Whenever I set myself down to a plate of
spaghetti with a meat sauce at lunchtime, I've often wondered just what the
caloric impact is for a given serving!
Here are the averaged figures I came up
with:
Spaghetti pasta = 3.6 cal per gram (based
on using American Beauty spaghetti panel information)
Pasta meat sauce = 3.3 cal per gram
(based on my research post)
So, the first task was for me to decide
what size of a serving made any sense! As I have been on a diet for what
seems forever, I'd long ago estimated that the average tri-meal caloric
content I needed to hit was about 500. (That was an averaged figure
that would work out to 1500 calories a day, leaving me a few hundred
to use for snacks). Eighteen hundred calories was, in reality, a top limit for a
male over the age of 60. At least for one who wanted to lose a few pounds a month.
OK, now assuming the meal would consist
of only the pasta and sauce, I wondered what a 500 calorie deal would
look like? OK. Let's assume I went for 100 grams of pasta. That would
equate to 360 calories right there. Now, to be under that 500 mark, I
could therefore apply about 40 grams of sauce (or 132 calories) for a grand
total of 492 calories for the entire meal-a-deal! This seemed a livable portion. Note: One of the fun things to do on any diet is to cheat! (Something I do quite often)! I therefore added a slice of garlic toast and found myself in culinary heaven! what a great lunch! Then, I started to wonder about what I was going to have for dinner....
