SARAH DI LORENZO: The hidden calories that count us out of health goals

Have you ever felt really frustrated with trying to get to your health goal and not sure where you are going wrong?

You are eating low carb, doing regular exercise, doing your best to stress less, could be seeing professional help, paying gym memberships, doing your 10,000 steps per day, and think you are in a caloric deficit, but the scales are not moving. Well, the chances are you are forgetting to include the calories from your beverage intake.

I see so many people in my clinic who completely forget to recall their beverage intake to me when I ask for a 24-hour recall of what they ate, or if I ask them generally about their eating habits.

Most people don’t even really know how much water they would drink in the course of a day. So, educating people about liquid calories will often put things into perspective for so many and can be the roadblock needing to be broken to get to their healthy goal weight.

Many people order the tall size, which takes the milk up to around 300ml and the calories even higher, and some people can have two to three of these in the course of the morning, taking the calorie intake up to 600 — which is a burger, fries and a soft drink.

The only way you can have many coffees is to make them black or do a dash of milk (not a splash) and avoid adding sugars and syrups. The choice of milk will make all the difference, with an almond cappuccino the lowest at 40 calories.

Next would be oat milk at 60 calories, then skim milk, and then a whole fat milk cappuccino at 120 calories. Tea is the same as coffee — you just need to watch what they are sweetened with and your choice of milk.

Next would be alcohol. If you have a long day at work and go home each evening to a couple of glasses of wine — say two or three — there is 450 calories.

If you are having a beer, then it’s around 150 calories. Spirits all sit around 80 calories straight, but many mix these with soft drinks like tonic and Coke, very quickly adding around 100 calories to these drinks. Champagne is a better choice, around 77 calories, and when it comes to cocktails they can range from 200–800 calories.

Regular soft drinks are full of calories. A standard 355ml glass of Coca-Cola is 140 calories, and Pepsi, as well as Sprite, are the same. Not only are these drinks a poor choice for their calorie content, but they are also a poor choice from a health perspective, with zero health benefits.

When it comes to the zero-calorie options for soft drinks, they are linked to weight gain as well. They don’t directly cause weight gain — there are other factors, such as they don’t hit the reward centre in the brain, so can increase appetite and cravings.

Plus, people can overcompensate by eating more because they think they are having zero calories in the beverage to make up for it. There is research showing that artificial sweeteners can alter gut bacteria, possibly affecting metabolism, and there are some artificial sweeteners that still trigger an insulin response, increasing fat storage.

When it comes to juices, they have around the same calories as soft drinks. Many people think fruit juices are a healthy choice, but the better choice is to eat fruit in its natural form — this way you are getting the fibre and a slow release of the naturally occurring sugar in fruit.

So, next time you think about your food intake, don’t forget liquid calories. By tracking these, you can really identify what is accurate and make better choices to get you to your healthy goal.