Steve's Hearty Low Calorie Oatmeal Recipe

I decided after Thanksgiving night's dinner, I needed to fast. By about 2pm I thought maybe I should eat a little bit. I thought, "How about I try and stay under 500 calories?"  So I looked up 500 calories diet. [They don't recommend such diets.] Oatmeal was on one of the lists.

Well, I realized last summer that recipes are big on blogs, but I've never put up a recipe.  There aren't too many things that I would call 'my' recipes, but my oatmeal is different and so I started taking pictures for an oatmeal recipe post.  But I forgot about it.  Until now.

I checked to see how many calories this is for one bowl.   It comes out to about 206 calories - give or take if you add lots of raisins, honey, or other fruit like blueberries.  So here it is.

(If the pictures are too small, double click to enlarge them.)


Cooked kiwi is really good.  And it's full of vitamin C.

The dry oat bran is a lot more calories per cup than the oatmeal - 231 to 150. But I only use a little bit of oat bran and added a few more calories to the count.  The oat bran is that little edge outlined with yellow in the picture.

About the egg white.  If you drop it into the water, especially if it didn't get beaten enough, it forms little globs.   So eventually I figured out that if I put some of the oatmeal in first, then the egg white, and then the rest of the oatmeal, then I can mix it into the oatmeal nicely, then with the water.  If the water is still boiling strongly, the egg will get into the water before mixing with the oatmeal. 

When I checked today, I found out the raisins were 5 calories each.  So you can lower the number of calories by putting in fewer raisins.




Fresh blueberries are less than a calorie per berry, so you can be more liberal with them. 



The honey adds lots of calories, relative to the other ingredients.  It does sweeten it up a bit, but if you cook the banana well, it sweetens things up too. 

This recipe makes two bowls. About 206 calories/bowl
with the raisins, 236 with the honey.

Of course you can add whatever fruit you want.  A large strawberry is only 6 calories.    The violet is for decoration only.  Now, I have a good friend who thinks this recipe confirms my weirdness.  Other friends have been more polite and actually said it was good.  It probably takes some getting used to.  If you are used to lots of sweet, you have to slowly adjust to less sweet.

Anyway, it's a good filling winter breakfast with very few calories.  But watch out for the orange juice.  Two cups is more calories than the oatmeal.  (One cup is 112 calories!)

I decided I didn't need to be fanatical today so at dinner I had some soup (vegie broth was 20 calories per cup) plus some brocoli and mushrooms and a little Thai spice, and a small piece of bread.  Stayed well under 500 calories.  I'm a bit hungry, but I'll wait til tomorrow.

This isn't a diet for every day, but looking up all the calories is a good reminder.  I'm not a big person, but that also causes me to think I can eat more than I should.  And my pants get a little tighter.  And with my exercise level down in winter, I need to remember that a whole apple is only 44 calories,  about the same as 15 peanuts.  

I got most of the calorie counts from The Calorie Counter.  I did find a fair amount of difference in calories on different sites.