Healthy eating starts with healthy food choices. However, that doesn’t mean we have to forego our favorite guilty pleasures. It’s often just a matter of finding ways to make them less guilt inducing by substituting healthier ingredients. Here, I share my top five guilty-pleasure foods that will satisfy your cravings and help you make healthier food choices.
A Morning Latte
You can enjoy a morning latte done the right way by skipping the sugar and dairy creamers and adding grass-fed butter, or, better yet, lactose-free ghee with a dash of cinnamon. This rich, warm drink will fill you up, keep your blood sugar down, and keep you in fat-burning mode for hours. Jump-starting your morning this way will melt off pounds fast, because ghee and grass-fed butter are rich in the essential fatty acid CLA—that’s short for conjugated linoleic acid—and CLA is one of Mother Nature’s most powerful fat burners. In addition, butter and ghee are loaded with hormone-balancing nutrients like vitamins D, K, and E—and when your hormones are in balance, you take off extra pounds faster.
Bacon and Eggs
Skip the toast, hash browns, and pancakes, and grab some nitrate-free bacon and pasture-raised or cage-free eggs. You’ll have a super-filling, low-carb breakfast that will get you through the day without that mid-morning sugar crash, and you’ll get a good dose of vitamin D from the eggs and a shot of fat-burning choline from both the eggs and bacon.
French Onion Soup
It sounds decadent, but when you make French onion soup with bone broth, you transform it into a powerful slimming food. That’s because bone broth is loaded with the amino acid glycine, which helps you burn fat faster while it protects lean muscle. The gelatin in bone broth also helps to heal and strengthen your gut wall—and when your gut is rock-solid, you optimize your metabolism and lose pounds easily. And here’s a bonus: Onions are a prebiotic food that supplies fertilizer for your gut microbes. When your gut bugs are well-nourished, they burn fat faster. To revamp this guilty pleasure so it’s sin-free and still tastes fabulous, you can replace cow’s milk cheese—which is bloating—with Manchego cheese, made from sheep’s milk, which is easier to digest. And for extra credit, you can replace the classic croutons in French onion soup with pork rinds, to cut the carbs and give it a fun crunch.
Sushi
Sushi rice is a sweetened rice, which is why it’s sticky. And that means it’s a major carb bomb. In fact, there are 30 grams of carbs in just one sushi roll, which is more than you get from an entire candy bar! That’s why I’ve developed a recipe for the new edition of my Bone Broth Diet book that puts your favorite sushi ingredients into a poke bowl with cauliflower rice so you can treat yourself without packing on the pounds.
Chips and Guacamole
This is my go-to snack for the football playoff season, and it’s a cinch to transform it from sinful to slimming. That’s because avocados are a fat-burning superfood already—so you just need to swap out the high-carb chips for protein chips, zero-carb pork rinds, or crunchy veggies like celery and cucumbers. These days you can even buy chicken chips! I like to put out an assortment of dippers on my plate so my guests can alternate them, but I always include the veggies because they’re rich in fiber, which slims you down.
