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Ten Easy Ways To Save Some Calories

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10 Ways To Save Calories

  1. If you’re full, stop eating and clear your plate right away.  If the food hangs around in front of you, you’ll keep picking at it until there’s nothing left. An exception – a study has found that looking at the “carnage” – the leftover bones from barbecued ribs or even the number of empty beer bottles – can serve as an “environmental cue” to stop eating.
  2. Do you really need to stand in front of the buffet table or kitchen spread?  The further away from the food you are the less likely you are to eat it. Don’t sit or stand where you can see the food that’s calling your name. Keep your back to it if you can’t keep distant. There’s just so much control you can exercise before “see it = eat it.” Take a walk or engage someone in an animated conversation. It’s pretty hard to shove food in your mouth when you’re busy talking.
  3. Before you grab another slice, some chips, mac and cheese, or a cookie — ask yourself if you really want it.  Are you hungry? Is it worth the calories? Odds are, the tempting display of food in front of you is visually seductive – and may smell great, too — but you may be reaching out to eat what’s there for reasons not dictated by your stomach, but by your eyes. Have you decided that you want to splurge on something specific? Try deciding what that splurge will be ahead of time and commit to your choice so you don’t find yourself wavering in the face of temptation.
  4. Drink from a tall, thin glass instead of a short, wide one. You’ll drink 25%-30% less. People given short wide glasses poured 76% more than people who were given tall slender glasses, and they believed that they had poured less. Even experienced bartenders poured more into a short, wide glass.
  5. Let this be your mantra:  no seconds. Choose your food, fill your plate, and that’s it. Keep a running account in your head of how many hors d’ oeuvre you’ve eaten or how many cookies. Keep away from food spreads and open bags of anything to help limit nibbling and noshing.
  6. Stop eating before you’re full.  If you keep eating until your stomach finally feels full you’ll likely end up feeling stuffed when you do stop eating.  It takes a little time (around 20 minutes) for your brain to catch up and realize that your stomach is full. A lot of eating is done with your eyes and your eyes love to tell you to try this and to try that.
  7. Divide your food up into smaller portions and separate them to help avoid overeating. Yale researchers took tubes of potato chips and made each seventh or fourteenth one red. The people who got to the red potato chip “stop signs” ate less than half as many chips as the people without the red chips — and they more accurately estimated how much they’d eaten. Definitely avoid eating from a large open bag — count out your chips, crackers, and pretzels or only eat from a single portion size bag. Who can stop when there’s an open bag of salty, crunchy food right in front of you? It’s amazingly easy to keep mindlessly eating until the bag is empty. A dive to the bottom of a 9-ounce bag of chips (without dip) is 1,260 calories. One serving, about 15 chips, is 140 calories.
  8. Cut down a little bit, you probably won’t even notice. Have a one scoop cone instead of 2 scoops, a regular portion of French fries instead of a large, a small smoothie instead of a medium. Eat slowly and give your brain time to register the fact that you’ve fed your body some food. You’ll probably be just as satisfied with the smaller portion and you’ll have saved yourself a lot of calories.
  9. Use a fork and knife instead of your fingers, a teaspoon rather than a tablespoon — anything to slow down the food going into your mouth. Chopsticks can slow you down even more. Chew your food instead of wolfing it down.  If you have to work at eating your food – cutting it with a knife, for instance – you’ll eat more mindfully than if you pick food up with your fingers and pop it into your mouth. Before you eat, drink some water, a no- or low-calorie beverage, or some clear soup. The liquids fill up your stomach and leave less room for the high calorie stuff.
  10. Use a smaller plate. We eat an average of 92% of what we serve ourselves. We pile more food onto larger plates, so a larger plate means we eat more food. A two inch difference in plate diameter—decreasing the plate size to ten inches from 12 inches—would mean a serving that has 22% fewer calories. It’s a smaller serving but not small enough to leave you still hungry and heading back for seconds.

Are Your Snacks The Equivalent Of Another Meal?

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eat-snacks-graphicWe chow down on a lot of snack food — a quarter of our calories come from them!

Snacks account for more than 25% of Americans’ daily calorie intake; since the 1970s, snacks have accounted for around 580 calories a day — which basically turns them into “a full eating event,” or a fourth meal.

When And Where Do We Snack?

  • Americans average 2.3 snacks per day, snacking most frequently in the afternoon, evening and late at night.
  • Most people snack at home, 12% say they snack at work, 7% eat snacks while they travel from place to place
  • 27% of Americans snack on impulse, 28% snack because they want a treat, and 14% eat snacks when they’re stressed or anxious
  • 57% of people say it’s important that food and beverage snacks be healthy, the food and beverages mentioned the most were chips and soda.

How Many Calories?

Maybe we snack so much because multi-tasking has increased – think about how often you eat and drink while you’re doing something else.

Between 2006 and 2008, it took around 70 minutes to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Secondary eating, the kind you do while you’re working on the computer, driving, or walking down the street, doubled from 15 minutes in 2006 to nearly 30 minutes a day in 2008.

The time spent on secondary drinking jumped nearly 90% — from 45 to 85 minutes — which explains why beverages account for 50% of the calories we take in through snacking. (Ever wonder why Starbuck’s and Dunkin’ Donuts are so crowded?)

Are All Snacks Bad For You?

No.  Research doesn’t support the idea that snacking is the main cause of obesity; for some people — like young children and older adults – snacks can be an important source of nutrients and calories.

Trying to go more than four hours without something to eat can make you so hungry that you’ll eat quantities of just about anything in sight. Eating a small meal or snack every 3 to 4 hours helps keep your metabolism revved up so you burn more calories over the course of a day and will help ward off mid-morning and afternoon slumps.

Thoughtful, planned snacking can keep you from feeling outrageously hungry, really grouchy, and can put the brakes on raiding the refrigerator or going on a buying spree at the nearest bakery.

What’s A Snack?

Almost 100% of Americans snack every day, but there isn’t a standard definition of what a snack is or what motivates us to snack. We “self-define,” leaving plenty of wiggle room to blur the line between what’s a snack and what’s a meal.

A snack shouldn’t be a fourth meal.  An individual snack, like the one so many of us have mid-morning or mid-afternoon, is recommended to be between 150 and 200 calories, have at least 8 grams of protein for satiety and to keep your blood sugar stable, and at least 3 grams of fiber to fill you up. Keep the fat and sugar grams low.

Beware health halo foods – the so-called “healthy” snacks that are really a bunch of sugar and/or fat in disguise.  These include a selection of (but not all) cereals, breakfast and protein bars, yogurt-covered anything (like raisins and pretzels), sports and energy drinks, smoothies, and frozen yogurt. Check labels.  Most baked goods, chips, candy, and sugary drinks are occasional treats and not daily snacks.

If you’re not hungry, don’t snack. Ask yourself if you’re snacking because of hunger, habit, or some other reason – like boredom or anger.

Some Snack Choices

Pick snacks that taste good and you look forward to eating.

Some good choices:

  • Baby carrots (or other vegetables) and hummus.
  • Half a cup of cottage cheese with fruit or whole grain crackers.
  • An apple, orange, pear, peach, or grapes with ¼ cup of almonds or reduced-fat cheese or a low-fat cheese stick.
  • Whole-grain crackers, a slice of whole grain bread, or a banana with peanut butter.
  • Trail mix or a combination of nuts, seeds, raisins, and whole grain cereal. Be careful of portions, though – although they’re healthy, nuts are a higher calorie food.
  • A whole wheat or multi-grain English muffin with a small amount of nut or seed butter.
  • Low-fat or non-fat yogurt with raisins, a banana, or a small amount of whole grain cereal.
  • A 12 ounce skim latte or cappuccino.

This is the first post of week 4 of the lose a pound a week challenge.  How are you doing? Let us know on Facebook.

Does Impulsive Mean Overweight And Neurotic Mean Yo-Yo?

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Are You Impulsive — Or Neurotic?

If you’re impulsive it seems that you are more likely to be overweight. If you’re highly neurotic and less conscientious, it’s more likely that you’ll see your weight go up and down.

At least that’s what was found in a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — based on data accumulated over 50 years from close to 2,000 people. The researchers studied these generally healthy and highly educated people to attempt to determine how their personalities might affect their weight and body mass index.

Your Food Choices

So what does that mean for your food choices?

Think of it this way.  If you are an impulsive person and prone to giving into temptation — as many impulsive people are — standing in front of a delicious bakery window and peering in may not be the best idea for you.  It’s going to be darn hard not to succumb to temptation and turn around and walk away.  And, if you do walk in, what are the chances that you can just order coffee without getting that delicious cinnamon-pecan sticky bun to go along with it?

So maybe do yourself a favor and plan your route so you don’t pass the bakery.  By doing so you cut down on the opportunities for those impulsive food purchases that you might regret later.

Risky, Antagonistic, Cynical, Competitive, Aggressive

And by the way, according to the study people who are risk takers — or who are antagonistic, cynical, competitive, and aggressive — also gained more weight.

And If You’re Conscientious . . .

Lucky you if you’re conscientious because you were found (in the study) to typically be thinner.

How Obesity Threatens Our Future

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Since 2006, Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released an annual report on obesity.  This year’s report, F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011 (available as a PDF download), unveils some downright alarming statistics.

Some Major Findings:

Adult Obesity Rates and Trends (2008-2010)

  •  Adult obesity rates rose in 16 states over the past year. No state had a decrease.
  •  Obesity rates exceed 25% in more than two-thirds of states (38 states).
  •  Mississippi had the highest rate of obesity at 34.4%; Colorado the lowest at 19.8% — the only state with a rate below 20%.
  •  Obesity and obesity-related diseases (like diabetes and hypertension) remain the highest in the South. Nine of the 10 states with the highest rates of diabetes and physical inactivity are in the South as well the 10 states with the highest rates of hypertension. Northeastern and Western states have the lowest rates of obesity.
  •  In the past year adult diabetes rates increased in 11 states and Washington, D.C.; more than 10% of adults in eight states now have type 2 diabetes.
  •  Obesity increased for men in nine states and for women in ten states, and decreased for women in one state (Nevada).
  •  People who didn’t graduate from high school have the highest rates of obesity (32.8%). High school graduates who didn’t go to college or technical school have the second highest obesity rate (30.4%).  People who went to college/technical school had an obesity rate of 29.6%; graduates from college/technical school had the lowest obesity rate, 21.5%.
  •  Households with an income less than $15,000 have a 33.8% obesity rate; households with an income above $50,000 have a 24.6% obesity rate.

Changes in Adult Obesity, Overweight, Diabetes, and Hypertension Over Time

  • Twenty years ago no state had an obesity rate above 15%.
  •  Twenty years ago the state with the highest combined obesity and overweight rate was 49%; now the lowest rate is 54.8%; 44 states are above 60%.
  •  Twenty years ago, 37 states had hypertension rates over 20%; now every state is over 20%; nine are over 30%.
  •  Over the past 15 years seven states have doubled their obesity rates; 10 states nearly doubled theirs with increases of at least 90%; 22 more states saw their  obesity rates increase by at least 80%.
  •  Since 1995 obesity rates have grown the fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee and the slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut.
  •  Ten years ago there weren’t any states with an obesity rate above 24%; now 43 states have higher obesity rates than the state that was the highest in 2000.

Top Recommendations

“The report includes recommendations for policies to help leverage change quickly and efficiently, by providing individuals and families with the resources and opportunities to make healthier choices in their daily lives. For instance, the report calls for the strategic implementation of the ACA, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, and other federal and state policy changes to help prevent and control obesity in America.”

Please take notice.  To see more recommendations and to read the full report click here.