Would you like to eat healthy, but cooking low-fat or low calorie fare just seems like too much work? Do you buy vegetables, only to see them rot away before you get around to eating them? Is your kitchen decidedly unfriendly when it comes to healthy food choices and preparation? Let celebrity chef Devin Alexander come to the rescue. Chef Alexander has catered parties for Reba McEntire, worked alongside Paul Prudhomme and the late Julia Child, appeared on Good Morning America and written food articles for many magazines, including Prevention, Shape, Muscle & Fitness and Women's Health. Currently, she has been offered a pilot on the Food Network and is busy working on her book, Fast Food Fix, which will be published by Rodale next year.

But there's more to Chef Alexander than her long list of credits. To look at this attractive young woman, you'd never know that she was once overweight. But the combination of her meat-and-potatoes upbringing and her cooking ambitions almost guaranteed she was going to pack on the pounds. Instead of depriving herself to lose weight, however, she got creative and learned how to cut fat and calories out of her favorite dishes. The result was a 55-pound weight loss... and she has kept the weight off for over 12 years.

Alexander's approach to healthy cooking and eating will come as a relief to those who love traditional fare as much as she does. "I get upset about a lot of cooking shows," she says, "because they take people's favorite foods and chock them full of broccoli and whatever. To take a sausage pasta dish and put broccoli in it is just blasphemy to me!" Instead of tossing in an incongruous vegetable, Alexander prefers to find methods to make the sausage lower in calories and fat. She points out that little changes to your daily food intake will make big differences over time: "All you have to do is decrease your calories by 100 calories per day compared to what you're normally eating and you'll lose 10 pounds in a year. If you want to lose 20 pounds, you just cut out 200 calories a day or work out to burn off 200 calories." And the weight loss is easy to maintain, "because you've just tweaked your lifestyle a little bit" instead of depriving yourself.

There are dozens of ways to tweak your kitchen and your food preparation so you can cut down on the amount of calories and fat you eat. On the following page, Chef Alexander shares 10 of the best ways to instantly make your diet a healthier one.

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