Losing weight can be frustrating. Many diets require serious changes to your lifestyle, and can be expensive or socially prohibitive.
Here are 8 easy and inexpensive changes you can make to your diet that don't require any radical adjustments to your life. Many of these are well-known, but it’s amazing how easy it is to overlook something that is so simple and beneficial.
The good news? There’s no exercise involved, and you won’t have to eliminate junk food, alcohol, pasta, pizza or pastries, and you can even eat just under a pound of chocolate per month!
1. Ditch The White Bread (Save 6,600 Calories/Month)
Bread is a staple of most Western diets. Many people eat it for both breakfast (toast) and lunch (sandwiches), consuming on average 3-4 slices per day. That’s 21-28 slices per week.
Your average slice of white bread contains anywhere between 80-110 calories per slice, depending on brand and thickness. Switching from regular processed white bread to regular processed wholemeal bread won’t make much of a difference to your calorie intake. The calorie, fat, protein, carbohydrate and fibre content for white or wholemeal is basically the same.
Even assuming the lower end of our numbers, 21 slices of 80 calorie bread per week = 1,680 calories. And it could be as much as 28 slices of 110 calorie (i.e., very thick) bread, which equates to 3,080 calories, or a staggering 13,200 per month!
However, if you switch from standard sliced bread to an alternative such as Nimble Wholemeal (or white) or Warburtons Medium Wholemeal (400g) each slice you eat drops down to 48 and 55 calories respectively (as well as making significant savings in carbs and fat).
This translates to 21 slices of 48 calories, or 1,008 calories per week, or 28 slices of 55 calories, which is 1,540 calories per week, or 6,600 per month.
2. Switch To Medium-Fat Cheese (Save 1,765 Calories/Month)
Cheese tastes great, but it’s calorie and fat dense. Medium-fat cheese used to taste terrible, but it's gotten a lot better and is worth another look. Any time the cheese is melted you won’t notice any difference.
Normal cheddar is about 475 calories per 100g. Half-fat is approximately 275.
How much cheese do you eat? According to some experts, the average person eats 29.4 grams per day.
29.4 x 30 = 882 grams per month, or 4,190 calories.
Make that conversion to medium-fat cheddar, and that number drops to 2,425.
3. Switch From Sugar To Sweetener (Save 3,600 Calories/Month)
If you sweeten your coffee (or tea) with sugar, switching to a non-calorie sweetener is an easy way to ditch calories. A teaspoon of sugar has about 15 calories. Let’s say you have two teaspoons per cup of Joe, four times per day.
4 x (2 x 15) = 120 calories.
Over a week, that equates to 840 calories, or 3,600 per month.
If you switch to sweetener - an inexpensive and convenient alternative - you can reduce that number to zero.
4. Switch To Skimmed Milk (Save 1,920 Calories/Month)
There is no such thing as a perfect food, but milk comes close. A good source of protein and minerals, milk is a great source of nourishment.
Whole fat milk has about 66 calories per 100ml. The average glass of milk is about 250ml. You probably add between 25 and 50ml in an average cup of coffee (or tea). A 30-35g serving of cereal comes with a recommendation of 125ml of milk.
Let’s say you have four cups of coffee/tea per day, four bowls of cereal per week and two glasses of milk.
This breaks down as:
(100 x 7) + (4 x 125) + (2 x 100) = 1,400ml of whole milk per week, which equates to 924 calories, or 3,960 per month.
If you switch to skimmed milk, which is only 34 calories per 100ml, that changes to 476 calories per week, or 2,040 per month.
5. Switch To Low-Fat Mayo, And Use It For All Spreads (Save 2,957 Calories/Month)
Mayonnaise makes nearly everything taste better, but it’s terrible for your waistline. One tablespoon of mayonnaise has 49 calories, 44 of which come from fat.
Conversely, one tablespoon of Hellman’s Low-Fat Mayonnaise has only 15 calories.
However, where you can really score is by stopping all of your butter and margarine use (in your sandwiches, for example) and replacing that with low-fat mayonnaise instead. The savings really add up.
The average sandwich uses one tablespoon of butter, which has an unreal 102 calories.
By replacing that with Hellman’s low-fat mayonnaise you can save 87 calories per sandwich. If you eat five sandwiches per week, that’s 1,865 calories per month.
And this doesn’t even include what you’ll save by not adding normal mayonnaise to those same sandwiches. Let’s say you add one tablespoon to every other sandwich, on average. Which means 2.5 sandwiches per week, or
2.5 x 102 = 255 calories per week, or 1,092 per month.
Remember we’re now saving that, as you won’t need to add extra mayo as it’s already there as your spread.
6. Drink Diet Soft Drinks (Save 4,131 Calories/Month)
Another no-brainer, but it’s amazing what a difference it can make. One can of normal Coke has 139 calories. One can of Diet Coke has 1.3 calories. If you have one can per day of Coke (or any similar soft drink), that’s
139 x 30 = 4,170 calories per month.
With Diet Coke (or similar Diet beverage), that drops down to 39 calories per month. Many people drink far more than one can per day so the difference can be huge.
7. Swap Standard Potato Chips For Low-Fat Ones (Save 1,268 Calories/Month)
The average person eats about ten pounds of potato chips per year. This equates to about 24,621 calories, or 2,051 per month.
183 x 12.5 = 2,288 calories.
Swap those regular chips for Walkers Baked Crisps, which are 98 calories per pack, and that drops to 1,225.
8. Eat Half The Chocolate You Eat Now (Save 2,291 Calories/Month)
According to The Guardian, the average Briton consumes 11kg of chocolate per year. One imagines this volume is a constant throughout the rest of the Western world!
Chocolate is around 500 calories per 100g, so that works out about 4,583 calories, per person, per month.
You don’t have to give it up. Life’s no fun without chocolate. Just eat half of what you eat now. If you buy a Mars Bar, eat half of it. Give the rest to a friend, or put it away until tomorrow.
The Results
Total all the potential savings above, and it comes to a pretty amazing 24,532 calories.
3,500 calories make up one pound of bodyweight.
24,532 / 3,500 = 7 pounds.
That’s in just one month. In two months, just by making these basic changes, you could lose 14 pounds (one stone, or 6.35 kilograms) without doing any exercise, and pretty much eating and drinking whatever it is you normally have outside of the modifications above.
Naturally, if you threw in a few trips to the gym each week, the benefits could be extraordinary.
In all the examples above, brands are mentioned purely for illustrative purposes and are not an endorsement. Other brands are available. Check with your local supplier.