The Secret Ingredient for Weight Loss

If you can part with burgers and meat sauce, slimming down should be a cinch: Replacing red meat with white-button mushrooms can help you lose weight and keep it off, according to a new study conducted at the Weight Management Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Participants who ate one cup of mushrooms in place of meat every day for a year consumed an average of 123 fewer calories and 4.25 fewer grams of fat per day. They also lost more weight (an average of seven pounds) and saw a larger drop in body mass index, waist circumference, and total percent body fat compared to participants who didn’t change their diets at all.

Why? Mushrooms are super low-cal—there are just 44 in each cup—especially compared to lean ground meat, which has nearly six times as many calories per volume. But previous research has shown that mushrooms are just as satiating as meat, so you consume way fewer calories without feeling deprived.

In most recipes that call for ground beef—like sauce, chili, or burgers—you can swap in one and a half pounds of chopped, sautéed mushrooms for every pound of ground beef, says JoAnn Brader, manager of the Rodale Test Kitchen, which tests and develops recipes for Women’s Health.

Another option? Fill up on one of these tasty mushroom recipes. You won’t even miss the meat:

Black Bean, Mushroom, and Oat Burgers