I just came by a study this week talking about how people make better food choices when they have the calorie content in front of them. That’s great!

But, here’s the best part. The focus was calorie counts at restaurants, so the difference was between something like ordering a double whopper with cheese and maybe just the single whopper without cheese.

Now, I’m pretty sure, both of those options are “less than optimal”. Just like at the store, every packaged item has the food label on it. But I still see plenty of people eating the junk.

So coming from the title of this. Should you have the chocolate or glazed donut, while the glazed probably has a few less calories, the point is you shouldn’t have either.

Most of the better options in the store don’t even have a label. Fruits, vegetables, some meats, etc. With a few exceptions like frozen chicken, canned beans, some dairy, etc.

You are at your friends house along with several other buddies and it is getting to be time for your next meal. Your friend decides to order pizza while you are out back chatting with the others. When it arrives the pizza is set out on the counter. You come inside to a counter full of pizza and they look extremely cheesy and they are covered with all your favorite toppings.

The next thing you know you start to justify why you need this pizza and start to contemplate whether you actually should just dive right it. There is a good chance that you will cave into that temptation without any second thoughts.

The Solution

This one can be very hard to deal with. If you go throughout your day seeing what comes your way there is a good chance that something unexpected will pop up. From the previous example you might not have expected that you would be faced with an array of pizzas tormenting your will power. You need to decide at the beginning of the day that everything that you put into your mouth is going to benefit you and bring you closer to your goals.

Pre-plan what you will have throughout the day and if anything deviates from what you had already planned you can easily reject it. You don’t even have a choice to eat anything else during the day because you have already decided that you will eat healthy. Start your day off with a good breakfast and you are on your way to a healthy day.

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What does this mean do you ask, well let’s see. What does a dessert shop have on hand, well that’s an easy one, desserts. What are people going to eat if they are hungry at a dessert shop, desserts. Let’s take that same principle and apply it to home.

Let’s say you have your pantry well stocked with cookies and easy to make cake mixes as well as chocolate frostings and your freezer has some frozen pies and ice cream. If you have a strong craving for sweets what do you think you are going to do.

Well it would be so easy to just run to your pantry and demolish a Twinkie or go to the freezer and pull out that half gallon of ice cream or whatever else may be handy in your kitchen.

This one has a fairly easy solution. Just throw out all of the garbage that you wouldn’t want to eat on a consistent basis. If you don’t have any sweets handy when you get that intense urge are you going to take 15 minutes to drive to a grocery store and and run to the Little Debbie isle, I think not.

Unless you have some severe lack of will power this little trick could save you numerous diet crashes.

It’s a simple fact, keep your kitchen clean. When I say this I am referring to the food content of your kitchen but the other implication is also good advice as you don’t want to be eating in a dirty kitchen.

Where are these protein fortified candy bars?

Well probably in your kitchen or office under the disguise of some name such as “Deluxe Energy Bar”, “Protein Builder”, or whatever other creative names there might be. Take a look at the 2 bars below:

Bar 1
calories: 250
fat: 5g
carbohydrate: 44g (20g sugar)
protein: 10g

Bar 2
calories: 280
fat: 7g
carbohydrate: 27g (18 g sugar)
protein: 13g

Well aside from the obvious minor variations in the macronutrient contents and total calories, Bar 1 is advertised as a nutrition bar packed with protein, while Bar 2 is known as one of the Snickers brand candy bars. Although not all protein bars are to this extreme they are not far from it. In addition to getting all of that extra fat needed for binding of the bar’s contents, you also get unneeded amounts of sugar which are in almost all protein bars, and most bars do not even contain a great amount of protein in them.

Stay smart, avoid the marketing gimmicks and know what you’re eating!