The Notorious Cookie Swap

I have a wonderful friend who simply falls apart at the thought of baking 12 dozen (I’m not exaggerating) holiday cookies. It sends her into a tizzy, trashes her aspirations of healthy eating and stresses the poor woman out to the gills. There seems to be a simple explanation and solution to this predicament…Don’t engage in the swap!

It’s sometimes not that easy, right? Saying no to events that hover around the holiday period tends to cast a spell on us sometimes and draw us into their captivating ora even though we don’t particularly enjoy them or want to participate in them whatsoever. Being a part of the infamous “cookie swap” is one of those time consuming, stressful events that never seems to skip a beat at this time of year. Bah humbug you may be thinking, is this coach Scrooge? No, it is your health and wellness coach stressing the importance of not allowing yourself to get into situations that have a definite opportunity to trash your inner most goals and dreams.

Let’s examine the happenings of introducing holiday cookies into your merriment, how many calories they entail and what you have to do to erase their existence in your beautiful self. Perhaps if you see in black and white what they are worth and what you must accomplish to shred their calories it may deter you from entering a cookie swap, delving into their creations and if nothing else, gives you the awareness of what you are getting yourself involved in. According to The Complete Food Counter written by Natow and Heslin the following small biscuits have the following calories:

*1 peanut butter kiss cookie = 109 *1gingersnap cookie = 31 *1 chocolate chip cookie = 76
*1 chocolate dipped coconut macaroon = 125 *1 thumbprint cookie = 144 *1 plain sugar cookie = 94

It’s that jovial number that plays a part in the enjoyment of cookies. Can you eat just one? If you can then there really isn’t much to worry about truthfully. However, when one leads to two, three, four or more, it takes 140-pound woman 5 minutes of jumping jacks to burn off a gingersnap cookie, a peanut butter kiss cookie takes 30 minutes of vacuuming, a thumbprint cookie requires 16 minutes of stair stepping, and one plain sugar cookie involves almost an hour of wrapping presents. So as you can plainly see one little cookie leads to multiple times the amount of energy that must be exerted to burn that little bugger off. The next time you are tempted to indulge ask yourself one small question “is it worth it?”