Yesterday I had a light lunch, or did I?

In an effort to reduce the amount of calories I intake on a daily basis, I have been trying to eat very light–at least during breakfast and lunch. Sometimes I will look at the calories of certain foods and sometimes I just assume they are a certain amount.

Yesterday I assumed wrong.

The Low Calorie Lunch not so low

By mid-morning I was already feeling a bit hungry. Sometimes when I eat breakfast really early, I will be hungry well before lunch. So, in an effort to eat light, I got a bowl of cottage cheese (that’s a diet food, right) and about 5 townhouse crackers to ward off the hunger. After realizing my portion size this snack was probably close to 400 calories.

About an hour and a half later I was getting hungry again. This time I thought a good low calorie lunch would be some soup. I also ate some more townhouse crackers with my soup. After I ate the soup, I decided to look at the can. I was a little surprised to read that it had 170 calories per serving and there was 2.5 servings in one can. Of course I had the whole can of soup. That puts this little lunch at well over 500 calories–including the crackers.

As you can deduce from the above descriptions, my low calorie lunch wasn’t so low calorie after all. Between my mid-morning snack and my lunch I had over 900 calories. That is probably not going to score any points in any weight loss program.

So if you think that you are cutting back in calories and you are not seeing any results, then maybe you should take a closer look at the actual calories you are intaking. Losing weight is essential a very easy math equation. Calorie Intake – Calories Burned=Net Gain or Net Loss.

If you take in more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. It is that simple.