The calorie counter

Lean back in your armchair and feel your belly. Is it poking out? Overstretched? The after-effects of too much turkey and ham and cornbread stuffing? Then perhaps it's time to consult with Diet Detective Charles Stuart Platkin , a Miami-based public health advocate who is so concerned with fat intake that the website for his latest book lists the minute-by-minute aggregate weight gain of all Americans.

So far, we're in the trillions. Platkin's new guide, "The Diet Detective's Count Down," lists the calorie count of 7,500 of your favorite foods, from that rice dish at PF Chang ' s to the fat-filled, double-stuffed Oreo cookie. But this, you say, is not new information.

What is different about Platkin's book is that it tells you how many minutes of walking, jogging, yoga, dancing, biking, or swimming it would take to burn off that food. The whole point, says the New Yorker, is to know the energy cost of the foods you consume. Perhaps by knowing that it takes 198 minutes of walking to burn off that 769-calorie chicken salad with pecans, one might reconsider the vinaigrette dressing. In an interview with the Globe, Platkin explains his approach to eating sensibly, or not more than your body can reasonably burn in a day. -- ADRIENNE P. SAMUELS

Which of those 7,500 favorite food items has the most calories?

It's so funny you brought it up. The highest thing in the book are the PF Chang's banana spring rolls. They're 1,860 calories and that's unbelievable. My wife was asking: ' What's in them?'

Thank goodness a Breathsaver is only five calories. That's much more manageable to burn off.

Those things add up, too. Like the tangerine Altoids. If you have eight to 10 of them they start to add up. People eat them throughout the day. Fifty calories is not terrible, but if you do that every day it compounds.

In a lot of entries in the book, you recommend 180 minutes of walking to burn off certain high-caloric foods. Who has that kind of time?

For the countdown, there are some components to it that I think people miss. One component they often miss is that when they hear you have to walk 18 minutes to burn off one Oreo doublestuffed cookie, they say, " My goodness, imagine what a whole day's worth of food is." It's just disheartening and they feel that they have to exercise forever. But you have a daily caloric budget and once you exhaust that budget is when the exercise qualifications kick in.

Wouldn't dancing 186 minutes a day just make you hungier than you were when you started?

Exercise, I don't think it influences hunger too much. Obviously, if you've eaten properly and eaten well, it's not going to make you hungrier.

Will people find this book depressing?

It's a reference point. It basically gives you a relative value of what the food costs you so you know whether something's splurge -worthy or not.