Most of the diets I make are around 2,500 calories. To get these calories, you can choose to make GOOD choices or BAD choices. In this section, I want to give you some examples of bad choices:
- 1 bag salted potato chips (230 grams): 1242 calories. (Almost 50% of average daily caloric intake).
- Equivalent of a meal consisting of 500 grams cooked white rice, 300 grams lean ground beef and 100 grams of steamed mixed veggies.
- 1 Hershey’s milk chocolate bar (43 grams): 210 calories (Almost 10% of average daily caloric intake).
- Equivalent of 3 eggs.
- 1 regular sized haribo gummybears bag (140 grams): 483 calories (Almost 20% of average daily caloric intake).
- Equivalent of 20 big slices of pineapple.
In other words, the average person I coach can eat the equivalent of about 2 bags of gummy bears, 1 bag of chips and 1 chocolate bar a day to maintain their weight. (Anything over would result in weight gain).
I’m telling you this to give you perspective… One “snack” during the day can ruin an entire days progress.
And, if you want to make up for it through cardio, then you will have to work VERY hard. 30 minutes of cardio usually burns between 300-500 calories, so a bag of chips would require over an hour of intense exercise to burn and a chocolate bar would require over 20 minutes of cardio to burn.
Get Rid of Bad Foods
If you have a lot of sugary snacks, bread and chocolate around the house, it’s too convenient to eat those when you wake up hungry in the middle of the night. Therefore, get rid of these snacks. Throw them out, you don’t need them!
If your family insists on keeping unhealthy foods around the house, educate them on your health and fitness goals and explain how these foods provide no nutritional value for anyone in the house.