January may seem like a time to cut down on meals you’d typically consider to be unhealthy – but what if sticking to your nutrition and fitness goals didn’t need to be so depressing?
Alex Hughes, the 30-year-old behind hugely popular Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts Alex’s Kitchen Bangers, has been creating recipes to cut down calorie intake without compromising on taste.
From breakfast flatbread pizza and smashed cheeseburger tacos, to lamb kofta kebabs and salted caramel cookies, she’s on a mission to prove that everyday food can be comforting and no food groups needs to be cut out.
Sharing her story with an impressive 1.1 million followers on Instagram alone, Hughes has healed her own relationship with food and her body, after years of yo-yo dieting and depriving herself of her favourite meals.
So, as her debut cookbook Low-Cal Kitchen Bangers, is released, what’s her advice?
Don’t cut out carbs
Hughes grew up in an era of size-zero supermodels and women’s magazines that promoted skinniness, and got into a cycle of crash dieting and gaining weight from her teenage years.
“I always thought you just had to completely cut your food down to as minimal as possible. I also started to lose weight in sort of the time where it was like you can’t eat carbs unless you’ve exercised,” she says. She skipped breakfast every day and didn’t eat carbs at all.
“So I grew a really bad relationship with food – constantly over-exercising and under-eating. It was just putting on weight, losing weight, putting on weight – it’s not good for your health.”
In a bid to find a more sustainable way to stay healthy, Hughes started cooking her favourite meals, cutting down on the calories instead of cutting out food groups, and posting them on Instagram and TikTok, under the name Food and Fitness.
“I realised you can tweak certain ingredients to make them healthier and still enjoy the foods that you want to while you’re trying to lose weight.”
Don’t deprive yourself of your favourite meals
“If you’re used to eating takeaways all the time, you can’t expect that person to go and eat salmon and couscous for tea. If they have a certain taste, it’s about tapping into those tastes to help create a sustainable lifestyle, not just a quick-fix diet. Because once you’ve lost weight if that’s your goal], you then need to maintain it.”
She says her recipes are “something that you can sustain – you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything”.
Some of her most successful recipes online are burgers, wraps and ‘fakeaway’-style (homemade takeaway) dishes, she notes, like her butter chicken for example.
“I do love a good burger. The more you think I can’t have that, the more it’s like, well, I want it. I want it.”
Increase your protein
Protein keeps us feeling full and satisfied, says Hughes. So “more protein, [keeping you] fuller for longer, a bit of carbs to keep you happy, and for energy as well. A lot of people don’t realise [carbs are] an energy source,” says Hughes.
“It’s really hard to overeat on protein,” she reckons.
Choose lower-fat meats and cheeses
If you’re making a beef burger, “5% fat beef meat halves the calories compared to the 20% fat style, you’ve got low fat cheese slices. A homemade burger sauce, you could make that with either low-fat mayonnaise or you could use fat-free Greek yoghurt if you also wanted a protein boost.
“And brioche buns as well. Compared to a normal burger, the buns are just so much lighter, and they help to reduce the calories a lot. So you can get beef burger for 450 calories.”
For a creamy alfredo sauce, for example, (traditionally made with heavy whipping cream, butter, and Parmesan cheese), Hughes suggests making it with a broth first then stirring through some cream cheese plus a bit of skimmed milk, to creamy consistency.
And weigh out your ingredients. “I used to just get a big handful of pasta and throw it in, but weighing out your food is a massive education to people”.
Give in to cravings
“Honestly, I honour my cravings,” says Hughes.”If you’re like me and the weekends are a bit of a downfall for you, then make sure on the weekend you’ve got exciting meals in.
“If you usually crave a burger or Chinese, plan a ‘fakeaway’ in.”
If you’re craving something sweet, “just have them”, she says. “Because the longer you go no, no, no, can’t have them, your brain does this thing [saying] ‘I want it, I want it’ – and then what’s going to happen is, instead of having a couple of squares, you’ll eat the entire block.”
Hughes suggests, if you’re going to eat something high in calories, to “make space for it” by cutting down somewhere else.
“If you are the type of person who likes a bit of chocolate in the evening, allocate space for it. But when you are getting three really good, satisfying meals that typically tap into the cravings you usually have, you won’t really have them as much.
“You’ve got protein keeping you full. I always say every night to my partner, I’m going to have that chocolate bar tonight. By the time I have my tea, I cannot fit it in.”
Nothing is off limits, she says. “Allow yourself if you want to, because then you know you’re not restricting yourself, and you’ve got that choice.
“It feels a lot more empowering to say, ‘no, I don’t want that’. Rather than, ‘no, I can’t have that’.
Low-Cal Kitchen Bangers by Alexandra Hughes (Ebury Press, £20). Photography by Ellis Parrinder, is available now
