Book: Eat This Not That by David Zinczenko

I love this book. It colorfully and lovingly explores a single topic: how to make smarter calorie choices for the foods we all eat at the places we actually eat them. When browsing a menu we typically see chicken and think, that's a safe choice. Not so. The book, using full color pictures of each meal, shows at McDonald's you could select the Premium Grilled Chicken Club at 570 calories or you could eat the Quarter Pounder at 410 calories! That's a 160 calorie difference or a difference of 16 pounds a year. Eat the burger over the chicken and you save while still eating something tasty. Not what I would have expected.  Let's look at a few more.

I'm live in Northern California, so I've not even heard of many of the restaurants in the book, but most of them I recognize. I eat at Boston Market quite a bit, so this was surprising.  A meal of roasted sirloin, potatoes, and spinach has 560 calories. A meal of chicken, sweet potato casserole, chopped salad has towering 1,410 calories! I normally get the chicken so I'll definitely try the leaner sirloin next time.

In browsing through the book I noticed what seems obvious, that adding cheese to your meal adds a lot of mostly hidden calories. So I've resolved to try and reduce cheese where I can. Surprisingly, a Cinnabon cinnamon roll only has 730 calories. I thought it would be more. I've had few of Chili's Awesome Blossom's in my time and that sucker has 2,710 calories. Oh my. Subway is another place I eat a lot. A while ago I gave up on their tuna because of the calories. Good thing I did too. The tuna sub has  530 calories while the roast beef sub has 360 calories. That's a wonderful calorie savings, especially since roast beef is so yummy.

And that's what makes the book so fun. You can browse and take a look at all the stuff you've eaten that has so many more calories than you ever thought. Since most of this calorie information is not available, the book offers a real service. You can also build up a sense for the simple trade offs you can make to eat fewer calories yet still feel satisfied.