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How do you make a cup of tea.
I would assume you put the tea bag in first.
Then add hot water.
Remove the bag.
Add some milk and / or sugar.
Pretty much it.
Unless you’re one of those savages that puts the milk and tea bag in together then the water.
Either way, we put the tea in first.
Good tactic that.
Especially for tracking and planning our eating.
Tea (or dinner, if you’re of that persuasion) is invariably the meal that sends us into surplus.
We haven’t (usually) hit our daily calorie needs by that time of day.
And that last meal (and, maybe, any following snacks) takes us from deficit to surplus.
And leads to weight gain over time.
And whilst we could just eat less at that meal or make some different choices……….
It’s often too late by then.
The meal has been cooked.
We’re eating with others (family and / or friends).
Someone else has provided it (eating out or someone else has cooked).
And, whilst it’s not nice being hungry at any time of the day…………..
It’s particularly hard when we’re at home and there’s a few hours till bed, isn’t it?
Especially the looooonnnnnngggggg evenings we have now we’ve probably not left the house all day.
So, whilst it doesn’t have to be that way…………..
If we leave it to then, it’s probably too late.
But…………..
Like a cuppa…………….
We can put the tea in first.
If we’re tracking / planning our food, we can stick that night’s tea into MyFitnessPal (or other app).
Decide what we’re having and enter a realistic portion.
If it’s going to be a burger and chips and five pints, put that in.
Work backwards with what you’ve got for the rest of the day.
Make it so the earlier meals (and snacks if relevant) mean that ‘tea’ won’t send us into a surplus.
Or, at least, not so much of a one that we can’t average it out elsewhere.
If our target is, for simplicity’s sake, 2,000 calories…………..
And we punch “tea” in and it comes to 1,500………..
Then we could do 250 each for breakfast and lunch.
Or we do 400 each, go 300 over and have a plan to pull that back the next day.
If that’s not doable, maybe question the ‘extent’ of ‘tea’.
We make tea 800, have 400 each for breakfast and lunch and 400 on snacks and / or drinks.
We know we’re going to have that 700 calorie bottle of wine, we pop that and tea in and split the change between breakfast and lunch.
We were planning on having Starbucks Latte (340 calories – although chance’d be a fine thing at the moment), pop planned tea in and realise those two together leave so little for the rest of the day we switch to a plain black coffee.
If we’re not sure what ‘tea’ will look like and have no way of finding out (having a little think, asking or googling menus) then we could put a ‘worst case scenario’ in and go from that.
Whatever the case, it’s usually ‘tea’ that send us over.
Like making a cuppa, put that in (to MyFitnessPal) first.
Work backwards to make it all work.
And you’ll be good 🙂
Much love,
Jon ‘Kawfee’ Hall
