Category: Weight Control

I was reading a nutrition forum where I found a post by a guy who figured out an easy way to tell if a packaged food is high fat or low fat. This method is so easy, you can do the math in your head.

A food is considered “high fat” if more than 20% of its calories come from fat.

A food is considered “low fat” if less than 20% of its calories come from fat.

So, here is this cool, do-the-math-in-your-head method for figuring out if a food is high or low fat:

1. Multiply the calories from fat by 5
2. Compare the result from #1 to the Total Calories.

If the result from #1 is more than the Total Calories, the food is high fat.

If the result from #1 is less than the Total Calories, you have a low fat food.

Do you want to get the most nutrition for the particular amount of calories you consume? CRON-O-Meter is cross platform ( Java! Yay! ) software that will make achieving that goal easier. Just type in what you are eating or plan to eat. CRON-O-Meter will show you how much nutrition you will get for the calories you will allow yourself to consume given your food choices.

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Get it here:
http://spaz.ca/cronometer/

Like bagels and pasta, most people would be shocked to learn how many calories are in what they considered to be a reasonable serving of granola.

I shop at a store with bulk bins and l like to get myself very small bags of granola as a treat. Today, I read the packages of 5 varieties of granola that are very similar to what I get from the bulk bins. All of the prepackaged granola was about 130 calories an ounce.

The store didn’t have a scale that measured in ounces. So, as an experiment I decided to bag up what I thought would be a negligible amount of granola, maybe about an ounce.

When I got home and put it on my food scale I was shocked to see that tiny amount of granola was actually 2 ounces and approximately 260 calories.

An ounce of butter or an ounce of canola oil is 200 calories. Changing your diet by 250 calories a day is enough to change your weight by 1/2 pound a week ( 26 pounds a year ).

I decided to measure out an ounce of granola and I was blown away by how little it was. If anyone looked at that one ounce portion they would have called it just crumbs.

Bulk granola, in terms of weight control, is basically crunchy butter.

Seriously, as with bagels and pasta, you just don’t appreciate how caloric granola is until you measure out a portion for yourself at home.

If you love granola like I do, you should do this experiment.

I’m not going to stop eating granola but I am going to cut down on eating unmeasured amounts of it.