It happens all the time. We fool ourselves every day:
- I don’t eat anything in the morning. Never mind the cookie you had with coffee mixed with half & half. At least there’s comfort in knowing you used a no calorie Splenda to sweeten your treat.
- I had a salad for lunch, I can eat a big dinner. You conveniently forget the salad had dried cranberries, pecans, homemade butter toasted croutons, and a heavenly creamy raspberry dressing. Oh, and the 2 extra small garlic bread sticks surely don’t count!
- I’ll order a nice tilapia for dinner. It’s Low Calorie. Sure the creamy caper sauce topping the tilapia adds a few extra calories to your healthy fish meal, but it can’t be that much, right?
Recently, the tilapia example happened to me, a known calorie counter. While in a restaurant I wanted a low cal dinner. So I ordered the tilapia with crab meat, capers, and steamed broccoli. Proud that I skipped the giant fried onion thing that I really wanted, I decided to look up the calorie count for my meal on the new app, Nutrition Menu, on my iPhone. Based on prior experience, I assumed my dinner calories to be 300 for fish, 100 for crab, 200 for the capers and 100 for broccoli. A nice total of 700 calories for my healthy dinner.
Enter reality! My trusty iPhone app lists all major restaurant chains and the calorie count for most of their menu items. Well my healthy light tilapia weighed in at a whopping 1,183 calories! I was shocked. So when my dinner arrived I scraped off all the yummy toppings and ate the fish and broccoli, saving myself from a near disaster.
These are only a few examples of how we can fool ourselves all day long on how many calories we are consuming. We don’t think we eat that much, but in reality most of us overeat every day without realizing it. Our healthy intentions get squashed by our refusal to count everything that we eat. But who are we really fooling? Only ourselves! You’re the person who eventually has to step on the scale, and deal with the results of your actions.
Stop fooling yourself! Get a calorie book, or the Nutrition Menu app, and look up everything you eat before you consume it. Keep track of your calorie intake for one full week. I certain you’ll be surprised at what you find. You won’t need further explanation for where those extra pounds came from. But don’t lose hope! You will also discover that knowledge will set you free. You will be armed for the future with calorie awareness that will bring you back down to your ideal weight. But only if you stop fooling yourself!
Photo credit Ljv
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