Want to save around 100 calories? That’s what’s in two medium slices of bacon.
Nix two slices of bacon on your bacon cheeseburger or two slices on your club sandwich or breakfast sandwich.
If you eat bacon five times a week that’s a pound lost in seven weeks and five pounds lost in 35 weeks just by subtracting those slices from what you normally eat. Of course, that’s assuming you don’t add an extra slice of cheese or a heaping spoonful of mayo!
Have you ever followed an argument with a friend – or maybe with your Mom – with a trip to the bakery or the closest candy store?
You could already be stuffed to the gills. But, all you can think about is getting that cookie, or candy bar, or bag of pretzels and chowing down – even though you’re not hungry and may or may not actually enjoy what you’re eating.
Real hunger or physiological hunger is your body’s way of telling you that it’s time to eat food for nourishment. It’s when you have that empty, rumbling feeling in your stomach, a headache, maybe some lightheadedness. It usually occurs two to four hours after your last meal.
Head hunger or psychological hunger doesn’t have physical symptoms and can happen at any time. It can be triggered by emotional situations, habits — like watching TV, working on the computer or driving in the car — or by food cravings or as a form of procrastination. Whatever triggers your head hunger can make you think you’re hungry when you’re really not.
Emotions are common triggers for eating. Head hunger is emotional eating usually in response to gremlins like stress, sadness, loneliness, anger, fear, or boredom.
Head hunger also serves as a distraction – the eating it provokes can be a way to distract yourself from difficult situations, projects, and encounters.
The thing is, these feelings and situations are a part of life and eating won’t make them go away. Eating in response to head hunger often keeps you from figuring out what’s causing the feeling in the first place.
“I want chocolate” might really mean “I need comfort” or “I worked my tail off and I really need to be recognized for it.” Those trips back and forth to the fridge or the vending machine might be the ultimate form of procrastination – is there a project that needs to get done that you’re struggling with?
Wouldn’t it be great if it was as simple as figuring out what’s causing your head hunger and dealing with it. The fact is, that’s the answer. Eating can’t really satisfy your emotional needs, and left unmet, those needs will trigger your head hunger over and over. So, you overeat, you mentally beat yourself up, you feel awful, and the whole process is triggered once again.
To break the pattern, first stop beating yourself up when you eat in response to head hunger — as opposed to eating because you’re starving and your stomach is growling like crazy. Devise a plan to figure out what caused you to eat in the first place. Try keeping a written record of what happened and how you felt before your head hunger took charge. Looking back at a series of entries might give you a clue. Once you get a handle on your triggers, come up with a plan to deal with them and make a “go-to” list of ways to reward, calm, comfort, and/or distract yourself without eating.
Easter Eggs: The Confectionary TypeThey’re everywhere and at every price point. Some are piped with flowers and others are wrapped in foil. You find them in supermarkets, discount stores, and fancy candy stores.
Easter is the second ranked holiday for candy purchases in the US (just behind Halloween) and solid, hollow, and filled chocolate Easter eggs are some of the most popular choices of Easter candy.
I don’t want to be a killjoy, but chocolate is a high calorie, high fat food.
Here’s the stats for some popular chocolate eggs:
The health benefits in chocolate come from cocoa and dark chocolate has a greater concentration than milk chocolate. White chocolate, without any cocoa in it, is not really chocolate. In a recent study, German scientists followed 19,357 people for at least 10 years and found that those who ate the most chocolate, (average 7.5 grams a day or .26 oz), had lower blood pressure and a 39% lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke than people who ate the smallest amount (1.7 grams or .06 oz a day).
Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, contains flavonols which have antioxidant qualities and other positive influences on your heart health. It can be heart healthy if it replaces an unhealthy, high calorie snack, but there is still no recommended amount for health benefits.
Just a heads-up: Those delicious, pastel wrapped chocolate Easter eggs are caloric and moderately high in fat, one-third of it the type of saturated fat that isn’t heart healthy. Extra ingredients like crème and caramel fillings can add lots of extra fat and calories.
Peeps: the blazing yellow and hot pink marshmallow bunnies and chicks that were hatched over 50 years ago. They’re called PEEPS because the original candy was the yellow chick. Now they’re produced for many holidays – in seasonal colors and shapes, of course – and they continue to be the subject of lots of design contests (you’d be amazed what you can make out of peeps) and scientific experiments (some claim them to be indestructible). Just Born, the parent company of PEEPS, claims to produce enough PEEPS in one year to circle the Earth twice.
PEEPS have been the number one non-chocolate Easter candy in the US for more than a decade. Although yellow is America’s favorite color for PEEPS chicks and bunnies, they also come in pink, lavender, blue, orange, green, and other seasonal colors.
They’re made of sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, and less than 0.5% of potassium sorbate, natural flavors, dye, and carnauba wax, and they are gluten and nut free. (No wonder some claim that they’re indestructible!) You can even get sugar free PEEPS made with Splenda.
Five little chicks (42g, listed as one serving size) have 140 calories, 0g fat, 1g protein, and 36g carbs.
Some people like their peeps nice and soft. Others leave them out in the air to age to perfection so they get a little crunchy on the outside. They’ve been microwaved (careful, they expand and can make quite a mess), frozen, roasted, used to top hot chocolate, and added to recipes. They don’t toast well on sticks like regular marshmallows – the sugar coating tends to burn.
Jelly beans — little nuggets of sweetness that come in multitudes of colors and flavors. Their gummy insides might have originated centuries ago from the treat, Turkish Delight. Their outsides are basically the same as the colored hard candy coating, developed in the late 17th century, for the Jordan almond. The modern jelly bean appeared during the American Civil War when Boston’s William Schraft encouraged sending candy to Union soldiers. Because of their egg shape they became popular as Easter candy around 1930.
Although standard jelly beans come in fruit flavors, there are now so many flavors — some goofy, some sophisticated — like spiced, mint, gourmet, tropical, popcorn, bubble gum, pepper, and cola. They also now come in a sugar free version (seems weird, but true – wonder how many chemicals are in those).
Jelly beans are primarily made of sugar and also usually contain gelatin, corn syrup, modified food starch, and less than 0.5% of citric acid, sodium citrate, artificial flavors, confectioners glaze, pectin, carnauba wax, white mineral oil, magnesium hydroxide, and artificial colors (takes some of the fun out of them, doesn’t it).
They may give you Technicolor insides, but they are fat free. On average: