If you want to lose weight or if you are on a diet for medical reasons, you should check your daily consumption of calories.
The more calories you consume, the more physical exercise you must do to burn the calories so as to avoid gaining extra weight.
Losing weight is more often than not a game of numbers. Monitoring and evaluation are crucial for control. It’s important to know how many calories you are adding to your body with every meal or beverage you eat or drink during your day.
If you are a devotee of iced tea but you are concerned that you might be stocking up on more calories than you care to take up, continue reading this article, for that is my topic.
Just how many calories does a single serving of iced tea contain?
What are Calories?
Everyone talks of calories and how many they need to eat or burn and so forth, but how many of us know what a calorie is? Calories are units of energy.
Let me give you a simple analogy. A car needs gas. You fill up with gas at the gas station, and then you drive to the next town. After you run out of gas, you fill up again. This is not a neat metaphor, but it will do.
Calories, just like gas for your car, are the thing that gives you the energy to do whatever you do. When we undertake physical activities, we burn calories.
That’s why physical exercise is so crucial for anyone who wants to lose weight and get in shape.
You see, the excess calories in your body are stored in the form of glycogen or fat. So when you overeat and stock up on extra energy reserves that you don’t need, you start gaining weight.
And that’s why you are here. You want to continue enjoying your iced tea, but you are worried. Might the iced tea you are drinking be bulking up your weight?
Let’s find out.
Why we Need Calories
First, let me inform you that calories are not bad. What you have instead is deficiencies, optimum levels, and excess levels.
Remember that – calories are crucial for your health and well-being, but you must take the right amount.
Our culture, intentionally or unintentionally, has given a bad name to calories. An uninformed person is bound to think calories are evil, that they are like a disease or pest, something wholly undesirable.
That is a wrong notion. You see, without calories, we die. Yes, you need calories to live. Your cells need energy to live. Organelles known as mitochondria create energy in your cells.
Each cell in your body contains between 500 and 2,000 mitochondria. They are tasked with converting oxygen and calories into energy.
The oxygen is crucial for the burning of the calories you consume in your food or drink.
So no calories means no energy to run your body. Your heart stops. Your lungs cease functioning. You die.
How Many Calories Should You Eat Per Day?
Different individuals need different amounts of energy daily. It depends on a variety of factors, such as size, age, and how active you are. Also, height, weight, sex, and shape.
An example to illustrate this point: if you are 6 feet tall, a young man in your earlier twenties, and you play professional football, you need more calories than if you were a retired old lady.
Health authorities in different countries give different recommendations of the ideal daily calorie consumption quantity.
According to the US government, the average man needs 2,700 calories per day, while the average woman needs 2,200.
But the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has a different recommendation: 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the average adult should eat at least 1,800 calories per day.
You can find scientific calorie calculators on nutrition websites such as www.authoritynutrition.com. The calorie calculator on this site requires you to key in the following details: gender, age, weight, height, and activity level.
Using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the calculator gives you an accurate estimate of how many calories you should eat per day.
Calculating your daily calorie requirement will be useful for monitoring and controlling your iced tea calorie intake.
Other websites that have calorie calculators include MyFitness Pal, FatSecret, Lose It!, Cron-o-meter, and Spark People.
How Many Calories Does Iced Tea Contain?
Different foods and food types contain different quantities of calories. A gram of protein yields four calories. This is also true of a gram of carbohydrates. But a gram of fat will yield nine calories.
Now, let’s narrow our focus on iced tea calorie quantity per serving. The number of calories in a cup or can or bottle of iced tea depends on what you have put in the tea.
If it’s unsweetened, the quantity will be less. Sweetened iced tea has many more calories than unsweetened tea. I prefer using the best iced tea maker for this.
One cup of sweetened iced tea contains no fats, 23.44 grams of carbohydrates, 0.02 grams of protein, and 90 calories.
Conversely, a cup of unsweetened iced tea contains no fats, 0.67 grams of carbohydrates, 0.02 grams of protein, and only two calories.
I want you to notice the difference: 88 calories!
A cup of iced tea sweetened with sugar contains 47 calories. And if you sweeten your calories with low-calorie sweetener, you get seven calories.
Clearly, if you want to keep your iced tea calorie intake down, unsweetened iced tea is the only option.
Final Verdict
Keeping your calorie intake down is one of the proven ways to lose weight consistently. For that reason, you are required to track your daily calorie intake, calculating what each type of food or beverage adds to the day’s total.
Here is what I hope you took out of this article: that calories are not bad, that you actually need them to live. Only you must take care not to stock up on an excess quantity as this will be converted into fat.
And about iced tea, the lesson was this: that sweetened iced tea contains a drastically larger amount of calories than unsweetened iced tea. So if you are on a diet, stick to unsweetened tea.
Leave a Reply