Figuring out food...
What did I eat yesterday? Let's see:
I think this is everything I had, but of course it's hard to be sure, since I wasn't making notes as I went along. I'm going to guess the bread was 90 calories, the onion was 50 calories, the carrot was 50 calories, and the peaches were 150 calories. These are just guesses. The total? 2755 calories. A little shy for someone who works hard all day, probably about 500 more than someone like me needs.
The thing that I find interesting about this exercise is how wrong my guesses were as to which things were big calorie sinks for the day. We've all heard someone say "I cut Starbucks out of my diet, and immediately lost ten pounds." That's because the smallest drink you can get from Starbucks is the short latte, and most people don't even know about it, cuz it's not on the menu.
The tall latte is going to be about 200 calories just from milk, the grande will be about 240 calories, and the Venti will be 320. Drop from whole-milk to nonfat, and you save 140 calories on that venti, bringing it down to 180. You'd be better off getting the short double, enjoying the whole milk, and drinking a glass of water. The short double will run you somewhere between 80 and 120 calories (I'm not sure whether the cup is 6 or 8 ounces). If you add sugar, God help you, cuz I can't. Also, with skim milk, you're getting more calories from sugar (lactose) and fewer from fat, so it's going to hit your system harder.
Oh, a double short breve (half-and-half) latte will be somewhere between 140 and 210 calories. But we're way to virtuous to have one of those, aren't we? Personally, I brew my cappuccinos with less than 1/3c of whole milk each, so they taste better, and have fewer calories - even less than a short double from Starbucks.
I figured the sorbet was going to be a lot of calories. Turns out it's not. Sharon's makes their sorbet with pure cane sugar, and they don't overdo it. It's made in New York, and kind of hard to come by in Tucson, but they sell it at 17th Street Farmer's Market. Yet another reason to love 17th St. Farmer's Market.
I had no idea the white rice was such a big pile of calories! 320 calories! Holy cow! I thought rice was relatively healthy. I could cut that down to 1/4 cup of rice pretty happily, but I never figured it mattered much; now I know. Andrea will be smug. Same deal with the garbanzos, though. Wow. They're probably worth it, but it's sobering - overdoing it on garbanzos is more calorie-intensive than I would have thought.
And 320 calories for the Muesli was surprising too. More surprising, the calories from the yogurt. I've always et whole milk yogurt because I just don't see the point in cutting back on calories by eating nonfat. Eating nonfat yogurt would have dropped the calories in my morning bowl of spackle by 50 calories - totally not worth it. Smug much? There is absolutely no point at all in consuming lowfat yogurt instead of whole-milk yogurt, unless you mainline the stuff.
Worse, looking at the Straus yogurt website it turns out that with their maple-flavored yogurt, the difference in calories between nonfat and whole milk is 20 calories per cup; presumably they use less maple in the whole milk yogurt because it doesn't need as much to make it taste yummy.
So when you go for a cup of nonfat yogurt with fruit flavoring, check it out - you are probably getting more calories from the sugar than you saved from the fat. Plus, the sugar in the yogurt is probably high-fructose corn syrup, which is not the same thing as sugar, and it's probably way more than is required. So you're going to throw your blood sugar way out of whack, you're probably increasing your risk of type II diabetes, and sugar is so easy to metabolize that there's no hope it will pass through your digestive tract unmolested, so if you don't burn it it's going right to your beer belly.
And then there's the chili-cheese tamales. Zounds. I don't know what to say. Clearly, one tamale and a side of beans would be a smart move. Hm, 1/2 can of Bearitos Nonfat Green Chili Refried Beans is about 175 calories, so it makes a difference, but only a small one. I'm wondering what the regular refried beans add up to.
And then the half peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had before bed. Who knew such a seemingly minor indulgence could add up to so many calories? 330 calories, and it was just a little teeny sandwich. Sure cured my hunger pangs, though.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that as a society, we have our food priorities so completely ass-backwards (in Tibetan, that's loktah) it isn't funny. Go to the grocery store, what do you see? Nonfat sweetened everything. How many calories in a sit-down dinner at a restaurant? I don't even want to think about it. The really frightening thing for me is that yesterday was a pretty good food day for me. I probably eat a lot more calories than that on an average day.
What provoked this diatribe was an article I read on Digg the other day about what foods to eat to lose weight. Nearly every single individual piece of advice the person writing the article gave was, while not completely untrue, horribly misleading. She said to drop juices. That would save me 160 calories. Avoid empty calories. What, the sorbet? 200 calories. Most of my calories came from the real food I ate, not the "empty calories." If I'm going to drop calories, I need to do what my friend Mel does and just pay attention to what I eat. Ostracizing foods isn't going to do me any good at all. Nor is avoiding "empty calories."
| calories | food |
|---|---|
| 220 | 1.3c whole-milk yogurt |
| 320 | Muesli |
| 160 | 3 whole-milk cappuccinos, 1/3c milk each |
| ?? | 1 carrot |
| ?? | 1/2 medium white onion |
| 210 | 1/2 can garbanzo beans |
| 45 | 1/2 can diced tomatoes |
| 320 | 1/2c white rice |
| 200 | 2/3 container mango sorbet |
| ?? | 2 medium peaches |
| 130 | 1c mango/passion-fruit blend, diluted 4:1 |
| 520 | 2 chili-cheese tamales |
| 50 | 1/2c salsa |
| 190 | 2 tbsp peanut butter |
| 50 | 1 tbsp jam |
| ?? | 1 slice bread |
The thing that I find interesting about this exercise is how wrong my guesses were as to which things were big calorie sinks for the day. We've all heard someone say "I cut Starbucks out of my diet, and immediately lost ten pounds." That's because the smallest drink you can get from Starbucks is the short latte, and most people don't even know about it, cuz it's not on the menu.
The tall latte is going to be about 200 calories just from milk, the grande will be about 240 calories, and the Venti will be 320. Drop from whole-milk to nonfat, and you save 140 calories on that venti, bringing it down to 180. You'd be better off getting the short double, enjoying the whole milk, and drinking a glass of water. The short double will run you somewhere between 80 and 120 calories (I'm not sure whether the cup is 6 or 8 ounces). If you add sugar, God help you, cuz I can't. Also, with skim milk, you're getting more calories from sugar (lactose) and fewer from fat, so it's going to hit your system harder.
Oh, a double short breve (half-and-half) latte will be somewhere between 140 and 210 calories. But we're way to virtuous to have one of those, aren't we? Personally, I brew my cappuccinos with less than 1/3c of whole milk each, so they taste better, and have fewer calories - even less than a short double from Starbucks.
I figured the sorbet was going to be a lot of calories. Turns out it's not. Sharon's makes their sorbet with pure cane sugar, and they don't overdo it. It's made in New York, and kind of hard to come by in Tucson, but they sell it at 17th Street Farmer's Market. Yet another reason to love 17th St. Farmer's Market.
I had no idea the white rice was such a big pile of calories! 320 calories! Holy cow! I thought rice was relatively healthy. I could cut that down to 1/4 cup of rice pretty happily, but I never figured it mattered much; now I know. Andrea will be smug. Same deal with the garbanzos, though. Wow. They're probably worth it, but it's sobering - overdoing it on garbanzos is more calorie-intensive than I would have thought.
And 320 calories for the Muesli was surprising too. More surprising, the calories from the yogurt. I've always et whole milk yogurt because I just don't see the point in cutting back on calories by eating nonfat. Eating nonfat yogurt would have dropped the calories in my morning bowl of spackle by 50 calories - totally not worth it. Smug much? There is absolutely no point at all in consuming lowfat yogurt instead of whole-milk yogurt, unless you mainline the stuff.
Worse, looking at the Straus yogurt website it turns out that with their maple-flavored yogurt, the difference in calories between nonfat and whole milk is 20 calories per cup; presumably they use less maple in the whole milk yogurt because it doesn't need as much to make it taste yummy.
So when you go for a cup of nonfat yogurt with fruit flavoring, check it out - you are probably getting more calories from the sugar than you saved from the fat. Plus, the sugar in the yogurt is probably high-fructose corn syrup, which is not the same thing as sugar, and it's probably way more than is required. So you're going to throw your blood sugar way out of whack, you're probably increasing your risk of type II diabetes, and sugar is so easy to metabolize that there's no hope it will pass through your digestive tract unmolested, so if you don't burn it it's going right to your beer belly.
And then there's the chili-cheese tamales. Zounds. I don't know what to say. Clearly, one tamale and a side of beans would be a smart move. Hm, 1/2 can of Bearitos Nonfat Green Chili Refried Beans is about 175 calories, so it makes a difference, but only a small one. I'm wondering what the regular refried beans add up to.
And then the half peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had before bed. Who knew such a seemingly minor indulgence could add up to so many calories? 330 calories, and it was just a little teeny sandwich. Sure cured my hunger pangs, though.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that as a society, we have our food priorities so completely ass-backwards (in Tibetan, that's loktah) it isn't funny. Go to the grocery store, what do you see? Nonfat sweetened everything. How many calories in a sit-down dinner at a restaurant? I don't even want to think about it. The really frightening thing for me is that yesterday was a pretty good food day for me. I probably eat a lot more calories than that on an average day.
What provoked this diatribe was an article I read on Digg the other day about what foods to eat to lose weight. Nearly every single individual piece of advice the person writing the article gave was, while not completely untrue, horribly misleading. She said to drop juices. That would save me 160 calories. Avoid empty calories. What, the sorbet? 200 calories. Most of my calories came from the real food I ate, not the "empty calories." If I'm going to drop calories, I need to do what my friend Mel does and just pay attention to what I eat. Ostracizing foods isn't going to do me any good at all. Nor is avoiding "empty calories."
posted by Ted Lemon at 10:47 PM
6 Comments:
Well, the thing about eating nonfat yogurt rather than whole milk yogurt is not the calories, it's the fat grams. Same with cutting down to lowfat milk in the lattes.
When I'm losing weight, I try and keep my fat grams under 10 grams a day. I think the normal daily average is/whould be 35 grams.
So I suppose a good way to diet is to watch both calories and fat grams, although, I just watch fat grams.
This is precisely my point: why do you think that fat grams are worse than sugar grams? It should be the opposite, shouldn't it?
Think about it: sugar is easy to metabolize. It hits your system like a hammer. What you can't use gets converted into fat. Fat, on the other hand, is hard to metabolize. It hits your system like a pillow.
At worst, fat gets digested, converted to sugar, and then converted back to fat, right? Or maybe your body can store it directly, I don't know. But either way, if you need it, your body will burn it. So why would a calorie of fat be worse than a calorie of sugar?
Interesting exercise. If you weren't a vegetarian, I'd also suggest comparing the amount of calories in chicken, fish or beef versus rice, pasta or potatoes. But you can still look at the number of calories in an egg (about 74 for one large one). Personally, I always feel more satisfied or filled up or whatever you want to call it, after eating moderate amounts of protein vs. lots of starch or carbohydrates (still tend to crave the starches though!). After that, you can start examining portion sizes - how much you actually eat (or want to eat) of something, vs. what the actual "recommended" portion size is.
Too much protein, and your body starts to metabolize it for calories, which produces as a byproduct phosphorous, which leaches calcium from your bones. So you want to be a little careful about filling up on protein.
Actually, as far as I can tell, fat is what produces the most long-lasting feeling of satisfaction, because it takes the longest to digest.
So you could argue that calories from fat have a prophylactic effect, in preventing you from overconsuming non-fat calories. Of course, like any rationalization, this can be carried too far, and then you wake up on a park bench in Seattle with Ben&Jerry's chocolate ice cream dried on your face.
I thought the idea of watching fat intake is because saturated fat is so bad for your heart/arteries. Fat from non animal sources, like peanuts and fish is actually good for you because it reduces bad cholesterol levels.
Hi - I recently started eating less and it's really paid off. I have gotten myself down to 1600 calories a day. I eat egg whites and tomatoes for breakfast, spinach salad with strawberries and chicken and balsamic vinegar for lunch and white fish and steamed veggie for dinner. For snacks I have an orange (70 cals) and some unsweetened applesauce (50 cals).
Once a week I have a couple pieces of bread with cream cheese lite on them. Occasionally I'll put low fat cheese on either my eggs or my salad.
I've lost 15 pounds in a month. Only 20 to go...
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