Yea, people don't realize how calorically dense our foods are. And furthermore fail to grasp how efficient our bodies are at retaining those calories. I've heard that to burn off the calories of a peanut M&M (about 5 or 6 calories) you'd have to full-out sprint the length of two football fields.
I've been counting calories recently. I even bought a kitchen scale so I could reduce inaccuracy in my estimates (there's still some when eating out). The calories in just a little cheese were crazy. So I replaced it with avocado. I cut the calories in half and add more real food to my diet. I do think it's taken me fifteen years to figure out proper nutrition. You'll get through to a couple students, and a couple more will remember it later. You're doing good!
Thank you! And being versed in nutrition as a science seems like it could take a lifetime. But there is a Michael Pollan quote that's coming to me. Here he is discussing his reasons why he wrote (another) book, this time not on the ethics of our food chain but on personal nutritional decisions: Fair questions, though it does seem to me a symptom of our present confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat? True, as omnivores—creatures that can eat just about anything nature has to offer and that in fact need to eat a wide variety of different things in order to be healthy—the "What to eat” question is somewhat more complicated for us than it is for, say, cows.Yet for most of human history, humans have navigated the question without expert advice.To guide us we had, instead, Culture, which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother. What to eat, how much of it to eat, what order in which to eat it, with what and when and with whom have for most of human history been a set of questions long settled and passed down from parents to children without a lot of controversy or fuss.But many readers wanted to know, after they’d spent a few hundred pages following me following the food chains that feed us, “Okay, but what should I eat? And now that you’ve been to the feedlots, the food-processing plants, the organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what do you eat?”
You're spot on about certain dressings totally annihilating any caloric deficit you're trying to run. And portion sizes are another thing -- family sized bags are just a trap to have in the house. Even large containers of healthier foods like nuts I get into trouble with. Our brains aren't geared for abstaining from food that's around us and immediately available, especially food that's salty or oily or sweet. It can definitely be that. But you're pointing her to a nutritionist? That's pretty suggestive itself lol.It's a touchy subject though, so I'm pointing her towards a nutritionist and they can be the messenger.