Photo Credit: national museum of natural history on flickr.com
In this series, Surprising Ways to Slash 500 Calories, we discuss a variety of ways you can easily eliminate 500 calories from your daily routine resulting in an easy weight loss of one pound per week. You may not even think these food or beverage items “count”, but they do. Our job is to help you in your weight loss goals and even if you were to burn one less calorie day; it would add up over time.
The easiest way to reduce your daily caloric intake is to eliminate caloric sodas. Sodas include any soft drink such as root beer, 7Up, and orange soda. Let’s use Coke as an example to show you what a small 12-ounce can contains:
- 140 calories
- 50 mg of sodium
- 39 grams of carbohydrates
- 39 grams of sugar
A regular can of any cola is 12 ounces; most fast food restaurants offer 16 ounces, 24 ounces, and even 32 ounces! Now multiply the above numbers by two, three and even four. Can you see how easy it really is to consume 500 calories of soda without even paying attention? It’s also just as easy to remove these unnecessary calories from your day.
Don’t forget that sweet tea, juices, and milk can pack just as many calories as soda. It’s hard to justify this overload of calories when you don’t even get the luxury of chewing them! Always choose your calories wisely, even the ones you don’t chew. There are plenty of calorie-free beverages to choose from, but at the end of the day … water is always the gold standard.
