Why cutting bread from your diet can get you off to a good start

February 7, 2008

If you’re like me and a typical day usually involves a couple of slices of toast for breakfast plus a couple of sandwiches for lunch, then it might be time to have a good think about changing your habits when it comes to bread..

Two slices of white bread tips the scales at about 170 calories (that’s just the bread, not everything else on it too!), so the six slices a day I used to have made up 510 calories of my daily diet. According to this weight loss calculator, given my current weight of 131kg, with a lightly active lifestyle, I should be eating around 2380 calories per day in order to lose about 1kg a week. Six slices of bread would represent 21% of that target… not only are there many ‘dead’ calories in white bread, they are pretty light on nutrients too, so wasting over a fifth of your diet on something as bland as mass produced cooked flour is not really something I would recommend.

What are the alternatives?

I think having toast for breakfast was more of a convenience thing than anything else, it’s quite easy to grab a couple of slices, throw them in the toaster and by the time you’ve got your coffee cup ready it’s time to start eating. But there are far more convenient foods out there that will give you a much healthier breakfast: fruit, yoghurt, muesli – all exceptionally quick and simple to prepare and you’ll get far more benefit, and keep off the hunger pains for longer than with toast.

For lunch, you’ve got plenty of choices too. For starters you could just eat what you regularly put on your sandwiches but leave off the bread, stack your plate up with a bit of extra salad and you’ll be good to go. Personally I’ve switched over to rye crispbread, has less than half the calories of white bread (although the slices are smaller), and it actually promotes healthier eating (at least it does for me), I usually top them with a little cream cheese, tinned tuna, tomato and lettuce or sprouts, it’s a really tasty meal.

Share this article, I appreciate your support.
[Digg] Digg This
[Reddit] Reddit
[del.icio.us] Save to del.icio.us
[StumbleUpon] Stumble it!

February 7, 2008 | Filed Under Weight Loss Strategy 

Comments

Got something to say?





  • Current Status

    • Weight: 128.2kg
      Next Weigh-in: Mar 14th 2008
      Current Goal: Lose 4kg/month
      Weight Loss this Month: 0.3kg
      Total Weight Loss: 2.8kg
      (since Feb 1st 2008)

  • Google