How Many Calories is Your Favorite Food Hiding

Posted on Apr 06 in Featureby Michael StewartPrint

When it comes to weight loss, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about hidden calories. You may assume that all you have to do to reach your ideal weight is focus on eating whole grain or low-fat foods. Well, not quite. Before you pick up that box of whole grain cereal or bag of low-fat cookies, you need to look at the fine print because you could be taking in hidden calories and essentially preventing yourself from reaching your ideal weight.

So where exactly are those hidden calories? Well let’s break out the magnifying glass and take a look.

1. Grab a small bag of chips and it says there are 80 calories per serving. Sounds reasonable enough. You’re allowing yourself 1500 calories a day so 80 won’t do much damage. But take a closer look and you’ll see that there are 3 servings in that bag of chips. That’s a total of 240 calories. If you eat the whole pack you’ll only have 1260 calories left for the rest of the day. And it’s only 11 am. And for breakfast you had whole grain granola cereal which you were shocked to discover contains about 400 calories in the little ½ cup serving you poured into your bowl. That’s…that’s a gazillion calories already! As you can see, you need to pay attention to the fine print on supposedly healthy foods. They generally pack a stronger caloric – and fattening – punch than you’d like to admit
2. When it comes to sugar, don’t assume it’s safe to eat something just because the ingredients list doesn’t clearly say “sugar”. There are many forms of sugar and they generally end in” –ose” – dextrose, fructose, or sucrose. And remember that no matter which “–ose” you chose, it’s all the same to your thighs!
3. Just because a food is labeled as low-fat or fat-free, that’s no reason to indulge. Just as your thighs can’t tell the difference between sucrose and fructose, so too they can’t distinguish between 100 calories from regular Oreos or 100 calories from low-fat Oreos. Calories are energy to your body. Take in too much energy and it gets stored in your body as fat. So consume everything – including fat-free cookies – in moderation. In fact, you may want to be extra careful with the fat free varieties because the label fools you into thinking the calories are somehow different and magical. Not so.
4. In the good ol’ days the only thing you had to worry about when drinking coffee was overdosing on caffeine. But we’ve since had the industrial revolution and great technological advances which have allowed the great minds of the coffee industry to put forth creative and tasty new ways for us to consume more coffee and more calories. Nowadays you can turn a boring cup of coffee into a 500+ calorie minefield thanks to all the creamer, sugar, syrup (even more sugar!) and whipped cream that gets added when you order a fancy concoction at your local coffee shop. So, if you’re a coffee shop addict watch out – that cup of coffee could contain more calories than a full meal
5. You spend hours at the gym each week trying to whip your body into shape and during each session you quench your thirst with a sports drink. Someone told you it’s full of electrolytes or positive ions or something. Anyway, someone told you it’ll do you good because you exercise. Why not, you think – athletes drink it and they’re in tip-top shape. Turns out that a serving of a sports drink like Gatorade has 50 calories and 14g of sugar. With 4 servings in each bottle, that’s a total of 200 calories and 56g of sugar. Just as a reference, 4-5 grams of sugar is the equivalent of 1 tablespoon of sugar. That means there are about 11 tablespoons of sugar in that bottle of Gatorade. That’s quite a bit of sugar. You may wonder how professional athletes can consume sports drinks and maintain a perfect physique. Well, don’t forget that they earn a living based on their bodies. They workout for hours per day and burn thousands of calories. They can afford to take in the sports drink. The training you do for next month’s wedding isn’t exactly equivalent to Super Bowl training (although you may beg to differ given how much pain you’re in after doing 30 squats).

4 Comments

• Turbo Fire says:

  May 25, 2010 at 6:38 pm

  Just a quick post to say thanks for posting!
• Wynell Bayless says:

  May 27, 2010 at 6:04 am

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• Gustavo Hovorka says:

  May 27, 2010 at 4:45 pm

  Thank you for such a fantastic blog. Where else could one get this kind of info written in such an incite full way? I have a presentation that I am just now working on, and I have been looking for such information.

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