Family meals, low cal for me but not them

[MineCat]

Any ideas of family meals I can adapt to be low cal for me but plenty of calories for growing children/teens

We had Diet Coke chicken and rice last week which was great as they had plenty and lots of rice and I just had less rice and not too much chicken

Any ideas welcome, thank you

If calories are your only concern, you can eat exactly what your family eats, just less of it. Don't make things more complicated than they need to be or your efforts will probably fail.

Thanks, I struggle to say we have cottage pie, weighing it as the mince, potatoes etc is hard to calculate, or do you just do it roughly

I would have a small piece of cottage pie and then a healthy serving of steamed veg to go along with it.

But how would you calculate the calories in the cottage pie?

Sorry I'm new to this

Any meal works really - plenty of veg and a portion of protein (meat, fish, veggie alternative) for you and add a portion of carbs for the family (potatoes/ rice / pasta etc).

So for bolognese, you just have the bolognese (swap out some beef mince for lentils to make it extra healthy). You could have courgetti too. But give everyone else spaghetti with it.

Fajitas - have the chicken and veg but not the wrap etc.

Use MyFitnessPal to log your calories. They have a facility to do recipes so you log all the components and then the serving number and you get the calories per portion.

I cook the same for everyone, but make small adjustments.

Ie. Fish and veg , plus spuds for family
Stir fry - cauliflower rice (I use frozen) for me, normal rice for family
Chips - replace with (frozen) sweet potato and/or butternut squash, which I roast in the oven
Pizza - use beef mushrooms as base, add tomato paste, cheese, toppings etc

Michael Mosely in his Eight Week plan has some good carb-free recipes.

There’s a website “Two Chubby cubs’ with lots of good recipes on it.

Thanks all very helpful

My fitness pal has a feature where you can enter ingredients by the gram for recipes, and then calculate out the calories per portion. This is what I do... It also helps you see how being liberal with say olive oil impacts a recipe.

It helps me decide on what ingredients are worth it when cooking if you know what I mean

We use a lot of pinch of nom recipes. They're generally low cal and teen DC have similar sized portions to us. They'll have an after school snack and a higher calorie lunch at school so I don't think a lowish calorie dinner is too restrictive for them.

Re calories there are recipes sections on my fitness pal where you add all the ingredients and portion size and it works out the calories.

I just eat less, carbs is usually the easiest thing to cut down on, I'm fine if I get plenty of protein and veg. I use my Fitness Pal to calculate the overall calories for the full meal and then divide it into whatever portion is appropriate.