I have been learning lately that I am more satisfied when I eat yummy food. I require less food and I just feel physically better. My mouth is happy AND my tummy is happy.

When I met Rachel Moger, I knew I wanted to interview her and get her take on healthy cooking as a way to stop overeating/emotional eating (see video). Rachel teaches classes and has a wonderful website devoted to healthy cooking. I focus a lot on how to look at food as nourishment for our body, so this conversation with Rachel helped me consider how to be smarter with food.

I love Rachel’s take on making food healthy AND taste good. I find that when we overeat, we can eat foods that we either don’t fully taste (we eat too fast) or we eat foods that do not taste very good. When we eat something that is not tasty (i.e. diet food) from the start in order to restrict the amount of calories, we can then overcorrect by overeating. Also, we often turn to sugar, salt, and fat to make our foods tasty, resulting in adding on the pounds and/or making us not feel good in our bodies. We can then eat more food to compensate for the lack of taste.

Here are her tips and techniques to add satisfying food into our lives:

Read Labels to see what is really in your foods.

Rachel reminds us that those foods in the store (packaged ones) are laden with ingredients that make them taste better. I cannot even pronounce some ingredients on labels, and definitely don’t know what they are. As Rachel says, “these foods are created with science to make us want and crave them.” But they are often not nutritious. She likes to spice up food for textures and flavors.

She suggests we read labels to see what is in our food. She started looking at prepackaged food and spices. She found they were laden with additives and so she has found alternate foods to provide health and taste without all the additives.

Use whole foods as often as possible.

She said that after we really see what is in our food we have an option to look at healthy substitutes. She gives an example of packaged pasta which can be substituted with more flavorful foods like broccoli. She is suggesting a “this or that” idea where we can choose the plain pasta and we can have broccoli and real spices to it like real lemon and pepper. (Note to all, I was teasing her about people not wanting broccoli- I actually like and eat a lot of broccoli.) She provides substitutions for pasta like spaghetti squash to make a spaghetti or butternut squash to make lasagna.

Meal Planning is Critical

I asked her how we can manage cooking real food when we are all so pressed for time. She says meal planning is critical to make this move. She provides a helpful tip showing how to cook chicken when we forgot to take it out of the freezer earlier in the day. She suggests we boil a chicken breast or two and make enough to use for multiple meals that same week. Thus, she is planning for future meals. She suggests we use a calendar to assist to help plan this.

I appreciate Rachel Moger for her time and valuable insight. You can contact her at www.rachelmoger.com. You can sign up for her free weekly cooking tips and her Spice Club is a wonderful way to add flavor to your food without additives.

Do you have any tips to healthy eating? Let us know in the comments below.

Kim McLaughlin, MA is a motivational coach and counselor who works with people who struggle with binge eating, emotional eating and overeating. Kim offers a free 15 minute phone consultation to determine if her services might fit your needs. You can contact Kim McLaughlin at 916-847-8053 or email her

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