Zlimmer! Snack Guide: Potato Chips
Simple Tips To Enjoy Potato Chips While Managing Your Weight:
1. Create a Potato Chip Mayonnaise Sandwich:
The best way to enjoy potato chips is create a sandwich with them as the main ingredient. We’ll start with a quick recipe using Mayonnaise. You’ll need the following ingredients for this:
- 5 Lay’s Classic Potato Chips (or your favorite type of potato chips) - 40 Calories
- 1 Tablespoon Mayonnaise - 50 Calories
- 2 Slices of Large Bread (80 Calories x 2) - 160 Calories
Spread the mayo across the bread. Crush the chips and sprinkle them on the mayonnaise. Top off it with the other slice and you have a delicious snack using your favorite potato chips. Total for the Sandwich: 250 Calories.
2. Or Create a Peanut Butter and Potato Chip Sandwich:
Instead of mayonnaise, you can also use 1 tablespoon smooth peanut butter. 1 Tablespoon smooth peanut is about 100 calories. This will be a 300 Calorie snack.
The biggest difference between eating a regular size bag of chips vs. making a Potato Chip sandwich is that the sandwich will fill you up much more. It’s almost a small meal on its own.
3. Low-Fat is a Problem with Potato Chips:
We know that there are plenty of low-fat potato chips options available. But are they any good for managing your weight? Not really. Here’s why:
- Take Ruffles Lite Potato Chips for example. They are half the calories of the regular kind and they are pretty tasty as well. So what’s the problem? They use an ingredient called “Olestra” as a Fat substitute. This is commonly known to cause a laxative effect. So you can expect lots of rumble and grumble in your stomach and a few “related accidents” as well. But surely there are low-fat chips that don’t use Olestra an ingredient, right?
- Well, yes. One of the best tasting is “Cape Cod Reduced Fat Fresh Garden Herb Potato Chips”. The problem here is that we didn’t find any significant difference in total calories with these or any other low-fat, “non-stomach grumbler” brands.
So as things stand now, we don’t really recommend any of the low-fat varieties. If you come across one that tastes great and cuts down the calories, please add it in the comments below.
Meanwhile, if the sandwiches didn’t work for you, try one the following ideas to still enjoy potato chips while managing your weight:
4. Get the Regular Size:
The Regular size (about 1.5 ounce, 30 Chips) would be about 200-250 Calories for most types of potato chips. This is still a pretty good number in terms of calories but the key is to stop at one.
If you can get the regular size, enjoy it and stop there - 200-250 Calories is not a bad snack at all.
5. Change The Beverage:
Admittedly, the best combination with potato chips is Coke. But if you can replace Coke with a bottle of water or Diet Coke it will save you 150 calories per can.
Diet Coke Tip: Add a few drops of fresh lemon to your diet coke to improve the taste.
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