Filed Under: calories

Now we’ll know how many calories are in a New York cheesecake

April 22, 2008 at 8:25 am

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 your calling plan.

The New York State Restaurant Association is against the new measure, and I’m not really sure why. Their representative on the show was going on about how it’s so complicated and we shouldn’t go around complicating the lives of New Yorkers. I don’t know what he’s talking about. They’re not posting the nutritional information as the answer to a quadratic equation customers have to solve. If the board says the burger has 800 calories, that sounds pretty straight forward to me.

The other argument the guest made was that restaurants should be able to choose how they provide the information. In theory that would be nice, but you know restaurants would just do this in the cheapest way for them and not the most convenient way for the customer. They’d probably stuff the information in a pamphlet that is a copy of a copy of a copy and display it in the back hallway by the janitor’s closet. I know Ruby Tuesday experimented with posting calorie information on their menus for several months, but they eventually nixed the idea claiming they had to reprint their menus every time they added an item or modified the ingredients of an existing item. I suspect the NYSRA is really against the regulation because they don’t want to have to spend money updating their menus.

Also according to the article, Ruby Tuesday said the posting of nutritional information “had not caused any significant changes in ordering habits.” It will be interesting to see what happens in New York. The change is good for people like me who watch what they eat, but I probably wasn’t going to order the deep-fried double-bacon cheeseburger anyway. If you’re the type of person who is going to order something you obviously know is bad for you, I don’t know if seeing the calorie information will dissuade you or not. Everyone knows smoking will kill you, but millions of people do it anyway. I would guess the change will allow health-conscious people to make better choices and the people who don’t care will keep eating what they want to anyway. Maybe the people who will be most effective are the in-betweens, the people who’d like to eat healthier but don’t go out of their ways to do so. If you make it easier for them, maybe they’ll make better choices. Either way, I’m glad the information is out there and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Why didn’t you tell me coffee is low-calorie?!

February 14, 2008 at 7:49 am

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. I’m a diet soda addict, and proud of it. None of that coffee addiction for me! No sirree! I may feed quarters into the vending machine in desperation for a Diet Dr. Pepper at the end of the day, but I could always look down my nose at those fools who stuffed dollar bills into the Starbucks’ barista’s hand in the mid-afternoon.

Then last week I went out with some coworkers to try the new “skinny” latte at Starbucks which is fat-free and sugar-free, but still has 90 calories. It really perked me up. A couple mornings later I was considering napping on my space bar, but I decided to grab a cup of coffee from the pot instead. After consuming the warm drink, I decided to look up how many calories of damage it had done me. I don’t really count calories, but when I try something new I like to get a sense of how many it contains. I entered the words “coffee calories” into Google, hit return, and was stunned to discover that one cup has about 9 calories. Nine calories! I was expecting at least 40 or 50. If the skinny latte had 90 and there wasn’t any sugar or fat in it, the calories were all in the coffee, right? My mom likes to drink Kraft’s International Flavored Coffees, and I know those have about 60 calories. And coffee is made from beans, which have calories. So coffee should have calories, right? It’s all brown and thick looking. It must have calories! Only it doesn’t. It’s no worse than all the Crystal Lite I drink (when we’re just talking calories).

Curious, I then looked up tea and discovered that it has even less calories. I’m not sure how I’ve gone over a quarter of a century without realizing this. I haven’t felt this stupid since the time I discovered I was tying my shows incorrectly. So, I think I’m going to start drinking coffee. I used to think it tasted like ass, but I’ve noticed that if you keep trying a food or drink over and over again you can usually start to tolerate it and sometimes even start to enjoy it. It’s called “acquired taste” because you have to acquire it. All the artificial sweetener helps too. And before anyone starts, yes, I know all the caffeine in coffee will give me webbed toes and three-headed babies and turn my teeth brown. And the artificial sweetener is actually making me fatter if the experiments with rats are true. I don’t care. I’m going to start drinking coffee in the mornings. And hopefully I won’t fall asleep in the afternoon. And hopefully I don’t have cancer and the coffee won’t start causing it.

Counting Calories

October 10, 2007 at 9:15 am

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 impossible to figure out exactly how many calories you eat in a day. Was that tablespoon of peanut butter exactly a tablespoon or was there an air pocket in there somewhere?

Bad: Don’t want to become chained to my nutritional calculator

While it’s good to know what I’m putting in my body, I don’t want to become completely obsessed with it. I’d hate to get to a point where I go on vacation and start freaking out in the car because I cannot immediately log the bag of carrot sticks I ate out of the cooler. I also don’t want to enter a state of mind where I can’t give up food tracking.

Back in middle school, I started collecting the metal tops off of canned sodas. I’d open my soda, then bend the opener back and forth a couple times until it broke off. Then I’d put it them in my pocket until I could deposit them in an empty milk jug, if my mother didn’t find them in her washing machine first. I ended up with at least two or three jugs full of pop tops, though what I was collecting them for I have no idea. There was a rumor that you could exchange them for money for cancer research or something, but mine just sat in my room. Eventually I realized I needed to stop collecting pop tops, but every time I opened a soda I’d start working the top back and forth to break it off. It took me several weeks to stop myself from collecting these funky pieces of metal, and the urge to do so lasted for at least another month or two. I don’t want the same thing to happen with food tracking. I’d like to be able to just drop it if I decide I’m getting too psycho about it.

Good: It seems to be helping.

My weight is heading downwards again.

So, I guess I’ll stick with it for now, but I may drop it eventually if it becomes too much of a nuisance or I decide I have higher priorities than tracking every teaspoon of olive oil I roast vegetables in.

Filed Under: calories

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