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Wellness Wednesday for April 23, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Calories are the literal energy content. The subjective taste is irrelevant.

The point is that drinks sweetened with artificial sweeteners have 100 times less calories than drinks sweetened with sugar, because they have 100 times less of the sweetener. And 100 times less calories is so little that it can be rounded down to zero.

It does not matter. A tiny packet has 1 gram, or about 3.5 calories. The sweetness is irrelevant. The rounding down is because it's less than the allowed threshold

Cooking spray doesn't have zero calories, but the reason people think that's true is essentially due to a loophole in nutrition labeling requirements. Essentially, the label says it's 0 calories because of the declared serving size. For any foods, if the declared serving size contains less than 5 kcal (calories), the manufacturer is permitted to round down to 0. This is exactly the reason why Tic-Tacs - probably the most well-known example of this - indicate that they have 0 calories per serving, even though technically each Tic-Tac mint averages about 2 calories. Since the serving size is <5 calories, it can be rounded down to 0.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nutrition/comments/xpsky0/how_does_cooking_spray_have_zero_calories/#:~:text=Since%20the%20serving%20size%20is,much%20any%20liquid%20cooking%20oil.