What is Skinny Comfort?
Skinny comfort is not a diet - it’s a way of life. Skinny Comfort in my food philosophy that means eating all the foods you love, while making simple swaps to cut calories and watching your portion sizes. This has been the key for me to lose weight and keep it off!
What is a Simple Swap?
A simple swap means swapping a high calorie ingredient for a lower calorie one. For example, one of my favorite foods is sour cream. Full fat sour cream has 30 calories per tablespoon, while fat free sour cream has 12 calories per tablespoon. If you simply swap a quarter cup of full fat sour cream to fat free, you have just saved 72 calories! If you do this 5 times in a week, you’ve just saved 360 calories!
Simple Swaps Can Cut HUNDREDS of Calories From Your Meals
It really does add up. Remember, just cutting about 500 calories a day from what you normally eat will result in you losing about 1 pound. If you cut 200 calories out of your lunch and 300 calories out of your dinner, you’re on your way to losing a pound a week!
Restaurants NEVER make simple swaps in their meals
Remember, a restaurant would rather their food taste 1% better than cutting out those 300 calories. By cooking at home and making your simple swaps, you can save those calories. Restaurants are notoriously bad for throwing in extra butter, oil, and fat into any dish.
Not to mention the ridiculously large portion sizes. They aren’t focused on nutrition - they only want it to look good and taste the very best it possibly can.
Why are Portion Sizes Important?
In my opinion, portion sizes are the single most important part of weight loss. How many calories per serving is only relevant if you know how many servings you are eating! Even those hundred-calorie cookies can become a problem if you just ate five of them (oops…).
While it is now pretty easy to know how many calories are in restaurant meals these days, it is still difficult to know how many calories are in servings of home-cooked meals. Even when I exactly follow a recipe that provides a calorie count, I find myself scratching my head on how exactly to measure out ⅕ of a rice dish (ugh!).
Portion Sizes on Skinny Comfort
On Skinny Comfort I work hard to provide you accurate calorie counts (if you follow the recipe exactly) and an accurate serving size (both by weight and by volume). This will give you a very good estimate of how much you should eat and how many calories you are really eating.
I also try to provide a portion size that is a decent serving that will actually fill you up for a meal. I aim for 500 calorie dinners. For most women, 500 calories should be a decent amount to fill you up and not leave you starving. Trust me, if you only eat 300 calories for dinner you will be starving in two hours...you have to give your body enough to eat! Men will likely need to increase the serving size. You can easily scale the serving size up or down to match your calorie goal.
How To Measure Portion Sizes
Invest in a digital kitchen scale. These are super cheap on Amazon, but they are seriously worth the money. I highly recommend using a scale to measure out your portions. This is much easier than trying to use measuring cups. In my recipes, I try to provide portions by weight and volume.
Why Skinny Comfort Works for Me
I believe in eating the foods I love, every single day. You don’t have to sacrifice taste or starve yourself to be skinny.
My single favorite food is cheese and I pretty much have it every day (I’m a cheese-addict!). I love cheese, and I can’t give it up! Structured diets that cut out certain foods don’t work for me. While you might be able to cut out certain foods for a few days or weeks, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain and stick to your plan while living a normal life. What does work for me is watching how many calories I eat a day. I can eat anything I want and still lose weight as long as I stay within my calorie budget.
While restaurants might throw extra butter on anything just to make it taste a tiny bit better, by cooking my comfort foods at home I can control exactly what goes in them. By making simple lower-calorie ingredient swaps and controlling my portions, I can make delicious comfort food at home that doesn’t break my calorie budget!