The secret to weight loss through low fat cooking isn't to cut all of the foods you love from your diet. It's learning to make the foods you love in healthier ways.

If you want to lose weight, you have to burn off more fat than you consume. So cutting the amount of fat you have in your diet is the first step. And one way to do this is to substitute some of the high fat ingredients you cook with, instead using fat free or low fat alternatives.

You Can Eat Meat

A low fat diet doesn't mean you have to give up meat. What is important is the type of meat you choose.

Removing the skin from chicken also removes a lot of the fat. With beef or pork, choose thin cuts. And if there is any visible fat on a cut of meat, trim it off.

Even on a low fat diet, you can still eat sausage and bacon. Sausages made with chicken or turkey contains less fat than beef or pork sausages. And turkey bacon is better for you than bacon make from pork. And it tastes good, too.

Cooking Your Meat

How you cook your meat also makes a difference. Chicken that has been baked, broiled or grilled is going to be lower in fat than chicken that's been deep fried. Coating chicken with spiced breadcrumbs and then frying them can make a tasty substitute for deep fried chicken.

If you need to sauté your meat for one of your recipes, do so in a skillet that you have lightly sprayed with nonstick cooking spray.

Butter and Oil

Instead of using butter or oil to cook your eggs in the morning, spray the skillet with nonstick cooking spray instead. If you must use cooking oil, choose olive oil or canola oil over something like regular vegetable oil.

There is no denying that butter adds flavor to your dishes. But you can add flavor in other ways. For example, with egg dishes, you can experiment with all kinds of herbs and spices to give them more flavor. And, when you cook rice in fat free chicken broth, you taste buds won't even miss the butter, and it tastes delicious!

Milk and Cream

A lot of the dishes you make that call for milk will work just as well with fat free milk as they would with whole milk. Dishes that call for heavy cream, you can substitute fat free evaporated milk.

And you can still make those delicious cheese cakes. Just substitute reduced fat cheeses for the ones you usually use.

Weight loss through low fat cooking doesn't mean completely giving up on the foods you love. In most cases, it just means replacing some of the ingredients with healthier alternatives.