It really wasn't until I'd spent a fair amount of time actually counting calories that it occurred to me just how ridiculously easy it is to go over your recommended daily intake. The average man needs to consume 2500 calories a day just to maintain his current weight, with the average woman needing somewhat less at 2000 calories. These numbers sound like a lot, but they're really not and making the wrong choices can quite easily leave you consuming more than half your daily intake in a single meal.
Let's put those numbers into some sort of perspective and think of what most people would consider an average, fairly healthy, day. Let's start at the beginning with breakfast:
You're having a bowl of porridge with a glass of fruit juice and a banana. Looking at an average pack of porridge oats your suggested serving is 40g porridge oats, 100ml semi skimmed milk and 1 tsp of honey, this would make roughly 210 calories, or 150ml, worth of porridge. Taking into account that the average breakfast bowl holds 440ml of food, this works out to be less than half a bowl. Scaling this up to make a full (ish) bowl of porridge you're looking more like 100g of porridge oats, 200ml semi skimmed milk and 2 tsp honey, giving you a serving of 490 calories. Add in a 250ml glass of fresh orange juice, at around 120 calories, and a small banana, at 90 calories, and you've already consumed 700 calories before you even left the house.
You arrive at work, at 8:30am, and the first thing you do is make a mug of coffee with milk and sugar, providing you with an additional 50 calories.
10:30am arrives and you pop to the loo and make a second coffee for another 50 calories.
Before you know it, it's 1:00pm, it's lunch time and your stomach is rumbling. By 1:10pm you're sitting in the canteen slurping a capri sun with a pleasantly full belly, and an empty lunch box, having just polished off a fairly reasonable lunch of a ham sandwich, a packet of cheese and onion, an apple, an orange and a muller light for a grand total of 660 calories (including the capri sun).
You sit and read a couple of news articles on your phone, you have a chat with Barry from accounting, 2:00pm comes around and you head back to the office with your 3rd, and final, mug of 50 calorie coffee.
It's been a long afternoon when 5:30pm finally rolls around, you're tired, you're hungry and you've got a 20 minute walk home before you get to eat. There's only one thing keeping you on the straight and narrow and that is you know there's a slow cooker full of home made bolognese waiting for you and all you'll need to do is boil a bit of pasta, toast a slice of garlic bread and serve it in your favourite bowl for a respectable 750 calories.
It's 7:00 pm and you've just finished the washing up, you've popped the kettle on to make a pot of tea and the biscuits are calling your name, you've been good, you've not snacked and you've even managed to get most of your 5 a day, a couple of chocolate digestives with your tea, coming in at a total of 220 calories, isn't going to break the scales.
You climb into bed, your alarm clock reads 10:00 pm, you contemplate how your diet is going and you come to the conclusion that you're doing really well right before you drift off to sleep.
So let's do the maths:
700 + 50 + 50 + 660 + 50 + 750 + 220 = 2480 calories in one day.
Now if you're a man this isn't actually too bad for a day, you've more or less broke even and, whilst you might not be losing weight, you're not gaining weight, however, if you're a woman this would be a bad day and it would only take a few days like this a week to find yourself putting on a stone in weight over a 6 month period. So for anyone who is trying to lose weight and is having any sort of success, believe me when I say that even the slowest of weight loss should be considered success, you are doing amazingly well and you deserve respect.
