A simple tale of coffee cream

Getting back into the habit of living well can be a challenge. I was doing really well last spring, and then things got busy, and somehow, poor habits sneaked (snuck?) up on me.

The important thing about habits is that they are things you do regularly. The amazing thing is that little things add up.

For example, if you switch the cream in your coffee, if you drink as much coffee as I do, you can reduce the amount of saturated fat you consume over the course of a year by a lot. Say you use about 2 tablespoons per coffee, and drink a modest two cups a day. That's 7 grams of fat per day, 2/3 of them saturated. Over the course of a year, that is  2555 grams of fat, and 1606 grams of saturated fat.

That's about 28 sticks worth of butter of fat. Forgive me cows...I'm not saying that butter is all bad. I'm just trying to use an easy to understand metric!

Switching to whole milk reduces your fat consumption in your coffee to only 2 grams total, or 730 grams a year, and only 438 of these saturated. That saves 1825 grams of fat, or 16425 calories which is equivalent to almost 5 pounds of body fat. I won't even go into what my muffin a day habit was doing to my body, given the high fat and calories in those innocuous cafeteria muffins (which are again, way off limits after the cafeteria would not give me the nutrition info!)

There you go, and easy way to change one small habit, reduce fat and saturated fat, and (in theory) reduce your calories. In reality, without effort people may replace the calories saved in one domain with calories in another, but at least it is a step in the right direction! On that note, maybe tomorrow we can talk about steps...