Fat Burning Snacks With “Mouth Feel”

Sometimes you are hungry and you just need a quick fix!  However the celery is just not doing it. You want something that feels like dessert or that is sharp, salty and has that “mouth feel” that junk food does.

One of the challenges to losing weight is trying to stay away from those unhealthy foods that have that mouth feel that you crave as well as the calories that you feel you need to sustain you through a long afternoon or evening of working hard.

You should make it your personal weight loss and bodybuilding mission to consume foods that are healthy including the zero calorie foods.  Zero calorie foods are considered to be ALL fruits and vegetables with the exception of the avocado, which is loaded with calories and fats.

However the avocado does contain very good fats that help keep your skin beautiful, flush other oils and fats from your system and also keep your mood cheerful.  So if you really are craving something lush, moist and that has a fatty taste a slice of avocado perhaps accompanied by some raw fish roe and on a whole wheat cracker is not a bad choice at all. You are feeding your body and your brain at the same time by eating an avocado and it does have that mouth feel.

An oatmeal cookie is not a bad snack to have at all because oatmeal is lower in calories and high in fibber. Oatmeal is also a great source of B vitamins and it can help lower cholesterol levels and clean fat out of your arteries.  A cookie like this can really take care of the cravings you are having for sweets.

For the ultimate antioxidant and disease fighting treat have a handful of berries. Any type of berry will do. They are fresh, full of vitamins and fibber and have zero calories. They also help to move food through the intestine and also can heal the intestines because they are full of compounds that fight bacteria and parasites. Fat free whipped cream can help round out the taste of this treat.

If you are working out a lot and your muscles are sore then you certainly should try eating more pineapple as a snack. Fresh pineapple is best and dried pineapple is second best. Stay away from pineapple that has been soaked in calorie laden sugar syrup as these are not healthy calories.  Pineapple contains brome lain which is an anti-inflammatory. Once again you can use fat free whipped cream to give this food a comforting twist.

Craving French Fries? You can get by substituting deep fried yams or sweet potatoes instead. For best results you should have them baked. Both deep fried and baked sweet potatoes and yams are now widely available in most restaurants. The reason the yam is so much healthier for you is that they are full of good fibre, which can help sweep your intestines clean of debris.  Eating yams can also help fight the food cravings that can be caused by hormonal shifts in women.

As you can see there are healthier snacks to be had and in fact snacking is recommended instead of food deprivation as that can cause you to binge on calories later in the day and sabotage your good intentions to stick to a solid fat burning work out and eating regimen once and for all.

Health
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More Ideas and Tools for Making Creative Cocktail Garnishes

You can be the hostess with the mostest if you know how to make cocktail garnishes that really impress. There are a couple of very cool tools that you will need to create really attractive cocktail garnishes.  The first is a really good bar knife and the second is a paring knife.

 

With the bar knife you can cut fruit and vegetables into any shape you want.  The paring knife is used to make citrus rind curls called corkscrew twists

 

Corkscrew twists have almost become the measure of what makes a bartender more then a bartender, but rather a bartender chef!  The longer your rind curls, the defter you are considered to be with the knife.  A rind curl is a long spiral, slinky shaped piece of rind that can be dropped right into the cocktail or draped on the side of it.  Basically, you use your paring knife to peel the rind from the fruit and keep peeling from the top around from the bottom to achieve the longest “slinky” shape you can. Some bars serve rind curls that are four to six inches long!

 

Your paring knife can also be used to shave chocolate curls into a chocolate drink or cucumber curls into a martini.

 

Another trend is to feather the ends of vegetables such as celery and carrots before you stick them in Bloody Caesars or Bloody Mary’s or fashion them into a kind of a spear that you can then use to stab an olive or cherry tomato.

 

If you are really creative, you can also make cookie cutters part of your cocktail garnish tool set. Small cookie cutters can be pressed into any vegetable that is sliced laterally and flat enough so that you can create a shape.

 

Another imaginative way to garnish your drinks is to freeze the garnish inside ice cube trays and then throw them into the drink. This especially works well with small bead like fruits such a cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, melon balls and olives.

 

To make your own flavored sugars to “frost” your specialty cocktails all you need to do is mix up three tablespoons of a liqueur, beverage or other flavoring to one cup of sugar and crush it to a fine dust in a blender.  For instance if you wanted to make a cranberry frosting for cosmopolitans you would add three tablespoons of Cranberry juice cocktail to one cup sugar. To make a lemon frosting, add three-table spoons lemonade. Then use the dust to rim your glass!

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