Maria Shriver

5 Great Websites for Healthy, Easy Recipes

By Alex Kinzler

If you want to reboot your diet with healthy, delicious recipes – look no further than these five (free) websites. They’ll bring diversity to your diet – satisfy your palate, and help you prepare nutritious meals.

1. http://www.cookinglight.com
Cooking Light magazine’s website is dedicated to supporting a healthy lifestyle. They offer a ton of recipes with great photos. Likewise, each recipe lists the nutritional information so you can count calories or keep track of your fiber intake. They also have a great "Cooking 101" section that takes you through cooking techniques step by step, with photos. Lastly, the search engine pulls from the magazine archives, so there is a recipe for practically any dish.

2. http://www.myrecipes.com/healthy-diet/
“Thousands of healthy recipes plus nutrition news, diet recipes, and smart cooking strategies for a healthy diet”

This website is fantastic because it combines great, healthy, calorie-conscious recipes with coverage of new health studies and tips for reaching your weight loss goals. It also includes vegetarian meals, diabetic recipes, and other specialty diets. They provide lots of information and encouragement for healthy eating without compromising flavor.

3. http://www.foodnetwork.com/healthy-eating/index.html
Who doesn’t love the Food Network? Their website has a special section dedicated to “Healthy Eating,” which features recipes from the show “Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger” and lightened up versions of recipes including mac-n-cheese, and decadent chocolate cake. The only drawback is that you really have to make sure you stay in the healthy section, or you could accidentally make Paula Deen’s mac-n-cheese, which is delicious, but definitely not light on the waistline!

4. http://www.eatingwell.com
This website is completely dedicated to healthy eating. It has a vast array of recipes and options including kids meals, holidays and special occasions, and specialty diet, just to name a few. Readers are encouraged to send in recipes along with photos of their creations so you can get an idea of what a dish looks like when a home chef makes it.

5. http://allrecipes.com/Features/healthy-cooking-winter.aspx
In addition to lots of regular recipes, allrecipes.com has a “Healthy Cooking” tab. It has tips for recipe makeovers and if you have a great recipe, you can submit it to the website. They also have reviews of recipes and tips from people who made the recipes, including changes they made to make the dish their own, which is very helpful.

Of course these are just a few of the options available to you. There are many, many websites that provide healthy alternatives to heavier dishes and tips to make a healthy diet not just a temporary fix, but an ongoing lifestyle.

Alex Kinzler has been a professional chef for over 20 years. Although he is a classically trained French chef, he is passionate about foods from around the world. He lives in sunny California with his wife and four kids.