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.
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Hah! You’re going down my path. Welcome!
Eating nothing but vegetables would probably be fine nutritionally, apart from the inability to eat and digest it all in time with our guts. (Assuming ‘real’ veggies, leafy greens and carrots and tomatoes, not starches like corn and potatoes.) (And ignoring vitamin B12.) One trick I do is looking at a nutrition panel and multiplying the numbers out to 2000 calories, to see how bad it’d be if you ate nothing but that. And lots of veggies look pretty good that way, especially tomatoes. Meat’s good, apart from some vitamins and of course fiber. Most fruits are actually not good at all, though of course they’re awesome sources of vit. C and sometimes A and some more obscure chemicals good for us.
3-4000 calories? That is insane… I think. When I pay attention my calories, it tends to be 1800 a day, but I’ve never managed to pay attention for all that long, and maybe it’s too low. I grew up on 2000 being standard; calorie restriction people try for 1500 or even 1200; other sources say more like 2500 is normal. ?????
Veggies might be okay. I know you can certainly survive if you add in nuts to your diet. Somehow, eating 9 pounds of veggies a day doesn’t really appeal to me, though.
3000-4000 is kind of crazy, yeah, but it’s not that hard if you eat a lot of pizza and drink a lot of soda, for example. It’s certainly not an amount of calories that I need; it’s not like I’m running marathons or anything to burn off the excess. Fortunately, as I said, it’s not my typical Calorie count.