Being Starbucks Savvy!

I worked at a coffee shop for a year, and my favorite drink there was the "Chocolate Pecan Pie": a 20 ounce drink with fat-free milk, with 3 shots of espresso and chocolate, praline, hazelnut, and a touch of caramel flavored syrups. This was SO heavenly! But guess what? It was also SO fattening!  One large drink was around 300-400 calories, and I drank at least one per shift, sometimes two.

I can admit this now, because I have educated myself about the nutirional information about espresso drinks (like Starbucks.)  And it was as easy as going to their website and poking around!

I used to get a Venti skim mocha at Starbucks, until I went to their nutritional information website and found that drink contains almost 400 calories! Yikes! That is almost as many calories as a meal would be!

So I switched to sugar-free flavored syrups, and I have not looked back.  Sugar-free flavors have zero calories, and the espresso itself has zero calories, so the only calories a sugar-free drink contains is the amount of calories in the skim milk.

Now I get a Venti, "skinny" (sugar & fat free) vanilla & caramel latte. This new combination is less than 200 calories. That's right. I still get a large, kept the fat-free milk, and simply changed to sugar-free flavors. And that one small substitution saves me almost 200 calories!

I recommend that you check out Starbucks' nutritional website: http://www.starbucks.com/retail/nutrition_info.asp and check it out for yourself!

It's easy to make positive changes in your diet when you're well-informed!