How Varied Is Your Menu? And can you make a habit out of it?

I tell my clients not to bother about counting calories. Just eat whatever you want, but do it in small portions...and if you must snack after 8 pm or so, snack on carrots or something of that nature.

But it is necessary to start from a baseline - to know how many calories certain kinds of food have.

Of course, it's really common sense. Obviously a whole pizza is going to have a gazillion calories. Likewise a blooming onion (mmm, I love blooming onions, but they have over a thousand calories. But then, you'll probably only have one if you're out to dinner at an Outback Steakhouse, and you'll share it with friends, and split the calories that way).

A big piece of chocolate cake will have a lot of calories...a small candybar, about half, and so on.

So the question is...how big is your menu? By that I mean, over the course of two weeks, do you have five different things for dinner, and then just repeat them over and over? Or do you experiment and have a different type of meal every day of the month? (IF you do, I salute you!)

I eat chicken and beef, and eschew fish, veal, etc. I also don't eat a lot of vegetables - corn, potatos, peas, carrots, those are my staples. (Do you fix spinach with cheese and butter. Supposedly it's the cheese and butter that makes it taste good...and adds on the calories...)

So if there are only about 20 types of foods you eat, its easy to find out the calories for those kinds of foods, and that gives you knowledge of what you're consuming each day.

But don't make an obsession out of it.

The book might say... 3 ounces of chicken, 100 calories. Don't put a piece of chicken on a scale, and start cutting off tiny slices in an effort to get it to precisely 3 ounces. An extra ounce doesn't matter at all!