I am overweight. Not by a ton, but by an appreciable amount. I have started counting Calories, and it has very quickly become blatantly obvious why. While my usual diet is pretty okay1, there are certain days where I just go completely crazy and eat an insane amount of Calories (3000-4000). These are also generally the days when I get the least exercise.
Since I’ve started counting Calories, I’ve found it somewhat illuminating to actually compare Calorie values between different things. I had looked at nutrition labels before, but the Calorie count meant basically nothing to me; I wasn’t tracking where my Calories came from, and with the different serving sizes and all, it was very hard for me to conceptually understand what the number meant. Now that I have a recording of the Calories I’m eating right in front of me, I’m struck by the difference between similar amounts of food.
If I eat a cup of mixed vegetables, I would be getting about 40 Calories. If you were on a 2000 Calorie diet, and ate nothing but mixed vegetables2, you would be eating 50 cups of vegetables. Translating that into pounds3, that would be between 9 and 10 pounds of vegetables. A cup of rice pilaf is 220 Calories. On a 2000 Calorie diet of nothing but rice pilaf, you would be eating about 9 cups of rice pilaf, or just over a pound.
A Jolly Rancher contains 23 1/3 Calories. If you were to check how many Jolly Ranchers are in a cup, you would get somewhere around 404. That means that a cup of Jolly Ranchers contains somewhat more than 900 Calories. You could eat a little over 2 cups of Jolly Ranchers a day, at a similar weight to the 9 cups of rice pilaf5. Also, you would die a horrible, horrible death.
Just something totally random that I found fascinating.
In Calories, not nutritionally; that’s a different issue entirely. [↩]
Assuming, of course, that there was no problem nutritionally. [↩]
Top 10 Most Cited Biology Articles Of 2009 – Fairly self explanatory. Unsurprisingly, stem cells came out on top. There are also articles on genome sequencing, lymphatic development, and protein structure.
There’s nothing inherently special about a new year. It’s a fairly arbitrary date when we decided that everyone would get a new calendar, and we’d start our four month cycle over once again. Even so, the new year is powerful, because we’ve decided that it is.
We’ve decided that the new year is a time to start again, to get working on all the things that we’ve never gotten around to, but want to. It’s a time of hope and celebration. It’s midwinter, but it’s a time where we can look ahead and see that the winter is going to end, and the spring will come.
I should probably stop posting things that Coilhouse posted two months ago, but in this case I think it’s justified. I was looking back over some of the old blog posts, and I had to listen to this song again. It’s a parody of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face1 and, more than that, it’s a love letter to typography. It is also over the top, absurd2, and completely awesome.
