I was watching The Today Show this weekend and was happy to learn that New York is upholding the regulation to require calories on menu boards of chain restaurants. Go, New York!

Whenever I go out to eat I feel like I’m on the Price and Right trying to estimate the price of a new washer and dryer without overbidding. Which item has the lowest calories? Is it the chicken salad, or will that come buried in croutons and smothered in fatty dressing? Maybe it’s the naked burrito, but exactly how much cheese and sour cream are they going to pile on top of that thing? There’s really no way to know.

I usually look up the nutritional information on the Internet afterwards and have rarely ever been happy with the results. Some restaurants don’t even post that, which makes me wonder what they’re hiding Other than that, the only thing you could do is text message the diet.com service which sends you nutritional information on your cell phone, but that could get expensive depending on [...]

• Continue reading "Now we’ll know how many calories are in a New York cheesecake"

If I ever look back and wonder exactly when I became a coffee addict, let it be known that it wasn’t when I worked at place that had a Starbucks on campus, nor was it when I worked at a place where they made a fresh pot every morning. No, it was the day I discovered that coffee has essentially no calories. It was yesterday. I wasn’t born then, but I sure do feel like it.

I’ve been feeling a bit sleepy during the day lately. I’m not really sure why. I’ve been getting enough sleep and I’ve been eating normally. The paranoid part of my brain suspects that this is the first sign of a horrible, painful, terminal illness and months from now I will look back and wonder why I ignored the subtle warning signs and didn’t get treatment early. In reality, I’ve probably just been working too hard. Sleepy as I may be, I don’t normally drink coffee. It took me two months to spend the $10 Starbucks card I got for Christmas. [...]

• Continue reading "Why didn’t you tell me coffee is low-calorie?!"

As I feared, calorie counting has become somewhat addictive. I said I would only do it for two weeks, but that was three weeks ago and I’m still logging into Spark People every day from breakfast to dinner. Like basically everything in life, there are good and bad things about this.

Good: Heightened awareness of what I’m eating

There have been several times in the past month when I’ve muttered “Holy crap,” after calculating the nutritional values of some recipes I make. I didn’t realize the tuna melt casserole had so many calories or else I would have backed off on that third piece. It’s similar to the time I moved out on my own and started to realize how expensive it is just to exist. Cable, telephone, groceries, light bulbs – they all cost money and I didn’t realize how much until I had to pay for them all myself. Tracking my food is like going over all my bills and discovering hidden fees.

I’ve also accepted that whatever I enter is basically an estimate, since it’s [...]

• Continue reading "Counting Calories"