Learn To Swap Foods Smarter

When creating a diet, it's not important to cut out everything all at once. The idea is to simply start to exchange some of the items that you currently eat to ones that serve you better.

Case in point, let's say you must start every day with three whole eggs, two strips of bacon, two slices of jellied Greek toast, and a full 16oz glass of orange juice.

This total meal comes out to

Overall, there is nothing wrong with this meal. Add some hash browns or pancakes, and this is as classic of a diner breakfast as it gets. Nonetheless, people starting a diet may forgo breakfast for a cup of coffee or simply have a small bowl of oatmeal.  Oatmeal is great too, but I have trouble eating it every day and sometimes it’s not filling enough, and I’ll search out more food soon after.

 Let’s look at the simple adjustments that can be made to design the right meal for you.

First start off with an understanding of roughly how many calories you need in a day (or a week). If we take the average daily recommended calorie intake of 2,000.  We can split that over 4 meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack. Each meal would be near 500 calories. If we ate this 779 calorie breakfast for every meal (to stay consistent), we would consume 1,116 calories over per day.  Do this for a week, and change nothing else, it could lead to weight gain upwards of 1kg or 2.2lbs per week. It’s a “healthy” and common breakfast but it can hurt our ability to make progress. By consuming an excess of 3,500 additional, unburnt calories will add 1lb of body fat.

Next, we could just remove one meal all together. Let’s say you want to stop snacking. This too would leave you in a surplus caloric state. Three meals of 779 is still 337 calories over the 2,000 recommended. This is not recommended either. As we remove meals, we risk increasing our hunger and binging later to make up for it.  There is no reason to actively starve yourself for results.

Let’s go for the first swap. It will impact the flavor of the meal the least. Try to swap 1 whole egg for egg whites. If you have them scrambled, they might look a bit lighter, but it’s going to be tougher to notice beyond that. This simple switch lowers the calories by 55 (724). This simple change over the week allows you to only gain about 1.8lbs per week and no change to the total volume of food.

Lets take the next step. Identify the largest calorie item and see if there is a substitute. In this example, the Greek toast could be upwards of 105 calories per slice. Thick, fluffy Greek toast is amazing, but not necessary for every breakfast. Use this as a chance to search your local market for the lowest calorie Greek toast or see if there is another bread that is a better fit.  Places like Aldi have a 35-calorie bread. If we fully subbed out the calorie profile, we could have three full slices of low-calorie bread over one slice of Greek toast. Oddly enough, we could add more volume and eat more food to stay full and fight off hunger longer. For this example, we can swap out both slices of Greek toast for two slices of 45 calorie Aunt Mille’s Bread. This reduces calories by 175, leaving us with a 604-calorie meal.

Then we just repeat with the highest calorie segment and see if we can swap it out for a better choice.  This would then be the orange juice.  While OJ is great for vitamin C, it’s lousy at making us full. There is little to no difficulty in drinking several glasses during a meal. One 16oz glass is upwards of 206 calories. We can simply eat an orange. It may take 2.5lbs of oranges to squeeze a single 16oz drink.  I doubt too many of us could eat 2.5lbs of oranges in a sitting.  That’s eight medium oranges!  I couldn’t tell you a time I sat down and ate more than 3. If we swap out the juice for water and just eat an orange, we reduce the total calorie to 471. If we have that four times a day, we will total 1,884 total calories. Now we are under the 2,000 calories and would start to drive weight loss of 0.6lb over the week and not change the volume of food we could consume.

The chart below shows a single swap each round and the impact to total calories.  I continued to replace an item each time and tried to go as low as possible and still be about the same volume of food. There is no need to force the lowest option every time, but if we actively think about how to improve our choices, we will encourage ourselves to make those better choices more.