Live For Food

If you are having trouble either losing or maintaining your weight, and you are either getting towards the end of your weight loss journey, or perhaps have hit a plateau, or maybe you just have a small build, its possible that you may have to be more careful with your calorie intake than other people.

Personally I think it seems to be the height of unfairness that the less you weigh, the less calories you need, and the harder it is to either continue losing weight or maintain that loss. You would think that after all the effort you put in to lose the weight, you would be rewarded with a bit of leeway, but unfortunately it seems to work the other way round.

So if this is you, and you want to continue weight loss, or stop the weight creeping upwards again, why not start by analyzing the calories you are drinking.  Even if you keep a food diary it can be easy to forget about these calories or not take them into account.

A cup of tea with milk in can be anywhere between 10 and 40 calories (I’m quite keen on milky tea myself). I calculated for my own personal intake that at work every day I used to drink 200 calories of milk just in my tea.

I can’t face it black, and I’m not keen on herbal teas particularly, but I tried green tea and decided I like it and slowly weaned myself off the tea with milk. Now probably two thirds of the tea I drink is green tea without milk. It may take trial and error to find a different tea you like. Check out tea manufacturers websites to see if you can get sample tea bags, or try a different tea at a friend’s house.

I don’t drink coffee myself as I don’t like it, but beware the coffee calorie count from commercial shops such as Starbucks. Their coffees can have as many calories as a small meal.

Fruit juice is of course a healthy drink, but nevertheless a 200 ml glass of juice contains about 100 calories. Treat fruit juice and smoothies as food, not drinks!

Pop or soda is another popular choice. Its not something I drink regularly myself, only on odd occasions, but remember that a 500 ml bottle of Coke has around 200 calories in it. Solution – choose diet pop. Okay the aspartame doesn’t taste great, but if you’re trying to lose weight at least its calorie free. Personally I think Coke Zero tastes better than Diet Coke.

Finally, watch out for alcohol. If you go out for the evening have a glass of water after every alcoholic drink. At home buy small wine glasses, or stubby bottles of beer, and limit yourself to one drink a night or the calories will add up.

My typical day’s drinks would be one or two cups of tea with milk, two glasses of water, two or three green teas and a glass of red wine. I try and save other drinks for special occasions.

So if you drink too many calories try keeping a drinks diary, then cutting back on the liquid calories, and see what happens!  You might be surprised.