The Peanut Butter Problem

by | Feb 25, 2019

As all of you know, calories are king. It’s essential to get them near or near enough right for your weight loss efforts to be a success.

In an ideal world you would ONLY ever eat foods you can track and weigh so you could be sure of getting the calories / food allowances spot on. This way you are doing everything you can to give yourself a fighting chance at success.

BUT as you all know I am a big fan of having a life, and of course eating out is part of that. I honestly believe you SHOULD eat out, have fun, make memories etc BUT the purpose of this post is to point something out to you all.

When you eat out, and have to eyeball food to guesstimate it for calories or allowances, it is JUST THAT, a guess (at best)

YES I am quite good at doing it, and will always be roughly there or thereabouts BUT it is NOT accurate, and if you are struggling to get results you need to be as accurate as possible.

WHEN YOU SEND ME PICS OF FOOD understand that I COULD be miles out, see this pic below as an example.

Now if you sent me a pic of that and said “JJ how many calories/allowances please?” you can see how easy it would be for me to be WAY out, like WAY out. That’s the problem with eating out where you can NOT weigh food.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE

A typical 9″ boxed/packet pizza from a supermarket is around 700 cals, but a ‘make your own’ or one from the takeaway can be THREE TIMES THAT.

So when you say to me “JJ I have 3 slices of a 9″ Margherita pizza, how do I allow for that” then it could be 250 calories or a thousand!

What weight of cheese was it, how thick is the base, how big was the slice, does it have oil drizzled on it etc etc etc

The take home of this post is as follows:

YES go out and have fun, enjoy yourself, live your life but understand the MORE you eat OUT the harder it will be to control your results.

Yes of course you have to live life BUT if you really want to make this work LIMIT the times where we are GUESSING and if you DO need me to help you work it out do the following to make it more accurate:

  1. Send a pic of the food with your HAND in the pic so I can gauge sizes better
  2. Give me as much detail as possible about what is in it, ingredients etc
  3. Don’t ever message me afterwards and say, this is what I had, how much because what’s the point, I could just pluck ANYTHING from the air, that’s as close to accurate I could possibly be.

Finally understand that calories are secret little buggers. Even just going out for what looks like a healthy lunch could in fact be your whole days worth of calories or allowances, which is fine, but realise that of course impacts on the weeks results.

Ultimately, you KNOW what a TSP MEAL portion size looks like, if you end up with a plate of food twice the size, it’s not going to be pretty! That doesn’t mean DON’T have it, it means accept the figure it costs you and move on X

Hope that helps!

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