Calories Go In, Calo-Lies Come Out

As a nation, us Brits need to stop lying to ourselves. We need to stop pretending that Ant and Dec are the best presenting duo of all time (it’s obviously Sam and Mark), and we need to stop denying the fact that Michelle McManus is the greatest songstress of the past 15 years. Rita Ora who?

On a more serious note though, we also need to stop lying to ourselves about what we’re eating. We’ve all seen those memes saying ‘smoothie for breakfast; salad for lunch; the entire contents of the fridge plus the entire contents of the biscuit tin for dinner’. And many of us are guilty.

According to recent analysis of Office for National Statistics data by Public Health England (PHE), around one-third of us are massively underestimating how much we’re really eating on a daily basis. We think we’re being good with our porridge and berries for breakfast, our pasta salad for lunch and our grilled meat with Tefal ActiFry chips in the evening – and we are, technically.

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We’re just pretending that the four custard creams we shovel in with our mid-morning brew at work, that glass of wine while cooking dinner and the third helping of what was meant to be a low-cal dessert are calorie-free. Sadly, they’re not.

In fact, having five cheeky pints of lager in a week and not counting the calories could mean you’re consuming 44,200 calories more than you think. That’s a hell of a lot and a shock big enough to leave us needing a drink – we’ll remember to count it though.

Overall, PHE found that women typically say they eat around 1,500 calories a day, but when dieticians have looked at what many are actually eating, it’s more like 2,500.

For blokes, 2,000 a day tends to be the general estimate, but it’s realistically more like 3,000.

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Altogether, that’s around 7,000 extra calories a week, and a whole lot of calo-lies.

PHE recommends that people consume 400 calories for breakfast and then 600 calories at both lunch and dinnertime. If you’re the kind of calorie counter who knows how many are in everything from a satsuma to a kebab with extra chilli sauce, you’ll probably be able to quickly work out that this means you could technically have two Dairy Milks for breakfast and three each for lunch and dinner, right? No, not at all.

For the healthiest lifestyle, first you need to be honest with yourself. Put All This Time on, and you’ll have started your journey. Then, make sure you’re getting your daily calorie intake from across the food groups. You need carbs, fibre, protein and plenty of fresh fruit and veg in your meals, and enjoy the odd treat, just remember to count the cals.