I’ve decided to lose weight, which means that I must eat less and exercise more. How much less should I eat? How much did I eat before? Well, I didn’t write it down before, so I have no clue how much less I should eat! Then I found this calorie calculator that tells me at my current weight, height, and activity level how many calories I typically eat, plus how many I should eat in order to lose one pound or two pounds per week. (Since a pound is 3500 calories, that equals out to 500 or 1000 fewer calories per day.) I could exercise more (and I need to!), but walking a mile only burns 100 calories, so it’s a lot easier to eat less than to suddenly start running 5 or 10 miles a day.

So the calculator tells me that I am currently eating about 2300 calories per day, which means I need to eat 1800 or 1300 calories to lose 1-2 pounds per week. Yikes. This means I have to actually figure up how much I’m eating and write it down (which I am actually doing today).

For breakfast, I ate a banana muffin, which I had previously made. I figured up the total # of calories in the recipe, and then divided by the number of muffins, and found out that this little bitty muffin had over 300 whoppin’ calories in it! That’s over 3 miles of calories!! Normally, I would probably eat at least two for breakfast and then a third one as a snack, but when you really equate number of calories taken in to how far you’d have to walk to get rid of it, that makes you change your priorities!

So, I’ve decided to start looking at calories in terms of how far I’d have to walk so that I wouldn’t gain weight from consuming it. A Snickers candy bar is almost 3 miles of calories; a McDonald’s “Big Breakfast” is over 7 miles; a Big Mac meal, supersized is almost 16 miles (and almost all of the calories I’d be allowed for the entire day!); my husband’s favorite fast-food meal is from Popeye’s–two chicken breasts, with red beans & rice and a biscuit, which tops out at nearly 13 miles (1280 calories, to be exact).

It can be a little difficult to figure out some foods, but not impossible; also people tend to eat the same things over and over, so you can figure that stuff out once and go from there. But it is imperative to know what a “serving size” is, because I bet that most of the time when you eat junk food, you eat a lot more than one serving size. A serving size of Santitas tortilla chips is 9 chips; Pringles is 15; that bottle of Gatorade may be 1 serving, but then again, it might be 4. Even if it’s not “junk” food, you still may be eating a lot more than a single portion size–a bowl of cereal is probably at least two portions, but you won’t know unless you measure. If you eat out a lot, you can probably get a calorie menu (I think fast food places have to have those available online, if nowhere else), and if you can’t get an official count, you can probably guestimate pretty well by finding something similar online. However, there are a lot of hidden fats used in restaurant meals that you might not use at home, so some restaurant’s rice may have several tablespoons of butter added into it, so you have to figure for that, too. If you cook most of your own foods yourself, then it’s simple (but time-consuming) to figure out the calories in a portion: just add up all of the calories for each ingredient in the recipe, then figure out what fraction of the recipe you’re eating.

Then, transfer the calories into miles, and stop before you eat and think, is this roll of Smarties really worth walking a quarter-mile? If it is, then eat up and then go walk. If it’s not, tape your mouth shut!