What if the biggest contributor to your calorie intake isn’t dessert? What if it’s your morning coffee? Or the sugar stirred into your oats, or the full-cream milk poured over breakfast. It could be the flavoured yoghurt you grabbed on the way to work. While these tiny additions don’t feel like indulgences, your routine sprinkles, repeated daily, often have a far greater influence on our long-term health than the occasional treat we tend to blame. For registered dietician Mbali Mapholi, South Africa’s hefty burden of disease is often fueled by these micro decisions, creating a calorie creep from hidden calories in otherwise healthy food. Here, she encourages you to be honest about your calorie intake – not only from the muffin, sandwich or milkshake – but from the little additions to your otherwise wholesome meals.
Meet the author: Mbali Mapholi is a Registered Dietician (SA) and Nutrition Consultant at Canderel South Africa.
Calorie Creep: The Hidden Calories You Miss
In South Africa, non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke have been rising sharply. NCD deaths increased by nearly 59% between 2008 and 2018. Diabetes deaths alone rose by over 36%. Cardiovascular disease now kills more South Africans than all cancers combined.
These are conditions where daily dietary habits, accumulated over years, play a measurable role – and sugar intake is one of the most well-established drivers. The reality is that most weight gain doesn’t happen because of one indulgent meal or a special occasion. More often, it comes from the accumulation of seemingly insignificant choices repeated every day.
Nutrition professionals sometimes refer to this as “calorie creep” – the gradual build-up of extra calories that slips under the radar because each individual choice feels too small to matter.
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Calories in – but no out
Importantly, it is as crucial to recognise that highly processed and rapidly absorbed foods, like simple sugars and starches, are bigger threats to any diet than complex carbohydrates and fibrous veg. According to an editorial published in Public Health & Nutrition, “Such carbohydrates may induce neurohormonal changes that might, in turn, help produce the overeating and inactivity often interpreted as causative for obesity.” Translation: quick carbs and processed food react differently in the body, which creates the environment for obesity.
Think about a typical weekday. You wake up and make your first cup of coffee, adding a teaspoon of sugar without a second thought. It’s exactly the kind of moment where many South Africans could make a simple swap, replacing sugar with a sweetener stick while still enjoying the sweetness they expect from their morning routine. None of these decisions feels unhealthy. None feels excessive. Yet each contributes a small amount of additional energy intake that, over weeks and months, becomes significant.
“As a dietitian, I believe we need to change the way we think about healthy eating. Rather than asking, ‘What should I give up?’, perhaps the better question is, ‘What small change can I realistically make today that I’ll still be making three months from now?’” Mbali Mapholi, rd
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Weight Gain Happens In Minutiae, Not Big Moments
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about healthy eating. We tend to assume our health is determined by the occasional dessert, takeaway meal or festive celebration. In reality, our long-term habits matter far more than our occasional treats.
The World Health Organisation recommends that adults limit free sugars to less than 10% of daily energy intake, ideally below 5%. South Africa’s burden of diet-related chronic disease makes that recommendation not abstract, but urgent. It isn’t only found in sweets and desserts. It appears in coffee and tea, high-added-sugar breakfast cereals, flavoured yoghurts, many commercial smoothies, sauces and the wide range of ultra-processed foods that now make up a significant part of many South Africans’ daily diets. Individually, these choices may seem harmless, but together they can meaningfully increase our overall calorie intake.
How To Beat The Weight Gain Trap
The encouraging news is that these are also the easiest habits to change. That could mean replacing sugary drinks with water more often. Reading nutrition labels before buying breakfast foods. Opting for plain yoghurt over flavoured varieties. Or swapping the sugar in your daily coffee or tea for a single stick of a Canderel low- or no-calorie sweetener, allowing you to enjoy the sweetness you prefer while reducing sugar and calorie intake as part of a balanced approach to weight management.
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The same principle can be carried into the kitchen, where lower-calorie sweetening options can be used in everything from breakfast dishes to home baking, helping to make healthier choices part of everyday routines rather than special occasions.
What About Artificial Sweeteners?
The evidence on low- and no-calorie sweeteners and body weight is more nuanced than many people realise. These sweeteners can help reduce sugar intake in the short-term, particularly when used as a direct replacement in everyday habits like coffee or tea.
The World Health Organisation’s 2023 guideline noted that there is no clear evidence that they support long-term weight management on their own. What the research does suggest is that they can be one practical tool within a broader strategy of balanced eating and lifestyle change, not a solution on their own. For context, regulatory bodies set safe daily intake limits for artificial sweeteners far beyond typical consumption; a 70kg adult would need around 14 cans of artificially sweetened soda daily to approach the upper limit. That said, long-term science continues to evolve.
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Tiny Tweaks Pay Off
This philosophy that small swaps matter more than dramatic overhauls is one I’ve advocated throughout my career. As a dietician, I believe we need to change the way we think about healthy eating. Rather than asking, ‘What should I give up?’, perhaps the better question is, ‘What small change can I realistically make today that I’ll still be making three months from now?’
Because lasting health is rarely built through one dramatic decision. It is built through hundreds of small ones. The point is not that any single food or habit is to blame. The point is that awareness of what we eat, how much, and how often is where real change begins. If replacing sugar in your daily coffee with a lower-calorie alternative helps you start that journey, then that small swap has already done its job. But the real work is in the hundreds of other choices that fill the rest of your day.
