Getting started with bento making: Easy diet bento rules

Bento box lunches are a great tool to use within an overall weight loss program. Just the fact that the box is quite compact makes portion control a lot easier. However, just packing your lunch in a cute box doesn’t automatically make it ‘diet food’ either. Here are some simple rules to follow to maximise the weight-loss benefits of your bento lunches.

Figure out the total calorie count goal

There are several sites out there where you can calculate the total amount of calories you need to consume in a day based on your age, height, current weight and activity level (here is a handy one [1]). My base rate is around 1800 calories, so I usually aim for a bento lunch that is around 500-600 calories. Sometimes I add some treats, especially on my more active days, and occasionally (i.e. ‘The day after’) I make something that is even lower in calories.

See also: Selecting the right bento box [2].

Start with the carbs

I do not follow a low-carb diet (my body just doesn’t react well to it) - I go for a balanced eating approach. All bentos start with the kind and quantity of the carb component. For most of my bentos, the carb component makes up 1/3rd, or about 200 calories, of the total. That’s about a cup of rice, a bit less than a cup of pasta, or 2 to 3 slices of bread. I add to that protein foods that do not exceed the carb calories if at all possible. The rest is made up of vegetables, fruit and oils.

There are other formulas out there for ‘bento dieting’, but I find this one to be the easiest to remember by far.

If you’ve been following the Getting Started series, you’ll notice that this principle is really Aim for Balance [3] with a little bit of calorie restriction. Balance really is the key!

Watch the salt

Most Japanese bento okazu (the foods other than the rice/carb) recipes tend to be on the salty side, because they are meant to be eaten with a lot of plain, white rice. Since your diet-bento will have less rice, you will want to reduce the salt in your okazu or you’ll crave more rice. What I often do is to make the protein component the usual way, but make vegetables with little or no added salt, so that it all balances out.

Keep the fat low

This might go without saying, but try to keep the amount of fat in the bento fairly low. You don’t need to eliminate it entirely, but don’t have a liberal hand with it either. Use cooking methods that don’t se a lot of fat. One of my favorite methods is ‘water sautéing’ - where I stir-fry things in a non-stick pan, adding a little water to prevent it from sticking if necessary. I use oil as a flavoring ingredient, and so I use the types of oils that do have a lot of flavor - sesame oil, extra virgin olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, argan oil, and various flavored infused oils.

Use prepared foods sparingly, even if they are cute and Japanese (or Asian)

For Japanese food fans, a typical Japanese grocery store can be hard to resist. The foods are so cute, and colorful, and exotic - you want to try everything. But just because it’s Japanese and cute doesn’t mean it’s really good for you either.

If you look back at the virtual bento shopping trip [4] where we cruised around the prepared-bento departments of various stores, you’ll see that many of them feature deep fried and breaded foods. These are quite common in Japan. Room temperature fried and battered or breaded foods are surprisingly tasty, but aren’t too good for your waistline. If you must, include them in your bento as occasional treats.

(One of my weaknesses when it comes to deep fried breaded food is kureemu korokke, croquettes made with bechamel sauce, usually mixed with crabmeat or shrimp. Mmm, fried creamy sauce. I have them maybe once a year.)

Another more insiduous high calorie food category is dumplings and dumpling-like foods, the kind you encounter at a dim sum. Gyoza dumplings [5] for instance, another one of my favorites, when steam-fried in ‘potsticker’ fashion, are about 100 calories apiece. Can you be happy with just one gyoza? Not me. So again, these are treats that I have occasionally.

Steamed shumai dumplings have a bit less calories, but still, use them sparingly.

You should also watch out for the salt content in prepared foods like pickles and furikake. Salt doesn’t make you ‘fat’ per se, but high salt items in your bento will make you want more rice. In fact, things like pickles are intended to make you consume more rice (the phrase used is gohan ga susumu, “rice goes more”). My homemade furikake [6] are lower in salt content than commercial kinds.

These are the basic tenets to follow for a balanced diet bento. They shouldn’t be hard to stick to, and are pretty easy to remember. And, the very fact that you need to put everything into a compact container makes it more difficult to ‘cheat’!

Going to the next level

The following points take a bit more effort, time or change in habits, but if you can incorporate them, all the better.

• Use whole rice or grains instead of white. When it comes to grains, white is bad and brown is good. They have more nutrients and belly-satiating fiber. Cooking brown (or whole) grains takes more time, but you can pre-cook and freeze it [7].

• Beans beans beans. Japanese people generally love beans, which are usually cooked so that they are a little sweet. Incorporating small quantities into the corner of a bento. Even scattering a few pre-cooked frozen beans into your bento is not bad - it adds color, protein and fiber. If you can’t give up the flavor or white rice or white bread, one way to compensate for the loss of fiber and nutrients is to add a small amount of beans or other legumes. Example: I mixed some leftover firm lentils into fried rice [8].

• Make your vegetables colorful. I always try to use at least two kinds of vegetables in my bento. The more colorful the vegetables, the better - the darker the green, the better. Bright red/orange vegetables (carrots, peppers) are good too. I also like to cook the vegetables - a brief blanching or stir-frying reduces their bulk while losing little of the nutrition. Raw salads may taste healthy, but a big bowl of pale lettuce has little nutrition, while a small handful of blanched spinach has plenty.

• Use ‘no calorie’ foods. Many vegetables have virtually no calories worth counting. There are also some foods with almost no calories, such as konnyaku and shirataki [9] (see this beef bowl bento with konnyaku [10], or spicy shirataki noodle bento [11]).

Bento ‘dieting’ is not magic, but it’s fun and it does work! (You do have to watch your intake for the rest of the day too of course…)

See also: How it’s worked for me so far [12]. (I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit over the holidays, but I’ve gotten back to balanced-bento making this week, and already feel a lot better!)