Quick and Easy 400-Calorie Recipes: Delicious and Satisfying Meals That Keep You to a Balanced 1200-Calorie Diet So You Can Lose Weight Without Starving Yourself

• Author: Dick Logue
• Genre: Cookbook
• Publication Date: May 21, 2024
• Publisher: New Shoe Press

Thank you to NetGalley and New Shoe Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Four hundred super-simple, mega-satisfying meals that cover your every craving and desire, from wholesomely hearty breakfasts to decadent treats that won’t break the (calorie) bank.

For people looking to shed pounds and live more healthfully, eating meals in the 400-calorie range is your secret weapon to weight-loss success. Not only do these meals fuel your energy, rev metabolism, and keep you feeling full longer, but they also help you stick to a daily caloric range of 1200 to 1500 total calories, which is ideal for tipping the scales in your favor. With Quick and Easy 400-Calorie Recipes, you can reap the benefits of these low-calories meals without spending hours in the kitchen.

Perfect for anyone trying to pursue weight loss while living a busy life, this book works by expertly focusing on nutrient-dense, low-calorie ingredients that you can eat in abundance—such as leafy greens, artichokes, and berries—and combining them with smaller portions of equally filling foods like whole grains, beans, eggs, and poultry.

Featuring recipes for every meal, plus snacks, treats, and drinks, Quick and Easy 400-Calorie Recipes will help you lose weight without letting cooking and planning weight-loss friendly meals take over your life.

I’m always on the lookout for a good cookbook, and with a recent diagnosis of ulcerative colitis, my eating habits have changed. Small, light meals that are lower in fat seem to work best for me, so I figured that 400-calorie meals might be just the ticket. 

Starting out, Logue explains his own rationale for writing this book, and how he has taken control of his health and some serious health conditions through changes to his eating habits. He also gives a quick breakdown of the different components of a healthy diet, and emphasizes the importance of including whole foods and a variety of brightly colored fruit and vegetables in the diet. Also, the author mentioned that due to his heart health, he does not cook with any salt at home, and did not change that for this book. 

The lack of salt in his cooking made me a bit hesitant, but I did my best to remain open-minded. I told myself that I could always add my own salt to recipes, but was confident that there would be plenty of seasonings in the recipe to make up for this. 

Recipes are broken down into sections based on meals. I loved the breakfast section, which is broken down into both savory and sweet recipes, and don’t include any boring oatmeal recipes, but does provide some smoothie recipes for those mornings when you’re in a rush and don’t have time to cook. There’s also some seriously delicious sounding recipes that are prepared the night before and then quickly cooked the next morning, so that you can have a fantastic breakfast ready for company on a holiday, like a strata. 

Lunches and light meals are another section, and include more than just salads, but since the meals are only 400 calories each, you could easily fit 4 into your schedule if you’re hungry. Dinners are broken down by protein source: chicken and turkey, beef, pork, fish and seafood, and vegetarian, and I loved that vegetarian options were offered. Many of the vegetarian recipes featured cheese or beans, and all of the recipes featured plenty of fresh vegetables, making the meal feel larger and keep you full longer.

I quickly realized that there were no photos included for any of the recipes. I was kind of disappointed by that, since I always like to see pictures of what the recipe is supposed to look like. It helps me gauge my progress, not just with the recipe but with my kitchen skills overall. And I can’t lie, sometimes the picture will be the deciding factor that makes me decide to prepare a recipe I was on the fence about.

It wasn’t just the lack of pictures that I found disappointing about this book. The lack of salt in the recipes, I can understand. But it felt like the majority of the recipes didn’t really use many spices other than garlic, onion, black pepper, oregano, basil, and cumin, and in pretty small amounts. I bookmarked some of the recipes in the breakfast section, figuring that I could jazz them up with my own spices, and change around the veggies to a blend that I prefer. However, I was underwhelmed with the recipes in the rest of the book. The veggies were pretty much the same for most of the recipes (onion, green pepper, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini), and while there was a huge array of recipes in this book, there were only a few that appealed to me out of the total number. A lot of the recipes were for casseroles, which isn’t what comes to mind for me when I think of eating minimally processed items, and while I understand the author’s need to cook with an egg substitute for health reasons, I was confused by his refusal to include the equivalent for real eggs for people who don’t need to cut out eggs, since he emphasized whole foods so heavily in the beginning. 

One of the strengths of this book is that recipes are perfect for people who are new to cooking. The list of ingredients are all commonly found in the pantry, and if not, they’re easy to obtain from any local supermarket, and none of the recipe instructions are overly involved. This is a great way to learn how to cook in a variety of ways (fry, stir-fry, bake, roast, use a slow-cooker, etc.) as well as work with different types of proteins. But if you’re a little more comfortable in the kitchen, this probably isn’t going to cut it for you, unless you really love casseroles. Overall, this wasn’t a winner for me, and I wouldn’t suggest it for families with small kids unless they like veggies (since the veggies aren’t hidden), but this would be a great read for people just learning to cook, or wanting to add some more veggies in their diet while cutting out sodium.

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