Did you know that following 7 simple steps every day, can make a difference of over 500,000 calories in one year?
These 7 steps were taken from the Dietary Guidelines and we calculated how much you could save in a day or a year. We were shocked that you could save over 500,000 calories with these simple steps!
But there is also one more thing we learned by our calculations. A healthy diet makes a bigger difference than exercise although they both certainly work better together. If you look at the seven steps, you will see that exercising 30 minutes per day, 7 days per week helps someone burn 73,000 calories per year. Sure, you could probably double that, but in most busy schedules today, that is a pretty realistic amount. Free time for exercise is limited. But, if you take a look at the other 6 steps, which are diet related, there is a lot of opportunity to save a considerable amount of calories, about 400,000 to be exact.
Here are the steps:
Step One: Make a Healthy Plate MyPlate is a great guide to proper portions and proportions at every meal. Balance your calorie intake with MyPlate's helpful suggestions and messages. For example, one of MyPlate's major messages is a call to fill half your plate with fruits and veggies at each meal. If you do this, you will save an average of 300 calories per meal. That's 109,500 calories per year!
Step Two: Choose Fruit for a Snack By replacing a daily snack of potato chips with a medium apple, you will save 21,900 calories per year. An apple contains an average of 80 calories, while potato chips have roughly 140 calories per serving. These calorie differences can really add up over time.
Step Three: Go Calorie-Free for Drinks When it comes to choosing beverages, choose options with no calories. Lots of sodas, sport drinks, and tea beverages contain way more sugar than you might expect. Since these are mostly empty calories, just skip them. Replacing one can of soda with a calorie-free drink (water, diet soda, unsweetened coffee or tea) every day will save you 54,750 calories per year!
Step Four: Exercise Every Day Get 30 minutes of exercise per day. A two mile walk burns 200 calories. Do that every day and you will burn 73,000 calories per year.
Step Five: Downsize Dessert Desserts have been getting much larger lately. A baked good the size of your hand usually contains around 500 calories! Taking just a finger-sized serving of that dessert will save you an average of 350 calories. Doing this every day will reduce your yearly calorie consumption by 127,750 calories!
Step Six: Eat a Balanced Low-Cal Breakfast Getting rid of a bagel, fast food sandwich, or breakfast pastry and replacing it with a bowl of oatmeal will save you 180 calories. If you do this every morning, you'll save 65,700 calories per year!
Step Seven: Stick to Skim Milk Moving to skim milk will save you 47 calories per cup. Since MyPlate recommends that most people get 3 cup servings of nonfat dairy foods per day, that could come to 141 calories saved per day and 51,965 calories saved per year.
These steps were created for our newest poster
7 Simple Steps.
No comments:
Post a Comment