Zinczenko David - Cook This, Not That! Worlds Greatest Weight Loss Recipes

Forget dieting. Forget joining a gym. Forget the ads for the Ab-inator device you saw on QVC. If you really, truly want to lose weight, there is no quicker way to shave pounds off your bodyand dollars off your food billthan to cook more at home. Thats what Cook This, Not That! Worlds Greatest Weight Loss Recipes will teach you to do.

Now, we dont mean to say you should avoid restaurants and prepared supermarket foods like the plague. The Eat This, Not That! series is designed to help you make smart swaps at all your favorite restaurants and in choosing all your favorite supermarket foods.

But in many cases, the very smartest swap you can makeis to make it yourself. Just check out this sampling of restaurant and prepared supermarket foods, and see how many calories you can save if you simply learn to cook these very basic dishes at home.

Imagine that, over the course of a week, you cooked these nine foods instead of going out to eat them. Youd save a whopping 3,385 calories just in that 1 week aloneessentially, a pounds worth of flab. Cooking just these nine foods at home instead of letting the pimply-faced grease purveyor at your local chain restaurant do it for you would shave an unbelievable 50 pounds of fat off your body in just 1 year.

Why the dramatic discrepancy? In part, it has to do with the ingredientsrestaurants want to mess with your taste buds by adding as much fat, salt, and sugar as they can to everything they touch. But another issue is serving size. In 2010, the USDA found that people were getting an estimated 33 percent of their calories from food prepared outside the home. By 2014, that number had risen to 43 percent. One study looked at restaurant portion sizes and found that they far exceeded what they should be. By weighing foods, researchers found that, compared with USDA portion sizes, the following foods ballooned considerably.

Pasta: 480 percent oversize

Muffins: 333 percent oversize

Steak: 224 percent oversizey

Bagels: 195 percent oversize

Hamburgers: 112 percent oversize

Of course, youd still save a ton of calories and money by buying prepared foods in the supermarketjust under 1,700 calories a week. But why lose only half the weight you want to? And why spend more than you have to? And why settle for something that was cooked by a stranger yesterday (or last week or maybe even months ago)?

Its so easy to shave off the pounds, just by mastering a few simple cooking skills. So why dont we all do it? Thats the mystery.

Lets solve it.

Heres an experiment: Think of the term family dinner. Now, close your eyes and imagine what that looks like. Can you see it, smell it, taste it? Yes? Can you? And more important, how can you still be reading this if your eyes are closed? What are you, superhuman?

Seriously, when we think of the term family dinner, we almost always think of a family sitting around the dining room table. Its an image thats been carved into our brains over decades by books, magazines, TV shows, and movies. And maybe we remember those dinners from our own past because our parents or grandparents hosted family meals in just that way.

But todays family dinner doesnt look like the family dinners we see in movies or read about in books or even conjure up in our own minds. Family dinner cooked at home is rare, after all. Were far more likely to hit the fast-food joint, order a delivery, or heat up something that was prepared in a supermarket than we are to actually cook our own dinner. In 1963, only 28.5 percent of our food dollars were spent on meals prepared outside the home. And so, instead of clinking dishware and Pass the gravy, its crinkling paper bags and Who got the Tater Tots?

And that means were not in control of our food or our bodies. Sure, you can study that takeout menu like a grad student on Ritalin and pore over the side panels of the packaged food labels, but in the end, no matter how careful you are, youre still not in charge.