My granddad used to say, “You probably won’t run from one bee, but you dang sure will run from ten.” His old saying really applies to what I call “one bee” calories. These are calories we hardly ever think about when we are consuming them. Sort of like a single bee buzzing around you. You may swat at it, but mostly you just ignore it.
When I was just starting to lose my weight, I discovered I was consuming an average of 300 “ignored” calories everyday. That’s 2100 unaccounted for calories every week. That was like eating a whole extra day’s worth of calories! These “one bee” calories were enough to make me gain another pound every two weeks!
To have an extra pound show up on your scale you’d need only to consume 1814 calories of high calorie dense foods or as much as 4082 calories of low calorie dense foods.
I discovered most of these unnoticed calories were in condiments. Things like ketchup, mayo or a slice of cheese, different salad dressings or sauces I cooked with. All of these “add on” calories were secretly sabotaging my efforts to lose weight.
OUCH!
For example at dinner, I’d start with a healthy salad and pour some Thousand Island dressing on it, which added 354 calories. I’d eat a piece of meat loaf covered in ketchup and never considered the calories. I was using 10 to 12 servings at one sitting. That was at least another 180 calories. So in just one meal the condiments added up to 534 additional calories! That doesn’t count and jelly I used on my breakfast toast or the Bar B-Q sauce I used at lunch.