You know what calories are and how they help your body function. But did you know that it’s not only the amount of calorie taken in that has certain standards or daily allowances? There is a maximum amount of fat, carbohydrates, protein, sugar and the likes that we ingest daily. Once you reading this article, you will be also able to work out your daily allowances.
The simplest way to discover how many calories are in the food is to check the label. It’s not that easy though. Just for an example: You’re going out to a restaurant – how can you know what you’re eating? How can you know how many calories are in it?
Well, you can’t, but you can have a fair idea if you know what individual food groups contain.
Below is the daily allowance for a woman on 2,000 calories:
- Total fat – 65g
- Saturated fatty acids – 20g
- Cholesterol – 300mg
- Sodium – 2400mg
- Potassium – 4700mg
- Total Carbohydrates – 300g
- Fibre – 25g
- Protein – 50g
As you can see, what you need every day goes beyond the basics of fat, protein and fibre, but also branches into fatty acids, sodium and potassium too.
Now as we said before, most labels will now give you the basics of its ingredient base and nutrients, but in a restaurant you simply cannot know. So what do you do? The best technique we can recommend is gaining an insight into the ingredients themselves and what they contain.
Essentially you can pre-learn the calorie content of certain foods, so that you can still go out and monitor your diet. Below are some examples to help you in your food choices:
- 5oz lean steak – 181 calories and 6g of fat
- Medium grilled chicken breast (130g) – 192 calories and 2.9 g of fat
- Lean pork chops (120g) – 221 calorie and 7.7g of fat
- Medium baked potato (180g) – 245 calories and 0.4g fat
- Mash potato with butter (28g) – 29 calories and 1.2g of fat
- Chips (100g) – 253 calories and 9.9g of fat
- Carrots (60g) – 13 calories and 0.2g of fat
- Broccoli (30g) – 7 calories and 0.2 g of fat
- Peas (60g) – 32 calories and 0.4g of fat
Determine what you like best and remember how much calories it has for you to keep tabs of your daily calorie intake. You don’t have to remember the ins and outs of all foods, but if you can learn the basics of your favourite foods, then you can still keep the excitement of going out AND losing weight.