Healthy Eating Habits, Part 4 - Stop drinking your calories
- Healthy Eating Habits, Part 1 - Many small meals are better than one big meal
- Healthy Eating Habits, Part 2 - Slow and steady wins the race
- Healthy Eating Habits, Part 3 - Don’t clean your plate
- Healthy Eating Habits, Part 4 - Stop drinking your calories
- Healthy Eating Habits, Part 5 - The endless cycle of binge and guilt
- Five Super Foods You’re Eating Wrong!
We’re going through some healthy eating habits this week. Today’s topic is something we’ve already discussed in the past, liquid calories.
Liquid calories
When I first started changing my eating habits, I took a week to measure my calorie intake. I wrote down everything I ate in a little notebook. I put it all in there, from the biggest lunch to the smallest snack. I even included the vitamin supplement I was taking with its zero calories.
At the end of the week, I added everything up and calculated my average daily calories. They came out to about 3000. That’s high, but it’s not that high. For a man in his late 20’s, who is physically active and is around 5′11″, 3000 calories is going to add some fat, but it’s not going to make you obese. Yet here I was, 90lbs overweight and not losing anything.
I was a bit frustrated. Why was I overweight when clearly my diet indicated that I was doing reasonably well. So I did more research online and found an article about sodas juices and other sources of liquid calories. Turns out, I had completely ignored these. For some reason, I thought of these as water substitutes which therefore had no calories.
Simple math
So then I started writing down my liquid calories. Here’s a small sample:
- Lunch - Glass of coke with two refills. That’s about 315 calories.
- Afternoon - Two cans of Nestea ice tea. That’s about 180 calories.
- Evening - One giant big gulp from 7-11 full of coke or Mountain Dew. About 400 calories.
LIST 1
Now let’s do the math. That’s 900 calories a day or 6300 calories a week. In other words, I was drinking an extra two lbs of fat every week and not even noticing it. Even worse, these are completely empty liquid calories. My body does not consider these food, so even if I fill it up with these calories, it still tells me I’m hungry. The 315 calories I drank with lunch did nothing for my satiety. I still felt as hungry as if I had drank water.
More bad choices
Coffee, fruit juices and some teas are just as bad. That mocha frappuccino you had at Starbucks this morning? It had somewhere between 200 and 300 calories and possibly as high as 500 calories. That delicious fruit juice you had at Jamba juice at lunch? Somewhere between 200 and 400 calories depending on the size you picked and possibly as high as 600 if you went with a smoothie rather than a juice. Check out these links for more information:
By the way, I don’t mean to pick out these two companies. All juices and coffees are essentially the same. So don’t run out to Peet’s coffee thinking that you’re getting a healthier choice. The healthiest choice you can make is to simply avoid drinking calories.
Summary
If you’re thirsty, drink water. Water is still the best option when it comes to liquids. If you can’t stay away from nonwater drinks, at least be aware of the number of calories you’re consuming. These are calories you will need to keep in mind when you’re looking at your overall daily goals.
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