Christmas, Daily Chocolate and Calorie Counting for Weight Loss
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Daily Chocolate and Calorie Counting
I eat chocolate multiple times a day. I like it. I have chocolate cereal and chocolate pudding, and at 4pm I usually have 3 Hershey Kisses. Sometimes I have a mint chocolate cookie at 3pm.
I do this because it fits into my calories. I need calories at that point in the day and 60 odd calories just about does it.
You can see on this Christmas themed bag how the calories break down on the Kisses.
For every 9 kisses it’s 200kcal.
To determine how many calories per Kiss, you divide 200 by 9.
200 / 9 = 22 calories. Okay, so it’s closer to 70 calories.
New and Exciting Christmas Chocolate - Balancing it out
I was at the grocery store the other day and I found these last Christmas. They just came back out and they’re only released during the Christmas season.
I LOVE these things. They are very creamy chocolate truffles that melt in your mouth. Absolute heaven. They are 250 calories for 5.
SO, how many calories each?
250 / 5 = 50.
Yikes.
If I had 3 of these instead of 3 Kisses do you think that I would gain weight?
It would take a 70-calorie snack daily and double the amount of calories to 150.
Over a week that adds up.
That snack at 70 calories every day is 490kcal.
7 days of 150 calorie snack is 1050. Yikes.
That is 500+ calories a week extra. If you were trying to lose weight and made this little switch without doing the math you would undo all your progress.
How to Count Calories and Balance it out
Counting calories is kind of about identifying problems like this before it’s your waist line telling you that you’re doing something wrong.
Is the solution to never eat chocolate again? Never eat seasonal chocolate again? Curse Christmas and shun it? You’d miss the songs too much.
So how to do it effectively? The solution that I arrived at works well for me. I replace 1 of the Kisses daily with the truffle. I have 3 items, 2 of them are kisses and 1 of them is the truffle.
That takes my 70 calorie snack to 90 calories. Those extra calories add up to a weekly total of 630. Much more manageable.
If you want to be a stickler you can balance it out fully by reducing a snack in the evening to counter balance, but I find that 20kcal is a fairly small amount that can be absorbed pretty well without you needing to do too much.
Conclusion
I hope this helped you understand how even small changes in diet can have a big impact on your overall weight.
Calorie counting is a tool to get you in a sweet spot so that you can identify and solve problems before they become problems.