Are You Dense?

Well...not you specifically, but the foods you eat?  Calorie dense, that is...

Hunger is the main thing that everyone complains about when they start trying to eat less.  The easiest way to keep from being hungry is to eat large volumes of food.  Of course, it seems a little counter-intuitive to try to eat less AND eat large volumes of food.

But when I say "eat less", I mean eat less CALORIES.  I doesn't matter to me if you eat a medium order of Wendy's fries, or 4 1/2  large apples.  Yes, those two things have the same amount of calories.  

How about one of those little 1 oz. bags of baked Lay's potato chips you get at Subway?  If we continue with our apple comparison, you can eat about an apple and a half for the same calories.  We won't even mention how many apples you can eat in place of a non-baked bag of Sour Cream & Onion Lays.

Even some things that are good for you are very calorie dense.  Lean meat, for example.  Lots o' calories.  Nuts.  Everyone always mentions all the "good fat" you can get from nuts.  They're right; you can get good fat from nuts.  But even good fat is calorie dense.  Be careful that your healthy snack of nuts doesn't turn into a 500 calorie "oops".

For dinner the other night, I had pot roast, carrots, potatoes, salad, and corn bread.  This is one of the same meals that I've eaten for years.  The only thing I've changed is the ratio and the quantity.

In the old days, I would have had a huge chunk of meat, two or three pieces of cornbread, heaping portions of both carrots and potatoes, and ignored the salad.  Now, I try to keep my meat portion smaller, about half of what I used to eat.  I make sure to partake of the salad.  Only one piece of cornbread for me these days.  I'll go pretty heavy on the carrots, a little less so on the potatoes.  The potatoes are more "sugary", and a bit more calorie dense.

There's lot of stuff out there on the web about this idea.  One website that I stumbled on had a "Better Choices Diet" that even had a little graph for each food that shows how nutrition and filling it is.  Here's a nice graph from the same site, showing some of the common foods and how they stack up.


Last word of advice from my friend Teri.  Don't drink your calories.  So instead of that 20 oz Dr. Pepper, have 2 1/2 apples.