Spray Yourself Skinny

Some new versions of butter and salad dressing save calories not just by changing their formula, but by changing their method of application. What a great idea this is: Spray butter on your toast and save at least 100 calories; spray dressing on your salad and save over 150 calories!

Here's how the numbers add up in a few examples:

 Salad Dressings

-Wishbone spritzers variety salad dressings come in delicious flavors like French Flair, Raspberry Bliss and Caesar Delight. You only get 15 calories in 10 sprays. That is enough to wet a good portion of a small salad with flavorful dressing. Even if you usually pour a "light" raspberry vinaigrette over your salad you get 80 calories in two tablespoons. This is what they call a serving, but try measuring two tablespoons some time, then put it on your salad. Does this cover enough lettuce, tomato, and cucumber for you to be satisfied? If not, you might be using two, three, or even more 'servings' when you dress your salad! If you're still using regular dressing, fasten your seatbelt-Creamy Caesar dressing contains 170 calories in the same two tablespoons. Measure how much you use on your next salad to figure out how many calories you'll be saving by switching to the spray method.

You don't even have to buy this particular brand. You can use any light dressing you like and put it in a convenient spray bottle to help yourself cover more area of your salad using less dressing.

Butters and Spreads

-Do you like real butter? If that's what you use on your toast, or to fry an egg, keep in mind that a tablespoon of regular stick butter provides 100 calories. Spreads that come in a squeeze bottle (the more liquid, the lower in saturated fat) provide about 60 calories per tablespoon. Whipped butter comes in lower at only 50 calories per tablespoon. But the lowest of all is the "I can't believe it's not butter" spray with less than one calorie in five sprays. Now, it may take you 20 or 30 sprays to cover your entire bagel in the morning, but you know that can't be more than 5 or 6 calories, even if there were one entire calorie in five sprays!

If you've never heard me talk about the "100 calorie rule" let me summarize it here: For every hundred calories you save each day, you can lose nearly a pound in one month. This means if you change to spray butter and save a tablespoon of butter a day (100 calories) you can lose a pound this month. If you frequent restaurant s you should know that one tablespoon equals three pats of butter. How many do you use at a meal? On bread, potatoes, corn? By the way, margarine contains exactly the same number of calories as butter, pat for pat.

If you are used to pouring several tablespoons of salad dressing on your salad and you switch to spray dressings (or put diet dressing in a spray bottle of your own) you save 300 calories or more. This will mean up to three pounds lost at the end of 30 days if you usually eat salad every day. Restaurant portions of dressing (often served in a small gravy boat) can easily exceed eight tablespoons on a large salad. If you're counting, that means eight calories of spray versus 420 calories of light dressing, or 680 calories of regular dressing!

Think about how many calories you consume by covering your food with fats like butter and salad dressing. Try the new sprays, eliminate hundreds of calories a day from your diet, and join the "spray yourself skinny" club today!

Laurie Beebe, a registered dietitian certified in adult weight management, has transitioned into diet coaching. Coaching helps dramatically by allowing people to set their own goals and design their own action plans.

Please visit Laurie's website, "Shaping Your Future" at http://www.mycoachlaurie.com for diet tips, links to great books and websites, or to sign up for a free monthly newsletter!

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