Fatty gets hungry for Cheez-It’s

 I am currently on a diet and I am watching my calories. I’m starting to get hungry but it’s only 4:00. Two whole hours until dinner! I figure out that I can have a snack with about 100 calories. I could have bought the 100 calorie snack packs at the grocery store, but I figured out that the unit price wasn’t as good as just buying a large box. So I’m stuck with the Cheez-It’s that are not individually packaged into nice snack sized pouches. If I want only 100 calories, I’m going to have to figure out how many Cheez-It’s are needed by reading the nutrition facts.

 It says that a serving (29 crackers) is equal to 130 calories. I need to know how many crackers are 100 calories. I set up my proportion making sure that the number of crackers is on the top and the number of calories is on the bottom for each ratio (see below).

 

When I cross-multiply, I come up with the new equation:

2900 = 130x

 Finally, I divide each side by 130 to get 22.3 crackers. I look in my box for 22 crackers and take comfort in knowing that I will stay under 100 calories by not eating that 0.3 cracker, which I’m sure exists somewhere at the bottom of the box.

 

Late night snack

 I’m hungry again. This time, cheese flavored crackers won’t cut it. I need some actual cheese. I bought a block of cooper sharp the other day and I have yet to dice it up. The block weighs 0.75 pounds and the nutrition facts say that a serving size of 1 ounce is 100 calories.

Before I can start cutting, I have to figure out the total number of calories in the whole block. I know that 1 pound is equal to 16 ounces. I need to know how many ounces are in 0.75 pounds. For this, I set up a proportion. I keep pounds on top and ounces on the bottom:

 

After a quick cross-multiplication, I figure out that I have 12 ounces of cheese. (I cheated a bit to figure this out without using decimals. I knew that 0.75 was the same as ¾. All I had to do was multiply 16 by ¾. First, 16/4 is 4 and 4 times 3 is 12.) Since each ounce is 100 calories, the total number of calories in the chunk is 12 times 100: 1200 calories.

 Now I’m not sure how much cheese I want…definitely less than 100 calories. I figure that I’ll just chop it up until the chunks are a reasonable size. I start by cutting the block in half to get two pieces. Way too big! I then cut each of these blocks in half to get four pieces. Still too big. I chop these up into eight pieces. Closer, but still too big. It would look like a decent size if I cut the remaining strips into thirds. So I do so and end up with 24 pieces of cheese. Due to the Law of Conservation of Cheese Calories, there are 1200 calories in 24 chunks of cheese. To figure out how many calories are in each chunk, I set up another proportion.

 

By cross-multiplying, I derive the following equation:

 24z = 1200

 Finally, by dividing each side by 24, I determine that each chunk has 50 calories. I eat one, decide that that is not enough, and have another for a total of 100 calories.