Eat Out Eat Well

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A Dozen Really Common Reasons We Eat When We’re Not Hungry

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12 reasons for eating graphicEating when you’re not hungry, or when you’re bored, angry, tired, procrastinating, or celebrating can push your calorie intake way up.

The biggest problem is that we often don’t realize that we’re shoving food into our mouths – either because we’re distracted, we don’t want to know, or we just plain old don’t care.

What Makes Us Do It?

1.  “Cheap” calories: the kind you find at all you can eat restaurants, freebie tastes in markets, the basket of broken cookies in the bakery, and “value and super sized meals.”

2.  Bread and extras like butter, olive oil, and olives on the table or bar peanuts or pretzels.  Way too tempting to pass up – especially if you’re hungry or you’ve walked in with the attitude that you “deserve” it because you’ve had a tough day.

3.  Walking into your kitchen or the snack room at work and having your favorite snacks staring you in the face (see it = eat it).

4.  Procrastinating or avoiding doing what you have to do by having a snack.

5.  Watching TV with a bag of chips or a bowl of candy on your lap.

6.  Parties— especially when you drink — causing you to lose count and control of what you’re grabbing to eat.

7.  Food and coffee shops on every corner that offer lots of food, lots of variety, and are open all the time.

8.  The in(famous) sugar/fat/salt combination in baked goods, fast food, candy, fast food, frozen food, and processed food.

9.  Food that your family or roommates insist must be in the house – or that you think they want in the house.

10.  Feeling tired, stressed, overwhelmed, bored, angry, or “out-of-sorts” and turning to food as a “pick-me-up” or for comfort.

11.  Mindless bites – a piece of candy from the open bowl on a desk, a taste of your partner’s dessert, finishing your child’s food (especially dripping ice cream cones).

12.  Being a member of the clean plate club – which also extends to polishing off leftovers and finishing the last bits left in the pan or serving dishes as you clean up.

Is There Less Alcohol And Fewer Calories In a Serving Of Wine Than There Is In Beer Or A Standard Drink?

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calories-in-wineThat’s not a trick question. A standard alcoholic drink (in the US) is a drink that contains the equivalent of 14.0 grams (0.6 ounces) of pure alcohol, or the amount usually found in:

  • 12 ounces of beer
  • 8 ounces of malt liquor
  • 5 ounces of wine (not dessert wine or port)
  • 1.5 ounces or a “shot” of 80-proof distilled spirits or liquor (gin, rum, vodka, or whiskey, etc.)

So, if you’re comparing a standard portion of one form of alcohol to another, there is the approximate equivalent of alcohol in each drink.

But – take note of the portion sizes.  If the hand that pours puts 10 ounces of wine into a large wine glass (not unheard of) you are actually getting twice the amount of alcohol that you would get in a 12 ounce bottle of beer of a standard shot glass (1.5 ounces) of 80-proof liquor.

Calories From Alcohol Don’t Make You Feel Full

When you drink your calories your body doesn’t actually feel satisfied. Except for perhaps milk or other protein drinks, fluid intake doesn’t typically trigger production of the hormones that tell your brain that you’ve fed your stomach.  Most liquid calories don’t produce “satiety” or the feeling of “being full,” which your brain takes as the cue to stop eating.

This is especially true if you’re slowly sipping your drink — but research has shown that even if the temporary bloat you feel after rapidly downing a beer is no substitute for satiety.

(FYI: even if you don’t feel full, the alcohol you’ve drunk still has 7 calories per gram compared to 4 calories per gram for carbohydrates and protein and 9 calories per gram for fat.)

How Many Calories Are In Your Glass Of Wine?

The standard serving of wine (5 ounces) is probably visually smaller than you think. Wine glasses can generally hold a lot more, and depending on who’s pouring, can be filled with many more than 5 ounces.

Most standard servings of wine have 125-150 calories, but the calories can double depending on the size of the glass and how far it’s filled up.  Sweet and dessert wines are more caloric than table wine and champagne, although the serving size is generally smaller.

For comparison, on average, a 12 ounce bottle of beer has around 153 calories and 1.5 ounces (a jigger) of 80 proof liquor has around 97 calories.

As an experiment, try filling up your usual wine glass – using water—to simulate the amount of wine you would usually pour, and then measure that amount in a measuring cup.  You might be shocked to find that the serving you’re used to pouring is double the standard serving size.

You may have your preference – most of us do – but whether it’s red, white, dry, sweet, or sparkling, it is really easy to overlook the calories in those long-stemmed glasses.

If you have dessert wine after dinner it’s about double the calories per ounce although the standard serving is less:  usually 2 to 3 ounces.  So add on about another 100 to 150 calories for each glass of that smooth dessert wine.

Approximate Calories in One Ounce Of  Various Wines:

Champagne: 19 calories

Red wine (burgundy, cabernet):  25 calories

Dry white wine (Chablis, reisling, chardonnay, sauvignon blanc):  24 calories

Rose:  20 calories

Sweet white wine (moselle, sauterne, zinfandel):  28 calories

Port (about 20% alcohol):  46 calories

Sweet dessert wine (tokaji, muscat):  47 calories

Sangria:  about 22 calories (recipes vary)

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For more tips get 30 Ways to Have Low-Calorie Fun in the Sun: Your Guide to Guilt-Free Eating at Picnics, Amusement Parks, Barbecues & Parties  available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Is Your Coffee Giving You A Muffin Top?

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calories-in-coffee-graphic

How do you like your coffee?  Black, light and sweet, regular?  Do you stand in front of the sugar and milk adding and pouring until the color and taste are just  right?

Coffee Calories Are Sneaky

There are about two calories in eight ounces of unsweetened black brewed coffee – doesn’t matter if it’s hot or iced. Not a bad deal.

What a lot of us don’t think about is how many calories are in the stuff we put into our coffee.

The Add-Ins

Half and half, 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup):  40 calories

Whole milk, 2 tablespoons:  18 calories

2% (low fat) milk, 2 tablespoons:  14 calories

Non-fat milk, 2 tablespoons:  11 calories

Sugar, 1 teaspoon:  16 calories

What And How Much Do You Put Into Your Coffee?

How much milk or half and half do you put into your coffee?  We all do a freehand pour.  Try measuring how much you pour and you might be surprised.

How much sugar do you add?

How many times a day do you drink coffee?

How’s This For An Eye-Opener?

Say you have 3 grande (Starbuck’s) – or 3 large (Dunkin donuts) – size coffees a day.  Each is 20 ounces or 2.5 times the size of a traditional 8 ounce cup.

If you add 4 tablespoons of half and half and three teaspoons of sugar to each that’s:

▪   128 calories for the additives and around 5 calories for the coffee for a total of 133 calories for each grande/large cup of coffee.

▪   Have three of those and that’s 399 calories a day of coffee your way.

▪   Do that every day for a year and that’s the equivalent of 145,635 calories, around 41.61 pounds of body fat.   Not everyone drinks that amount of coffee with that amount of half and half and sugar.  But, weight management is a balancing act: If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight.  Because 3,500 calories equals about 1 pound (0.45 kilogram) of fat, you need to burn 3,500 calories more than you take in to lose one pound.  The equation isn’t totally clear-cut because you usually lose a combination of fat, lean tissue, and water.  As weight loss changes take place in your body you might need to decrease your calorie intake even more to continue to lose weight.

But, bottom line, it does make you stop and think about how many calories you really are putting into your coffee – or where your (around the middle) muffin top is coming from.

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For more tips get 30 Ways to Have Low-Calorie Fun in the Sun: Your Guide to Guilt-Free Eating at Picnics, Amusement Parks, Barbecues & Parties  available on Amazon.

Calorie Alert: Beware Oil Slicks On Your Food

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oil-slicks-graphicIt looks so good!  Your tomatoes and mozzarella arrive with drizzled decorative squiggles of colorful basil oil on top. But are those squiggles only decorative?

Flavorful, Caloric, and Decorative

The squiggles are attractive and probably provide some deliciousness, but they’re also adding what might amount to a fair amount of calories.

It’s so easy to be fooled by fatty sauces and dressings on innocent looking vegetables. Vegetables are great.  Veggies smothered with butter, cheese, croutons, and/or bacon are loaded with calories.  Restaurants love to use oil and butter for flavor and to make the veggies glistening and mouth watering so they’re often “rinsed” with oil just before they’re sent to your table.

With salad dressings and sauces, the amount of dressing or sauce on a dish is heavily dependent on the hand of the pourer, even when a standard size ladle is used.  You can always ask for sauce on the side, vegetables not to be rinsed, and with no butter or oil added.

If your food is cooked in stock or steam instead of in oil, you save 120 calories per tablespoon of oil.  Flavored oil drizzled on top of your food – like basil oil – will add another 40 calories a teaspoon.  Do you need it or want it?

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For more tips get 30 Ways to Have Low-Calorie Fun in the Sun: Your Guide to Guilt-Free Eating at Picnics, Amusement Parks, Barbecues & Parties  available on Amazon.