Two Hundred Calories of Pure Spite

The New Year’s resolution to eat better and drag yourself to the gym has almost certainly already collapsed—departing with roughly the same energy as a potential sexual partner who finally gets you home on a damp Saturday night, takes one look at the situation, and starts reaching for their jacket. I’ll call you, I swear, oh my god.

And yet: here’s a fat kebab, there’s a fat cheeseburger. What’s the worst that can happen? You need brain food. You’d eat less if you weren’t hungry. The label says light. You walked somewhere today. These are all real thoughts that real people have while the calories quietly consolidate their position.

wiseGEEK photographed exactly 200 calories’ worth of various foods side by side, and the results are the kind of visual information that makes you briefly want to never eat again before you open a delivery app anyway. The gap between what 200 calories looks like in celery versus what it looks like in anything you actually want is where your self-image lives. Scroll through it, feel something die a small death inside you, and then make peace with it. Information has never once made a person less hungry. At least now you can stop pretending.