Plain is good

One of the things I've done recently to incorporate different foods into my meal plan is to start eating yogurt.

Now, I used to eat lots of yogurt. The fruit-on-the-bottom kind was my favorite. Then, when I started to pay attention to nutritional labels I swore off it. When I got into my fitness/nutritional renaissance, I really swore off it and would avoid it at all costs.

But then plain yogurt started to come up a lot in different cooking shows and recipes I'd come across, so I looked into it. I ended up buying the generic store-brand plain, fat-free yogurt, a big container of it, as each serving was only 70 calories. Not sure exactly how much is one serving but it's at least one cup. I don't have one handy right now, otherwise I'd check.

Anyway, the Mag points out the benefits of plain fat-free yogurt.

According to the Mag: "In a 12-week study, people who consumed three 6-ounce servings of fat-free yogurt daily lost 81 percent more fat from their midsections than those who ate a variety of dairy products containing less total calcium."

I believe the serving size for mine is eight ounces. I typically have a bowl of plain fat-free yogurt maybe twice a week with lunch. Now, don't get me wrong... they call it plain for a reason. I don't eat it alone like that. I always slice up a banana and make my own fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt snack, but mine will have maybe 10g sugar, as opposed to nearly three times that... and most of my sugar is of the natural kind. One banana has roughly 10g sugar, by the way, and the plain fat-free yogurt has exactly zero grams of sugar.

Of course, I do need to pay attention to the labels though. My last batch of yogurt I got was vanilla, and not the plain fat-free kind. I think it was fat-free vanilla but the calories were more than double from the plain stuff, and I didn't realize this until I was almost done with the container. Yikes. I thought the stuff tasted a bit sweeter, but figured it was the banana that was doing the trick.

Anyway, I've experimented with lemons before and tried to use the yogurt with lemon on the bottom but that did not taste very good. I'm now afraid to try other fruits on the bottom. I may go for strawberries since I bought a bunch recently for cheap. But bananas work well and they make for a light and quick snack or a good side dish for lunch.