Americans Can Get a Full Day's Worth of Calories in Just One Dish…or One Single Drink

If you are what you eat, Americans are really, really big.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published "What 2,000 Calories Looks Like," a photographic look at how easy it is for one American meal to reach the 2,000-calorie mark — demonstrating how many Americans could be eating an entire day's worth of food in one sitting.

Image via joo0ey/flickr

Here are some of the worst offenders for each meal of the day, according to the Times' breakdown:

• Breakfast: IHOP's classic skillet with sausage and orange juice

Between the juice (110 calories) and the skillet (pancakes, eggs, sausage and home fries totaling 1,880 calories), one could eat this breakfast alone to hit their daily calorie quota.

• Lunch: Chipotle's carnitas burrito, chips and a Coke

The guacamole puts this meal over the top.

With a carnitas burrito (945 calories) and chips with guac (770 calories) on your plate, with a Coke (276 calories) to wash it all down, one lunch at Chipotle could hold just a touch over the daily 2,000-calorie recommendation.

• Dinner: The Cheesecake Factory's farfalle with chicken

This single dish has 2,410 calories contained within its heaping portion of pasta, cream sauce and fried chicken.

Image via Rahxy/flickr

• Dessert: Sonic's peanut butter caramel pie shake

Sweets were the kicker in many meals — with syrupy pancakes or an extra cookie adding hundreds of calories — but Sonic took the cake, so to speak, with its milkshake offerings.

Multiple Sonic shakes contained more than a full day's worth of calories, the Times reported, with the large peanut butter caramel pie shake weighing in with a whopping 2,090 calories.

See the full breakdown, complete with artery-restricting photos, at the Upshot.

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