Everyone with a wicked sweet tooth trying to stick to a low-calorie diet has probably heard of Chocolate Covered Katie. Her desserts seem downright magical. Some chocolate-dipped creations on “The Healthy Dessert Blog” boast calorie counts, calculated by Katie herself, that sound like culinary witchcraft, like 90 calories for a vegan brownie with frosting. But some fans are seriously confused about the calorie counts listed under her drool-worthy desserts. The major issue: they can’t replicate the same calorie counts, even when they try different calorie calculators. So are Chocolate Covered Katie’s calorie counts way off? We looked into it.
Although the question of her calorie count accuracy had been raised before, one Reddit user recently addressed their own confusion in a long post. The user is a part of the 1200isplenty subreddit, a forum where users following a 1200-calorie-a-day diet support each other and discuss topics ranging from weight loss success stories to low-calorie snack options.
How off are the calorie counts from Chocolate Covered Katie?
This Reddit user, vitani88, explained that they questioned them while enjoying one of the recipes, Katie’s “Tagalongs Peanut Butter Donuts,” which the blogger claims clocks in at 221 calories per donut, even with the chocolate coating. “I entered the recipe into MyFitnessPal and found that it was almost 100 calories more than her website listed,” vitani88 wrote.
The user even posted their calorie calculations, using MyFitnessPal, next to the blogger’s nutritional info for comparison. While the Reddit user left out an ingredient and even used a lower-calorie milk alternative, the calories still came out to over 300 calories per donut. Technically vitani88 should have used an additional ounce of chocolate or 2 tablespoons of oil in their calculations, meaning the difference is even bigger. So Metro tried it out ourselves. We used the USDA Food Composition Database to avoid inconsistencies since calorie counting apps frequently allow users to add entries, which may be inaccurate.
Using Chocolate Covered Katie’s recipe for these donuts, but substituting unsweetened almond milk in place of regular milk and using 6.2 ounces of chocolate chips (equivalent to a cup), our calculations come out to 356 calories per donut. Since the chocolate is 0.2 ounces above what she suggests, we also calculated with a much lower ¾ of a cup of chocolate chips (4.6 ounces). Even though this is now less chocolate that the blogger calls for, our calorie count still came out above hers. Ours was 316 calories per donut, nowhere near her delicious-sounding 220 calories. That’s 96 calories or, as the Reddit user pointed out, roughly 100 calories off of her claim.
While 100 calories might not seem like a lot to some, it’s almost 10% of your daily calories if you’re trying to stick to a 1200-calorie-a-day diet. To look at it another way, that means Chocolate Covered Katie’s calorie count on this recipe is 43% off.
Was it just the one recipe?
People make mistakes, sure. So let’s assume this one might have been a mistake. Something was typed wrong or perhaps she used the low-calorie powdered peanut butter and forgot to specify that on her post about the recipe. This Reddit user thought the same thing, and gave the blogger the benefit of the doubt. But when they calculated the calories for three other recipes on the site, even some that were the most straightforward in ingredients, none of them aligned with the numbers Chocolate Covered Katie was promoting.
You can see vitani88’s explanation and rundown about which recipes they recalculated in their original post, embedded below:
Question about Chocolate Covered Katie’s nutritional info from r/1200isplenty
Some of the differences identified are small, some are around this same 100-calorie mark. Either way, if you’re using a recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie to indulge your sweet tooth and still lose weight, consider calculating the calories on your own instead of relying on her numbers.
