Top 2 Tips To Make Room For Easter Eggs
Easter is upon us and it’s not that you have to give up easter eggs but by being clever and using two little tricks in particular you can make enough room to have your favourite chocolate egg.
Look, it’s been a tough few weeks with everything going on and at the time of writing this piece we have just been through 4 weeks of restrictions to limit the spread of Covid-19 and the governement in Ireland just announced another 3 weeks.
Easter weekend, being a bank holiday weekend would normally be when people get together and maybe go away for the long weekend or have extended family over or BBQ and party with friends. But most importantly it’s when we celebrate Easter. Now perhaps the true meaning of Easter or the message of it has been lost over the years and I won’t get into that but for the kids it’s a time to “collect” Easter eggs and for the parents to eat the leftovers that are lying around for the next 6 months. You know who you are !!
I remember when I was much younger it was nearly a competition with your schoolmates to see who could collect the most Easter eggs, or maybe that was just me. I do have a competitve streak! It was fun though and you always looked forward to see who what you got and what your friends got.
It’s slightly different this year and while technology could possibly allow you and your kids to facetime their friends and still “compete” that face to face social connection is what it was all about.
So it’s been a tough few weeks and I think we need to unwind a little and de-stress so let’s have an Easter egg and not feel too guilty about it.
I recently made a video on our facebook page talking about how to make room for a nice Easter egg without too much damage to the waistline or feeling too bad about consuming so much chocolate.
If you have been following any of our videos on reading food labels properly and keeping an eye on calories it fits perfectly into how we can make room for Eater eggs.
So obviously there are different sizes of easter eggs and with that comes different quantities in terms of calories in them and sugar content. If we take the “smaller” Easter egg in the video above, it comes with 100g chocolate egg and 30g bag of buttons. Now, when we are looking at the calories and sugar content of this keep in mind what they say on the nutritional label for how much of that egg the numbers relate to. So in this egg all the values are for a quarter of the egg so any number you see on that column you need to multiply by four.
For this small egg on it’s own the total sugar content, first of all, is 56g and when you add in 17g of sugar for the buttons it comes to a grand total of 73g of sugar. Remember that our total sugar intake for the day is recommended to be 90g or less. 20g should only come from added sugar. When we look at the egg only as an example with 56g of sugar this particular brand break down how much milk is in it. If we remove all of that to account for the amount of naturally occurring sugar in milk, which comes to 9g, that leaves 45g of added sugar in just the egg. This means in a small egg we ware consuming over two days of sugar in just that egg.
Now imagine a bigger egg wich can be two to three times the size of a small egg and the sugar content starts to rocket. For example some of those extra large Easter eggs could contain over 120g of sugar, which is crazy to think!
The other side of this delicious coin then is the calories of it all. In total this small egg and packet of buttons will set you back 720 calories. In the larger egg you could easily be looking at 1200 – 1400 calories. That is a days intake for a lot of people in just one egg. We all know the real problem is it doesn’t stop at one though does it. We can just keep picking on them.
You see, it’s tough enough on normal days to offset this intake of such high sugar and calories but because of the restrictions going on people are more likely than not moving less and eating more because they may be at home more, including the kids. They aren’t getting to run around with their friends as much or as intensely. This all means that we may not burn off this extra consumption as easy and then you are talking of adding to the waistline and negative side effects that come with that not only physically but how you feel in yourself as well.
Two Tricks To Make Room For Easter Eggs
- The first thing we want to try and do is offset all those extra calories. So how do we do that? Understanding that you are about to consume a hell of a lot of calories is important because then we can take action on it. Outside of Easter if you are going to have something you know is high in calories like going out for a nice dinner or Chritmas dinner etc then ideally what you would do is decrease your calorie intake before you have it. Look at bringing down your total calories for a day or two before and the morning of as well. So you might have smaller meals/ smaller portions the day or two before and the morning of you may have a smaller breakfast and only a snack for lunch to keep you going. This way you are making room for the extra calories in the egg. You don’t have to get too bogged down in counting calories, just reduce the portion sizes for the day before and morning of and cut out unnecessary snacks.
- Balance the sugar. It’s a lot of sugar to be hitting the bloodstream at once. Again if you read some of the previous posts on excess sugar you will know that all that added sugar will spike your blood sugar levels. When this happens the body releases insulin to bring down those sugar levels but how they do this is by triggering the fat cells to open up and store that sugar in there as fat. Obviously we want to avoid that from hapoening. The best way to do that is take in a lot of protein and/or fiber in your meals leading up to the sugar rush and the day of. Protein as well as fiber helps slow down the sugar spiking process so you don’t have as much fat storage happening.
At least attmeping these two tips will massively offset the guilt. Now go and enjoy an Easter egg!!
Mike
Follow us on facebook: www.facebook.com/ozonegym
Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/ozonegymennis/
Don’t forget to subscribe to our youtube channel for the latest videos:
