It is important to remember that “healthy” doesn’t mean low-calorie. Even if certain foods /ingredients/ drinks make great additions to your diet/meals, be mindful about how much of them you actually eat. Here’s a look at some common foods with hidden calories.
1. Olive oil
Go easy. Olive oil has health benefits nevertheless, adding /pouring it over every salad and adding it to every dish can be alarming. 1 tablespoon contains 119 calories. So just four tablespoons of olive oil shall add up to a lot of calories.
2. Fruit juices
250ml glass of 100% orange juice is made from 3 full oranges and contains around 110 calories.
3. Dried food
When the food is dried it increases the calorie content. Avoid eating heaps of dried food, as it is very easy to consume an excessive amount of calories in just one portion.
4. Nuts
A great source of protein and plant oils Nuts are calorie-dense. Limit yourself to one or two tablespoons at a time, to ensure you stay within your recommended daily allowance.
5. Spreads
Nutella and peanut butter are marketed as healthy and although they contain high levels of protein, they also contain more calories than jam. One teaspoon (10g) of peanut butter contains 62 calories. Let us be careful.
6. Bananas
Bananas are loaded with nutrition but one medium banana contains 100 calories – the equivalent of a ten-minute run. Check your daily calorie intake and fit in the Bananas.
7. Yogurts
With the large variety available on market shelves you need to take care while picking up readymade yogurt. A small pot of yogurt can contain up to 250 calories.
8. Breakfast cereals
All breakfast cereals are marketed to be very healthy; they still contain many calories. The recommended portion size is 30g, which contains around 110 calories. By increasing our portion size, we increase our calorie intake per portion.
9. Smoothies
As with juices, it’s very easy to increase your calorie intake with smoothies. By combining milk, fruit, vegetables, and protein powders in your blend, you can easily reach more than 350-400 calories.
If you use a smoothie as a meal replacement you will be fine, but as a snack, these calories will be too high.
10. Salad dressings
Some salad dressings can increase the calories of a healthy meal to more than that contained in a hamburger with chips. Three teaspoons of salad dressing [15 grms] contain approximately 50 to 85 calories. In the ready supermarket salads, they may have more than 3 teaspoons of salad dressing, be careful when choosing your dressing and use wisely.
Behavior patterns that we need to be careful about:
There are some of the ways we take in extra or hidden calories we don’t really consider:
- Going back for seconds. Many people will eat a clean meal, but then forget that they had an additional serving.
- Unplanned snacking. Just mindlessly eating small things all day like grazing. Individually these small snacks don’t seem like much, but when added up over the course of a full day they really add up.
- Large portion sizes. Again just because something is healthy does not mean you can just eat as much as you want of it! Inversely if you have something like a burger or pasta dish, you would be better served to eat only half the meal and save the other half for the next day.
- Eating extra food. Because you worked out hard or are exercising regularly and “need it”. This may be true of a highly trained athlete competing in sports, but for the average person who is just exercising to maintain or achieve a healthy weight, it makes very little sense to think this way.
