Calorie Counting

Okay, so the general rule of thumb when dieting for counting calories is 1200-1500 calories a day, broken down somewhat like this:

Breakfast: 300-400 calories
Lunch: 400-500 calories
Dinner: 500-600 calories

The hardest part about counting calories is getting "outside the box" of convenient frozen meals that give you all the nutritional info you need right on the handy-dandy packaging, and getting into making healthy, tasty, meals and including a little bit of variety in your life.

I learned of an awesome website today called www.CalorieKing.com

Here you can type in a food (either brand name, general food, or restaurant name) and it will bring you back the nutritional breakdown for that food by calories, fat, sugars, carbs, protein, etc., every little bit of info. you would want to know ... so you can figure out how each of the ingredients in your meal will contribute to your daily caloric intake.

To take it one step further, it even gives you an example of what amount of exercise you would have to do to work that meal/ingredient off (i.e. 50 minutes of walking vs. 20 minutes of jogging vs. 15 minutes of swimming vs. 27 minutes of biking).

Another fun thing to do is compare the unhealthy foods that we are used to with their healthy alternatives. Take "Soy Beef" vs. "Ground Beef 80% lean" ...
Per 3 oz. serving:
Calories: 118 vs. 231
Fat grams: 1.8 vs. 14.8
Cholesteral: 0 vs. 76 grams
Really, I know you love to tease me, but with stats like that, you gotta give it a shot!

I hope you find this as useful as I did! :) -Karen.