Eat It Up

Kati and I were watching a new show on Food network called Food Detective. On the episode that we watched they were trying to figure out how to keep ice cream from falling off the cone while eating it. They threw out a stat of how much ice cream the average American eats in a year. The number that they gave was 15 quarts a year or 3.75 gallons. I thought that this number was kind of low so I did a little research this morning and found a variety of numbers from 25 pints (3.13 gallons) to 23.2 quarts (5.8 gallons). For today's purposes I will go with the higher number of 5.8 gallons a year. From this I started thinking about how much ice cream I must consume on an annual basis and how this compares to the national average.

I eat a 1.75 quart container a week at least. I'm not including in these figures the bowl I eat at my parents house at Sunday dinner each week, when we splurge and go to Baskin Robbins on a Saturday night after a hard days workout or when I have to go to the store on Wednesday night because I am out. If you figure I eat 1.75 quarts a week (0.4375 gallons), that's 91 quarts a year (22.75 gallons). Even using the highest number that I found, that's 3.9 times the national average of ice cream consumption.

Now let's talk calories. The brand that I prefer is the Kroger's Mint Chocolate Chip. There are 14 serving in this container (they say that one serving is a half cup, Ha!) at 160 calories per serving making it 2,240 calories per container. Meaning that I consume 116,480 calories per year just in ice cream. But, to make things fair I am also taking in 1,456 grams of protein and 13,832 grams of carbohydrates at the same time.

I figure that I will have to slow down my consumption when training is over because at the current rate I am burning nearly 9,000 a week just in workouts.