Tesco Healthy Living Range

Tesco have rather handily got a range of healthy food options that cross nearly all of the product ranges that you require and it seems like when ever I go into my local Tesco a new product has been added.

The full range of products can be found here: Tesco Healthy Living

At the start of my diet the ready meal range of these products was a god send as they clearly display the calorie content in big letters and numbers on the front of the box and the calorie count is easy to decipher, for  example on products like salad cream it will tell you that it contains 20 calories, 1.2g of fat, 0.1g of saturated fat, 0.2g of salt and 1.4g of sugar per tablespoon. If only more products made it so easy to measure out your portions in this way!

As a side note My Fitness Pal has an annoying habit of not using the simple measure, so when I scanned the barcode of the salad cream the only measurement options were 1g, 100g or a whole container which is really that helpful! Thankfully there is an easy way to deal with this: in the search function there is a tab called "My Foods" which lets you create your own searchable database of nutritional information for food and once you've created it you can select it from the "My Foods" tab or it will show up at the top of any typed searches you perform.

I'm not going to list all of the products available in this line, I'm just going to highlight some of the ready meals, cooked meats and other things I've actually purchased:

• Braised Beef and Root Vegetable Mash contains 291 calories (!) and tastes really nice, the mash is particularly good.

• Ham And Mushroom Tagliatelle contains 394 calories and is pretty average if I'm honest, it's flavour is quite bland, but you liven it up with some pepper or other spices.

• Sausage and Root Vegetable Mash at 316 calories this was a game changer for me as I love sausages but until I found this ready meal I'd resigned myself to not having them for a long time. The sausages are not bad at all for low fat versions and the mash is very nice however it's not very substantial and I'd advise against having this for a main meal as it won't satisfy your hunger.

• Minced Beef and Potatoes contains 244 calories, again like the sausage and mash it's not very substantial so having it for a main meal isn't advisable.

• Chilli and Rice has 422 calories and is very nice indeed, I found that this needed to have spice added to liven it up a bit, but all in all it's not bad.

• Cheese and Bacon Crustless Quiche (160g) this mini quiche has 258 calories and is really great, it tastes like regular quiche but due to the lack of pastry you get a lower calories count. Can be eaten hot or cold.

• Quiche Lorraine (400g) is a normal quiche size but only has 196 calories per quarter.

• Roast Chicken Slices contains 29 calories per slice and there a four slices in a container so you could have all four slices with a salad and the meat would only be 116 calories.

• Honey Roast Ham contains 28 calories per slice, again you get four in a pack, so if you had the four slices with a salad the Ham would only be 112 calories.

• Toffee and Vanilla Yoghurt  each of the four pots contain 65 calories and are quite sweet, so it's good for a treat if you have a sweet tooth, or you could add some fruit to make a bigger dessert.

• Strawberry Trifle at 154 calories per pot this is not too bad at all, but my advice is to only get one a week as if you start eating too many of them you are defeating the object of eating healthily!

• Vanilla Big Pot Yoghurt I like a big pot yoghurt or two in the fridge to have with fruit for dessert and at 64 calories per 100g this is nearly perfect.

So as you can see if you have a big Tesco near you you really have some good healthy options open to you and keep your eyes peeled as there always seem to be new things just around the corner, today I spotted boiled sweets (Not a good idea for me!!) and little two tub packs of ice cream that looked rather favourable!