Daily Diet Makeover

Cutting Calories in Cheeseburgers

Need a few savvy suggestions to help cut fat and calories? We've got a few plates that contain some of the most popular favorite foods.  Trimming calories is easy with these suggestions:

Typical Cheeseburger Meal:

Homemade Cheeseburger - about 600 calories

Potato Chips or Potato Salad - about 240 calories

Corn on the Cob - about 200 calories

Baked Beans - about 240 calories

Classic Soda - about 300 calories

The total calorie-count on our typical cheeseburger meal above comes to about 1,580 calories.  Considering that we still have an opening in our daily diet for breakfast, lunch and a couple of snacks, 1,580 calories pretty much blows a huge hole in our Calorie Stash.  Let's see how we can trim those calories and fit in our other meals and snacks:

Cheeseburger - Homemade hamburgers are often very generous when it comes to meat with some big-boy burgers weighing in with double-patties and some, even triple.  To compound matters, regular ground beef and extra lean ground beef are worlds apart when it comes to calorie content with some brands of regular ground beef containing more than double the calories as extra lean ground beef.

Then there's the cheese, Mayo and the traditional preparation method for buns.  Many of us like to smear our buns with butter, then set them under the heat until they are golden brown.  By the way, we are talking about HAMBURGER buns here - just in case you lost us.

So here's how we cut the calories:

Hamburger Calories

• Use the leanest ground beef available;
• Don't add extra oil when frying;
• Pound patties as thin as possible;
• Either toast bun with dry heat or spray with butter flavored cooking spray to toast;
• Keep bun calories to 130 calories or less;
• Use mustard rather than Mayo;
• Keep a pot on cheese calories by limiting to 50 calories;
• Add tomato slices, lettuce and onion.

Chip/Potato Salad Calories

Opt for baked beans instead as they tend to lend a feeling of fullness for hours.

Corn on the Cob

Choose small ears and use no calorie butter.

Baked Beans

Baked beans contain about 140 calories per 1/2 cup, so measure out so that the calories don't measure up.

Soda

Opt for a no calorie beverage.

We've cut the calories in our cheeseburger in half, as well as the calories in the baked beans and corn - simply by shrinking our burger, using lower calorie condiments and by simply taking time to measure out our beans.

New calorie count - about 550 calories.

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