I often get questions from clients such as:
“Can I eat oranges instead of pineapple?”
or
“Can I eat goat meat as a protein source?”
These are all great questions and I will let you know whether you can use a certain replacement food, and if that food isn’t optimal, I will help you find alternatives.
However, I want you to be active in the process of finding the right quantity of the replacement food, because it teaches you the amount of calories in a certain amount of food and over time you can use that skill to go away from measuring and weighing stuff, and just estimate.
Remember, the end goal of our coaching is not to have you calculate and quantify everything, but to enjoy your life.
Example: Replacing Pineapple with Orange
Let’s imagine that you want to replace your pineapple serving with orange and I tell you it’s a good replacement in your diet.
I also tell you that the pineapple serving in your diet contains 100 calories. (This is the maximum amount of calories you can eat with the orange replacement then).
In that case, you will calculate how many grams you can eat of the orange by following the steps below:
(1) Find the orange inside VirtuaGym Food Nutrition Search and make sure that you can see how many calories there are in 100 grams of the food.
(2) Calculate how many grams of orange you can eat without exceeding 100 calories:
In this case, 100 grams of orange have 49 calories, so you take the total amount of calories you can eat (100 calories) and divide it with the total amount of calories in 100 grams of the orange (49 calories), and then you get the number 2.04
Then you multiply the number 2.04 with 100 grams to figure out how much orange you can eat.
In this case, 204 grams.
Here’s the formula:
(Calories in original food/Calories in 100 grams of replacement food)*100 grams = Grams you can eat of alternative food
This formula can be applied to any foods, not just oranges.
Bonus Tip To Make Your Life Easier
Let’s say that you don’t want to weigh out 200 grams of orange, but that you want to know the amount of oranges you can eat.
In that case you can scroll down to the bottom of the VirtuaGym Food Search app and find the correct unit:
The screenshot above shows the Units for oranges.
As you can see, one orange fruit is about 140 grams.
This means that you can eat roughly 1.5 orange to hit 204 grams (no need to be super precise here since all oranges differ in weight anyways).
The same goes for other foods.. You can always find a unit that fits you and then estimate how much you can eat of that.