Summing it up

I just learned an astonishing fact, which many of you many not yet know.  It’s common knowledge that in order to lose one pound, you need to burn 3500 more calories that you consume.  The same goes for gaining weight, meaning that if you consume 3500 more calories than you burn, you will gain one pound.  After doing the math, I realized that it only takes 100 extra calories per day to gain 10 pounds a year!!  Over the course of a few years, the average person could easily become 20 – 30 pounds overweight. 

This got me to thinking about different foods that could easily contribute to this scenario.  For instance, at home we have Snyder’s hard pretzels.  One pretzel is 100 calories.  Now if you can limit yourself to just one, then I applaud you.  However, for most of us, (myself included) I could easily eat four or five at one time.  Another product that comes to mind is the craze of “100 calorie snack packs” which took off about five years ago.  Now again, if you limit yourself to just one bag, then you will fair pretty well.  But for the average person, I think that it is all too easy to lose sight of how quickly the calories add up by the end of the day.

Being an average person myself, I do not want to get sucker punched by these extra calories at the end of the year.  So I came up with a way to keep a handle on these calories, but without the nuisance of actually counting them.  When it comes to snack time, (which for me is a couple of times a day) I enjoy an unlimited supply of all kinds of fruits and vegetables.  I have found that raw fruits and vegetables like apples, oranges, carrots, red peppers, and bananas are very filling, satisfy my need to crunch, and are easy to prepare the night before. 

So the next time you are headed down the snack aisle, swing over to the fresh produce aisle instead and load up on colorful and tasty treats…you won’t even have to check the label!