Beware of Cereal Calories!

When you go cereal shopping, if cereal is something that you like to eat for breakfast, or just something that you like to have around as a snack for once in a while, you really want to be mindful of looking at the calories that are in each serving of a cereal. The reason for that is because you can easily consume a 600 calorie bowl of cereal if you’re not careful, especially when you consider that the milk you use adds at least another 100 to 150 calories by itself.  I  of course recommend that you use a fat free milk as this greatly cuts the milk calories down in your bowl of cereal.

I prefer to use Lactaid Fat Free milk because a lot of the milk fat and lactose that are difficult to digest and may hamper the efficient digestion and elimination of the cereal and milk are not present and therefore don’t provide any real roadblocks to the complete digestion of the product.  Digestion and elimination of a product are very important as that means they are less likely to be stored as fat on the body and excess calories, which is why an easily digestable diet is always recommended by experts.

I tend to favor heavier cereals over the lighter ones like Cheerios of Frosted flakes, because I like my cereals with a little more substance to them and more heavy fiber, and I’ve also found unfortunately that the “heavier” a cereal is in fiber, usually also the more calories it has.  Lighter cereals often don’t keep you as full as long, so that is another consideration.  But consider for example one of my favorite cereals, Cracklin Oat Bran.

It’s a very heavy cereal and full bodies and doesn’t really leave you feeling hungry.  However, in that tiny box they sell there are a whopping TEN servings, with 200 calories each for just the cereal alone.  That means that tiny box holds about 2,000 calories in cereal, so you have to be very careful about how your portioning out your bowls and make sure you are only taking about a 300 calorie serving so that your milk adds another 100, and you total about 400 calories for breakfast, which is about right.

Another of my favorites has similar calories, but they actually give more generous servings, frosted mini wheats, but they do really fill you up and are practically all fiber, so I do still indulge in those once in a while too.