Calorie Dump – 3 ways to drop calories and improve your weight loss efforts without compromising health

If you’ve hit a plateau with your weight loss, or simply looking for some easy ways to drop your calories, give these 3 swaps a go

1. Swap the sugar in your tea and coffee for stevia

One teaspoon of sugar is roughly 4grams, which equates to 16 calories. Now, how many sugars do you have in your tea or coffee? I find quite a few people don’t factor their tea or coffee sugars in to their diet plan. Its one of those things that just kind of slips their minds when I’m asking about their sugar intake. When I make it a point to ask ‘Do you a have sugar in your tea or coffee?’ however, they often look surprised. Isn’t habit an interesting thing? So, if you have 2 sugars per cup of tea or coffee, and you drink 1 drink a day, that’s around 32 calories and 8 grams of sugar. What if you have 2 cups? That’s 64 calories and 16 grams of sugar. Its sounding worse by the minute, right? Why not use stevia instead? Its a natural plant based sweetner with no caloric value. How long does it take to burn off 64 calories? Around 11 minutes walking at a leisurely pace, or (according to a website I found) 28 minutes of ironing.. ewww.

Image from organicsansar.com

2. Swap one of your daily pieces of fruit for berries

We’re talking about weight loss here, and reducing calorie intake, for that purpose, some fruits and vegies are better than others. I realise we don’t often eat bananas by the cup, but for the sake of comparison, lets compare a cup of sliced banana and a cup of blueberries

Image from taste.com.au

Per 1 cup	Banana (sliced)	Blueberries
Calories	133	84
Carbohydrates	34	21
Sugars	18	15

You can see from the table that the blueberries have 49 calories and 3 grams of sugar less than the banana. Those 49 calories is around 10 minutes of weight training or 12 minutes of treading water in a pool. Sounds fun.

3. Swap the sandwich bread for a wrap

Image from 123rf.com

If we look at an average for a commercially produced whole wheat bread, compared to a flat bread, we see that 2 slices of whole-wheat bread have 138calories, 12 grams of which are carbohydrates. Mountain Bread wheat flat bread has 70 calories and 13 grams carbohydrate. That is 68 calories difference! That’s equivalent to roughly 12 minutes mowing the lawn or 20ish minutes of housework!

‘So what?’ I hear you say, those swaps don’t make that much of a difference. But what if you did all 3? If you swapped your 4 teaspoons of sugar (2 coffees x 2 sugars), swapped out one piece of fruit and had a wrap instead of a sandwich, that’s 181 calories!

If you’re trying to lose weight, why not burn 181 calories worth of fat instead? That’s around an extra 1 kilogram, or 2.2 pound weight loss every 5 weeks, or 10kgs (22.88lbs) a year! Swap it out and see what happens.

Chris