Those Little Calories
While I’m hard at work trying to carve another 30 pounds off my body, I’m paying close attention to what’s going into the engine, and how I’m choosing to burn it back out. Now, I eat really healthy for the most part. I’m well read on nutrition, eat nearly all my calories for value (high fiber, or good antioxidant level, or great protein count, etc.) Still, I’m finding lots of little places where extra calories were adding up.
Breakfast: when I eat at home, I don’t get a big omelette stuffed with light sausage and feta, I don’t eat both slices of buttered toast, and I don’t finish my daughter’s uneaten 1/2 of a large chocolate chip pancake. Instead, I have either a bowl of wheat bran flakes with more bran, raisins, and 1% milk, or oatmeal and similar. 300 fewer calories, at least.
Morning snack: instead of a bagel with peanut butter, an english muffin with peanut butter gives me the same feeling, with almost 200 fewer calories.
Lunch: I eat a big lunch, in lieu of a big dinner. My reasoning is that I should be burning more of this while I’m upright, instead of adding calories near the end of my day. No net change.
Afternoon snack: I split my snack in two, because I seem hungry once at 3:30PM, and again around 5:10PM (which is usually on my ride home). That way, I don’t eat a full snack at 3:30, and then splurge on another snack 2 hours later, and 1 hour before supper. 100-200 calories.
Supper: no changes here. I eat well and healthy.
Treat: I eat something tiny before bed, around 100 calories. But it’s WHAT I eat that determines whether the monster comes out. No net change.
Monster: Middle of the night, I *love* to eat. I’m trying to shave here, because that’s probably another 200 calories, especially because they’re wasted on rest. If I can save it, that’s 200. If not, I add this to my daily fuel-in, with no value.
Have you found similar little “tricks” inside your eating habits?
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I know its bad, but I love eating out. Some tricks that I use to help things out though, when I’m trying to lose weight:
Eat one large meal per day, max. Make this your social meal. For the other one, a 300-400 calorie meal is plenty.
Breakfast foods can make good meals. Two pieces of toast (180 cal) covered in half a can of beans (180 cal), two breakfast links from Morningstar Farms (80 cal), and a fried egg (90 cal) makes for a very satisfying - and filling - meal at only 530 calories.
When eating out, avoid the “free” food. That means breadsticks, heavily-dressed salad, tortilla chips, etc. If you really want it, eat a little with your main course, never before, or you risk filling up and still eating your regular meal as if you hadn’t.
Don’t eat past your entree. Let’s say that you get some enchiladas. Mmm, enchiladas. Actually, let’s all go out and get some enchiladas right now. Oh, wait. Sorry about that. Anyway, they probably came with some rice, beans, chips, and maybe some guacamole if you’re lucky. That’s alright. But now fast forward to the time that you’ve polished off that last forkfull of corn-wrapped goodness. Stop. That’s it. No getting more flour tortillas to wrap up the left over beans. No grazing on the chips. Put down the guac. As soon as the thing you actually ordered disappears, you’re done.
That applies to mopping up “extra” pasta sauce as well, especially if you use bread to do it.
There is no need to finish everything that’s on your plate. Whatever obligation you might have to do so disappears completely if you were not the one to fill your plate. Actually, your obligation is to fill it properly in the first place, so that if you’re done and you still have food you failed in the filling, not in the eating.
Hot steaming pretzels with mustard are like crack. Stay away from their glistening goodness. And if you can’t, well, I understand. But we must never, ever, talk about this. It didn’t happen.
If you want to nibble, make it a meal. Once I got a nice fresh pan of bread with olives, tomatos, etc, on it from EatZis. I nibbled away at it. That became dinner for two days in a row.
Don’t write a long post about food while hungry.
Richard cracks me up. So I gotta comment again…
Reminds me - one of my favorite things is french fries with mayonaise and ketchup (you either love it or you hate it, and we can talk about that some other time). So I buy these baked fries at Costco with like 4 grams of fat per serving. On days when I am craving it (~ once a week), I come home for lunch, turn on the oven, throw in the fries and have them with low fat mayo and ketchup.
If I ignore a craving, it festers and then I overdo it. So chocolate… I keep it in my fridge at all times. I have a bite every day at lunch. If I am craving chocolate like crazy, I can say to myself, “Oh, this craving isn’t so overpowering right now because I know I’m going to get a bite of chocolate later today.” I used to not be able to have it in the house, but somehow I’ve trained myself.
And some restaurant meals I have to ask them to put half of it in a to go container and half on the plate. or split with a friend and save $$ too. (more a girl thing though)
The trick that I’ve discovered which has worked best for me is that when I think I’m hungry, I drink some water. Oftentimes it turns out that I wasn’t actually hungry, but thirsty, and drinking solves the problem. I’m a compulsive constant eater though, so this trick may not work for anybody. I think it just keeps my mouth and stomach distracted for a little while. Like they’re thinking, “Oh thank god, now we’ve at least got SOMETHING that we want. We’ll think about food later.”
Which actually brings me to another thought. I believe that there are two different types of hunger … mouth hunger and stomach hunger. Mouth hunger is really when you just want something in your mouth to chew on. This often gets confused with belly (or true) hunger. About a year ago I realized that more often than not, my hunger is mouth hunger. So I started chewing sugarless gum on a more regular basis. It helps most of the time, but when it doesn’t I resort to grapes, which have negligible calories but are very satisfying to the mouth hunger.
I had some stomach problems last year and my western doctors were not that helpful. I wove their advice into the advice from my eastern doctors and the outcome was good. Portion control was a big thing for me, as well as the timing of when I eat. I ended up feeling better AND managing a few extra pounds that I’d been trying to drop. Bonus!
I really liked the intro to the book Healing With Whole Foods, which incorporates Eastern tradition with modern nutrition and medicine. Very interesting info. It’s a bit of a textbook, but the intro is very good. The rest of the book I use as a reference rather than a full read.
tracy
http://durteemartini.blogs.com