lose weight

Milkshake Or Strawberries? 650 calories or 50?

April 28, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

Day #3 of The Lose Five Pounds in 5 Weeks Challenge: It’s springtime – and visions of milk shakes might be dancing in your head. A thick chocolate milkshake can have around 750 calories for a large (22 ounce) shake. A medium (22 ounce) Burger King strawberry shake has 630 calories with 15 grams of fat and 103 grams of sugar. Have a bowl of strawberries instead – one cup of sliced strawberries has 53 calories with no fat, 13 grams of carbs, 3 grams of fiber, and 1 gram of protein.

How are you doing? Have you decided to take action? Post your progress and you’re doing on Facebook and grab a buddy to do the challenge with you. There’s power in having an accountability partner — and you’ll both have fun by egging each other on.

Think Twice About That Bran Muffin

April 27, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN 1 Comment

Tip 2 of “The Five” Pounds in 5 Weeks challenge:

Think about skipping the bran muffin at breakfast. Bran muffins are often thought of as “healthy”– probably because they have the word bran in their name. But they’re made with a lot of sugar and fat.

In general, a 4 ounce bran muffin has around 350 calories – but, have you seen the size of muffins? A Dunkin’ Donuts Honey Bran Raisin Muffin has 480 calories with 15 grams of fat and 79 grams of carbs. It does, however, have 5 grams of fiber.

If you really crave one, eat half and then take the steps instead of the elevator. A 150 pound person burns 91 calories for every 10 minutes of stair climbing.

The Easy Way To Lose 5 Pounds In 5 Weeks

April 26, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

“The Five” Challenge

Did you wake up this morning feeling like an extra five pounds of fat attached itself to your body — and you have no idea how it got there? Maybe there’s only four pounds if you challenged yourself to eating a bit differently and moving a bit more during Week #1.

Take “The Five” Challenge and safely lose a pound a week the easy and healthy way – and in a manner that will help you to keep the weight off.

Why Five?

We take in energy through food (calories in) and expend energy through our bodies’ metabolic processes and through activity (calories out).

About 3500 calories equals one pound of body weight so you’d have to eat around 3500 calories less than your body needs to lose one pound. Since we’re all unique, each one of us gains, loses, and processes calories at our own unique rate.

Even with our unique variations, choosing 3500 calories as a weekly target when you’re trying to lose weight is reasonable and doable. Taking in 500 calories a day less than your body needs and/or using up more calories through activity will help you to lose approximately one pound in a week (7 days x 500 calories = 3500 calories or approximately one pound). Do this for 5 weeks and you will have lost around 5 pounds.

Remember – that’s 500 FEWER calories and/or MORE activity than what you normally would eat or do.

“The Five” Challenge In A Nutshell

It’s as simple as this:

decrease your energy intake by 500 calories a day

expend 500 calories a day more than you usually do

use any combination of the two that adds up to 500 – for instance, eat 250 calories less and move around for 250 calories more than you usually do – or you could eat 350 calories less and burn 150 calories through activity.

Do this seven days a week for five weeks and you should be around five pounds lighter. Everyone is different – we all calculate calories and activity differently and everyone loses weight at a different rate. But, if you hop on the challenge you certainly will see some results and you’ll be building great new habits.

The Specifics

Every day I’ll post a calorie saving tip on EatOutEatWell.com that focuses on eating behaviors, food selection, or ways to burn calories through activity. I’ll also tweet and post the tip on Facebook, and Pinterest.
Everyone eats out — whether it’s for a snack or a meal — I want to encourage you to Eat Out and Eat Well. Many of the tips are geared toward helping you when you eat in restaurants, amusement parks, ballparks, barbecues, airports, at parties, on vacations, or at work.
When deciding which tip(s) to use, choose the ones you think will work for you and that will fit into your daily life without much difficulty or stress.
Do one thing for seven days, or for all 35 days (great for habit formation), or try something new everyday. The choice is yours, but take a chance and do something. Those “a little too tight” clothes in your closet will fit much better.
Post what you choose to do on Facebook. Also post if you’re struggling. There’s a community out there to help.

Week #1:

Tip #1: What’s your coffee (or tea) pleasure? How many cups do you drink and are they small, tall, grande, vente or extra large? What else do you put in the cup along with the coffee or tea?

Here’s some facts – use them to decide how to moderate your coffee/tea calories. The calories below are for 1 tablespoon. My guess is that most of us pour at least two to three tablespoons of milk or cream into our coffee, not just one. Add up the calories and multiply them by the number of cups of coffee or tea you have a day. It’s not at all far fetched to be drinking 500 calories of coffee or tea when it’s made with extras.

Brewed coffee, grande (16 oz), black: 5 calories
Brewed tea, (16 oz): 4 calories
Heavy cream, 1tbs: 52 calories
Half-and-half, 1 tbs: 20 calories
Whole milk, 1 tbs: 9 calories
Fat-free milk, 1 tbs: 5 calories
Table sugar, 1tbs: 49 calories
Bailey’s Irish Cream, 1.3 ounces: 121 calories

Remember to post on Facebook and to share the challenge with family, friends, and coworkers.

Resolutions And Goals: Perfection Just Might Be The Enemy Of Good

January 7, 2013 By Penny Klatell, PhD, RN Leave a Comment

It’s a week into the New Year. Your pants are uncomfortably tight and the number on the scale is in the wrong zip code. Trying to right the ship did you resolve – swear — to never again eat another chocolate chip cookie? Or maybe you’ve taken an oath to lay off potato chips forever or to go to the gym six days a week at 6AM.

Resolutions Can Be Tricky

Count yourself among the legions of people who have a specific end game in mind and then set broad – huge – resolutions and goals to try to get there. Unfortunately, those resolutions and goals usually aim for perfect achievement – something that’s virtually impossible to accomplish.

Aiming For Perfection

Be honest. You know that aiming for perfectionmeans lining yourself up for a big time fall. Inevitably, you end up feeling awful when you step over the theoretical line – or maybe it’s more like you fall off the cliff. Why must pursuit of a goal be done that way? Perfection, in this case, is really the enemy of good. In the real world, isn’t movement toward achieving your goal good enough?

Two Tips

1. Ditch the all-or-nothing thinking and overly ambitious goals. Drastic changes usually don’t sync with daily life and probably won’t last more than a few weeks. Cycle through the drastic changes often enough and you solidly embed a “no can do” attitude in your brain. Remember, your less than ideal behaviors have taken time to develop and replacing them with more ideal, healthier ones takes time, too. Don’t reassess/alter everything at once. Instead, work toward changing one thing at a time. Human brains don’t like too much disruption all at once – they like their familiar way of doing things. Pick one thing at a time and create a new habit around it. Then go on to the next thing on your list.

2. Not having succeeded before doesn’t mean you won’t succeed this time. Everyone has made and broken resolutions. We’ve all tried to lose weight or eat more fruit and veggies. Adopt a positive attitude and frame your resolution in positive terms. “I will eat vegetables instead of French fries twice a week” or I’ll have cereal only on Saturday mornings” is much more positive than “I’ll never eat French fries or cereal again.” It’s easier to put a new habit in place than to change an old one, so embed the positive behavior not the negative one.

30 Days Of Usable Tips And Strategies

For the next 30 days check in daily at EatOutEatWell.com for a practical, usable tip of the day to help you on your way to achieving – and keeping – your resolutions and goals.