As people constantly strive to eat healthier and loose weight, many times they may give themselves a food reward for reaching a goal, decide to skip the diet and give into the temptation of their favorite meal/snack, or just have a snack that doesn’t seem too bad. They tell themselves that they will just do some extra sit-ups or run an extra mile or something to make up for the slip. Many diet and exercise sources have even warned against sabotaging your diet with one meal, yet sometimes they have no idea what that really means. So, I’ve found a few yummy examples that will definitely get people right in the gut! (Literally.)

Alright, so you didn’t eat breakfast at home this morning. You decide to drive through the golden arches to pick up a deluxe breakfast. Yeah, those pancakes, sausage, hash browns, eggs, and biscuit total 1,220 calories to start your day! Holy cow! If you are a high school football player, you could just run around the football field 47 times to burn that off.  If you don’t play football, you could head down to your nearest health club and take over two hours of step aerobics classes. No gym membership? Then just jump on your bike and go for a three-hour ride. Order the breakfast sausage biscuit instead, it will save you about 810 calories!

It’s lunchtime, and you are ravenous. You decided to get a Chipotle chicken burrito with all the fixings. Hey, it’s got chicken so it’s got to be healthy, right? Ummm… not so much. All that chicken, sour cream, guacamole, beans, and rice yummy goodness packs a 990 calorie punch! Hope your car, and all your friends’ cars, are really dirty, because you’ll be spending the next 4 hours manually washing them in order to burn it off. Okay, if you are looking for a more fun way to get rid of that burrito, grab those same friends and go play full-court basketball for about an hour. Or, you could just make a healthier choice by ordering the burrito salad bowl, which only has 380 calories. That’s a difference of 610 calories!

So, it’s about three o’clock and you are smack dab in the middle of that afternoon energy slump. You need an energy boost bad, so you head on down to the nearest Starbucks and get a venti white chocolate mocha (580) with a raspberry scone (440). Well, I hope you’ve got a big lawn because it’s going to take you three-and-a-half hours of raking the leaves to burn off the 1,070 calories you just consumed. Do you live in the hill country? Then you could pack a ten-pound backpack and go on a two-and-a-half-hour hike. Then again, you could save about 670 of those calories for dessert and order a café latte with and a fruit and roasted nut blend.

Lets say you munched on an entire medium-size popcorn with butter when you went to see the latest movie release last weekend. That’s a whopping 1,120 calories! Yikes! You would have to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower 2 1/2 times or jump rope for 102 minutes or play kickball for 146 minutes in order to burn all those! An alternative is having the popcorn minus the butter, and the calorie intake drops to 450. Who’d a thunk it?!

What if your irresistible pleasure is dessert? Like when that pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey Ice Cream is just calling your name. You would have to walk almost 13-and-a-half miles before bedtime to burn those 1,200 calories you just consumed while sitting on your couch watching prime time TV. Then again, you could always go horseback riding for about 4-and-a-half hours. Your butt might be a bit sore, but that ice cream wouldn’t still be settling on it any time soon. Then again, choose No Fat Black Raspberry Frozen Yogurt instead so that you can save about 700 calories. That’s a lot closer to a guilt-free dessert.

As you can see, you could be one meal away from completely undoing all the weight loss progress you have made, not to mention the amount of activity you must do in order to burn off that meal! That’s a heck of a lot more than an extra few sit ups or miles on the treadmill. So, the moral of the story is that by making a few healthier choices you can still enjoy yummy foods without blowing that calorie calculator.

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(Original photo by thebittenword.com, used under Creative Commons license.)