge in delicious foods without perceiving food as the enemy. I had my kitchen stocked with truffle oil, fresh Parmesan cheese, I was able to master cooking and eating vegetables and whole grains. And to my surprise, I lost weight eating this way.

What are three of the most important steps anyone can do in their own kitchen to stay trim?

Number One is to avoid drinking your calories. Right now, I have three huge bottles of unsweetened sun tea sitting on the windowsill of my kitchen. I also always keep seltzer water on hand and drink plenty of brewed tea during the winter. Second, stock your refrigerator with fruits and vegetables and clean out your pantry of snack foods. Right now is the season where fresh produce is in abundance. Stock up on blueberries, pineapples, peaches and whatever is fresh and in season. Third, don’t be afraid of following recipes. The dishes that we prepare on Cook Yourself Thin are healthy and simple.

Candice Kumai of Cook Yourself Thin

An Interview with Candie Kumai:

Looking to lose those last ten pounds, but not give up your favorite foods? Lifetime may have your solution with its new show Cook Yourself Thin. Taking real women who are looking to drop baby weight, get ready for an impending reunion, or perhaps have just let themselves go, each episode features a guest as she learns how to transform favorite (but fattening) recipes into healthy (and still tasty) fare. The viewers get to see how after six weeks the participant has progressed, and if she has kept up the healthier lifestyle. TVGuide.com spoke with one of the hosts, and former Top Chef Season 1 contestant, Candice Kumai about what sets her show apart, how you can enjoy foods you love, and why she’s defending Kim Kardashian.

TVGuide: How is Cook Yourself Thin different from other weight-loss shows?

Candice Kumai: It’s really fun, cute and creative because we take really great food and make it even better because we’re making it healthy. You don’t think of eating lettuce or rice cakes or depriving yourself, you think of an actual burger or fries or milkshake that you can have and actually love. It’s mainly the lifestyle change and it’s genuinely built for women.

TVGuide: There are three hosts, so do you each have a different expertise you bring to the table?

Kumai: The three of us are so different yet we make the perfect puzzle
pieces for each other. Harry [Eastwood] is our original girl from the series in London. She’s our blonde, British baker; she really specializes in trying to find the perfect substitute for fat in her baking. Allison [Fishman] is our classic American beauty, girl-next-door, from New York, and she is amazing at cooking instruction— she’s very technical. I’m total SoCal, surfer girl, born and raised with a Japanese mother and an American father. So I grew up with all different kinds of cuisines, very cultured, well-traveled and I bring more of the ethnic edge. We are so different but when we come together we make this amazing team and we just feed off of each other.

TVGuide: What’s your favorite recipe you’ve made on the show?

Kumai: The roasted chicken was so good— it’s a classic everybody should know how to make. Also one of the alternative recipes I loved was the tequila lime sautéed shrimp tacos. It was always too fattening so I try to find the really healthy, California way to jazz it up.

TVGuide: There’s been some controversy about Kim Kardashian being labeled as plus-size. Being on TV, do you feel pressure to stay slim?

Kumai: Kim Kardashian is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. For people to say things like that just blow my mind because it’s not all about your waistline. I defend someone like her because she’s beautiful and even Allison, Harry and I all have to work really hard to maintain our weight. We’re all in the same boat together. Nobody’s perfect and everyone can be beautiful in their own way. Dieting has become part of the culture [and] has taken over the world of food. We just want to be able to teach women that food isn’t your enemy. It’s going to be here for the rest of your life, you may as well make amends with it.

Cook Yourself Thin Mondays at 5 pm/ET on Lifetime.

Harry Eastwood Video Smoothie Recipe

Reviews:

Really loving the new Lifetime series Cook Yourself Thin. The trio of recipe rescuers — Candice Kumai, Harry Eastwood and Allison Fishman — swoop into a woman’s life and teach her sneaky little tricks to lighten up her favorite meals and slim down.

The companion cookbook is just as fun and mouth-watering. Filled with full-page color photos of many of the dishes, the book offers a step-by-step way to replicate the trimmer and tasty recipes seen on the show, which airs weekdays at 5 p.m. with back-to-back 30-minute episodes.

In addition to the recipes, which include calories, the book includes:

* Bios of the hosts
* A quiz to find your Eater ID, with solutions
* The trio’s weight-loss philosophy
* A brief calorie guide
* Food and equipment basics to stock in your kitchen
* Smart calorie swaps
* Skinny alternatives to your favorite unhealthy foods and risky situations
* A calorie-burning chart on exercise

I love this softcover cookbook — lots of great ideas, smart swaps without going all “science project”, lots of photos and inspiration and sensible advice.

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Cook Yourself Thin: Skinny Meals You Can Make in Minutes

by Harry Eastwood, Candice Kumai, and Allison Fishman

Give up Italian food if you go on a diet? The new healthy eating recipe book “Cook Yourself Thin: Skinny Meals You Can Make in Minutes”, based on the Lifetime television show, teaches you to cook delicious Italian style dishes and not be scared to count the calories! And you don’t have to go on some weird, extreme fad diet!

Harry Eastwood, Candice Kumai, Allsion Fishman

Tried and Tested Recipes

There are over 120 recipes, half of which were winning entries in a competition – so they’ve been made by ordinary dieters in their homes, and are all tried and tested.

Calorie Counting

The idea of the book is to help you cut 500 calories a day. By fine tuning your diet like this, making small changes in the way you cook and the ingredients you use, you can start to lose weight – and more importantly keep it off. It certainly helps with calorie counting, as each recipe tells you just how many calories there are per serving. So you can indulge in a breakfast of tasty Coconut and Banana Pancakes drizzled with maple syrup, safe in the knowledge that there are 193 calories per serving. (Mind, the recipe makes enough for 4 people, so be sure you’ve other people there to share them with. Otherwise it would be all too easy to polish them off yourself.)

Daily Menu

The book is intended to be adaptable, and is divided into chapters that help you plan daily menus. There are sections on breakfasts, lunchboxes, vegetarian dishes, desserts – and dishes that will fill you up when you’re ravenous.

Cook Yourself Thin on Lifetime is the HOTTEST new way to get thin and stay that way…while still enjoying life and FOOD!

The show started with the first participant, Rachel, the “takeout queen”, who says she developed bad eating habits as a child. She wanted to get pregnant, but wanted to lose weight first. The shows hosts cut down her typical daily intake of 2,500 calories to less than 1,000. Simple suggestions like keeping the skins on Yukon potatoes when you mash them instead of heaping on butter gives you that buttery flavor without the butter! You can also add half a cauliflower, scallions, and buttermilk to make tasty mashed potatoes you cut your calories from 1,042 to only 389 per serving while getting a similarly satisfying dish. The show teaches ways to add secret ingredients to cupcakes; like ground almonds to provide natural fat and shredded zucchini to add moisture instead of butter.

The second episode offered some simple suggestions like “confetti-ing” ham and poaching eggs in vinegar water for a healthful version of a traditional breakfast sandwich. This method can bring the calories down from 700 to 300. French fries were replaced with baked sweet potato fries with chili powder, garlic powder, and olive oil and burgers were modified to turkey burgers, with green chilies for flavor. The experts also suggested a cooking tip to add flavor to burgers: pressing the patty. It preserves air pockets to catch juices. These VERY simple and tasty suggestions can cut the average burger meal from 2,500 calories down to only 600!!

Cook Yourself Thin also has an interactive website where you can find things like recipes, food suggestions, exercise tracking and the caloric modification to your diet that it can give you, goals, diary writing, and a community. See below for an overview of the site, but it costs $ (just $18 a month), but still, I really just want the recipes, so the book is perfect for me (and a one-time cost).

Food Diary and Food Database

* Track calories and see how many you have used up in each meal and how many you have left for the day

* See the proportion of fat, protein and carbs in your food, and how many grams of fiber – giving you the control to balance your diet

* Keep notes about food and drink for the day, how you felt and what affected what you ate and drank

Exercise Diary and Exercise Database

* Find out how many calories you burn during workouts and ordinary daily activity

* Add your earned exercise calories to your diary and see how many extra calories this gives you

* Track your total calories for the day including those earned through exercise to see how many you’ve used up and how many you have left

Recipes

* Search for recipes by calorie content or your favorite ingredients, or browse through the recipe categories for inspiration

* Create and calorie-count your own recipes, and see what difference it makes to the calories when you change quantities or swap ingredients, helping you drop the pounds without dropping your favorite dishes

* Add recipes to your Diary, from the database or from the list of recipes you have created

Goals and Results

* Set a weight loss goal; see how many calories you need to get there and the date you can expect to reach your goal

* Speed up or slow down your rate of loss depending on what suits you at the time. You can even go onto ‘maintenance calories’ for times when you need to relax but don’t want to put weight on. Great for holidays and Christmas

* Track your measurements and view your weight graph – there’s nothing more motivating than a nice downward line!

Community

* Get support – whatever you’re going through, the chances are that other members can relate to it. They understand exactly what you mean because they’ve been there themselves

* Get ideas and inspiration – real life practical answers to situations you face from “What shall I have for lunch?” to “How do I cope with evening munchies?”

* Add the IDs of your buddies to your friends list and you can see when they’re online

Monthly Membership: $17.95 a month

Check out the book and order it now!

Cook Yourself Thin: Skinny Meals You Can Make in Minutes