A Latte A Day or Why Appetite Matters

4 kg of extra body fat

Lets say that you are eating exactly the right amount of calories that you burn in a day. Unlikely, but just imagine. Now you decide to have a latte on your way to work. A nice treat and what harm could it do? (This is not Starbucks bashing - the choice of treat was pretty random). A latte in Starbucks contains 180 calories. If you have one of those every work day, that's about 200 of them a year. Which gives 36000 calories. There are 9 calories in a gram of fat. This means that your daily latte translates into 4 kg of fat added per year. This type of conversion is very rough, but it illustrates. You would know if you had 4 kg extra fat on your body and after a few years..

Quit the latte?

Not necessarily. The point of this exercise is to show that trying to control what you eat is virtually impossible without the aid of your inbuilt appetite. If your body does not tell you when to stop eating then telling yourself to ease up is just not going to work in anything but the shortest of time frames. You need to choose foods that work with your body so that you feel full and don't experience a blood sugar crash following the consumption of high carb food. There is a bit more about this here.