Paying attention to the fine print

I haven’t had such a misadventure in a long time, but it has happened in the past, and could very well happen again. So, because I’ve recently been reminded of it, I thought about mentioning it here: when buying food, make sure to pay attention and properly do the math when it comes to calories per serving and serving sizes! It seems evident, and yet it can be quite a trap, one that might even make you gain pounds, slowly but steadily, instead of just stalling your weight loss.

Let’s say you like eating a serving of oatmeal everyday as a snack–I’m taking oatmeal as an example, but it could be anything else. You look at the box, it says “X servings per box”. Alright. It also says “N calories per cup”. Again, alright. The first math many of us would do is certainly to think that one cup means one serving in that case. But is a serving equal to a cup? Sometimes, it’s really so easy to be misled by all those little prints that tell us different information. We have to do the job ourselves here, so to say; of course, it’s not very difficult, and it would be silly to ask that everything be always premade for us. However, I keep on thinking that it’s a habit not necessarily easy to take, and that one could very well read such information the wrong way, just because A wasn’t printed exactly next to B.
Therefore, try to keep in mind this little tidbit. Someday, it may prevent you from eating a snack that is “100 calories only”, when in fact it was closer to 200 or 300. Those are killers when it comes to weight loss–and we don’t need them on top of all the other things we already have to keep in mind!