“Wow! These crackers I just got at Whole Foods are 17 calories each!” I said to my husband the other day.
“Wow!” he said.
“Wow, that’s a lot, or wow, that’s a little?” I asked.
Silence, then:
“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot?”
Goofball.
You don’t have to know calories, to cut them
In my last post HERE I talked about how I lost 25 pounds and kept it off. The post was all about keeping a food journal of every morsel I ate and drank, and the calorie count of everything. I love detailed stuff like this because (I’m a little geeky and) details clarify and motivate me.
But, if you are as turned off to calories as my husband, you can still work with the concept of calories to lose weight — without counting.
Eat this, not that
In that last POST, I also introduced the fun fact that it takes 3,500 calories to gain a pound of body weight.
And, conversely, that to lose a pound, you need to cut 3,500 calories from your normal routine (over a period of time). You do this either by eating fewer calories, by burning more of them off, or a combination of the two.
But, you don’t even have to know this, to lose weight.
Make better food choices for lifelong weight loss
Our goal is to begin creating eating habits that will help you lose weight and keep it off. This isn’t a diet. Diets don’t work. They just do not work. So quit fooling yourself.
If you are serious about losing weight, you’ve got to start making better food choices. And you’ve got to make these choices into habits.
Substitute one food for another one
The idea is to cut some of your caloric intake by subbing one food for another – or modifying what’s on your plate in the simplest ways.
For instance, if you know that a sandwich-sized bag of potato chips is 120 calories and that sandwich-sized bag of baked chips is 70, and you switch to the baked chips, you save 50 calories! If you eat them five times a week, you’ve cut 250 calories a week.
Make more of these lower calorie substitutions and you’ve got yourself the foundation of a food plan that will result in real, sustainable weight loss over the course of time. If you can build the food choices into habits, they will last you a lifetime.
If you lose even just a pound a month, you’ll lose 12 pounds in a year. Real pounds. (That breaks down to eating about 100 fewer calories a day than you normally would.) Slow and steady wins the race.
Eat this, not that: Ten suggestions
Note: You may feel like you really do not want to eat the substituted food! You may feel like you’re dying for the food you’re used to. But here’s the trick: Get the substitute food INTO YOUR MOUTH, and you’ll be okay.
Note #2: After you’ve worked with food choices for a while, it’s likely to lead you to eating healthier, whole foods, as you begin to want to get the biggest nutritional bang for your caloric buck!
1-Eat baked chips instead of regular. Example: One single serve bag of Lays oven baked originals is 120 calories. And one single serve bag (we’re talking about 15 chips here) of Lays Classic chips is 160 calories. That’s a 40 calories savings. (Better yet, forget the chips all together and eat celery or a baked potato!)
2. Take the top piece of bread off your sandwich. Or your burger. This could save you around 100 calories, depending on the type of bread.
3. Skip the cheese on a burger or turkey sandwich. This could save you around 100 calories, depending on the cheese.
4. Use mustard instead of mayo on a sandwich. Mustard is a gift! A tablespoon is only 15 calories, whereas most mayos are 100 calories a tablespoon. (This includes both Hellman’s and organic Spectrum.)
5. Choose ice tea, which has zero calories, over a can of coke, which has 140. Add a teaspoon of sugar to the ice tea, and the drink will still be only 16 calories! Add two teaspoonfuls, and it’ll still be only 32 calories. Compare this to cans of Arizona ice tea which cost you about 200 calories each!
6. Eat a medium sized orange, instead of orange juice. Eight ounces of OJ is about 110 calories, and a medium orange has only about 70!
6. Use skim milk (aka non-fat milk) instead of half and half: it’s half the calories.
7. Get used to frozen fruit pops instead of ice cream. Whole Foods (there are many other brands) 365 Everyday Value Strawberry Fruit Bars and Lime Fruit Bars are delicious at 120 calories. Whereas a cup (half a regular container) of Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream is a whopping 520 calories! Even a single serve container (which is 1/4 cup) of Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry cheesecake is 260.
8. Forgo heavy-duty salad dressings, like blue cheese and ranch, for olive and vinegar and/or lemon. Wishbone chunky blue cheese, for example, weighs in at 150 calories for 2 tablespoons. But it’s thick and hard to spread throughout the salad, so you generally get double that amount on a salad in a restaurant.
On the other hand, one tablespoon of olive oil will spread around evenly and cover lots of salad at 120 calories. And red wine vinegar is 3 calories a tablespoonful, and so is lemon juice.
9. Choose dishes without creamy sauces. Cream and butter are highly caloric. Choose grilled entrees — chicken, fish, pork and beef.
10. Eat an English muffin instead of a bagel. The muffin (both bottom and top) is 130 calories, whereas a whole bagel is 260, twice as much!
Good luck!
