February means lots of things – Super Bowl Sunday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and that most traumatic time of the entire month – Girl Scout Cookie time!
Going to the grocery store means that you are confronted with sweet little faces, begging you to buy just one box, please? What harm can there be in purchasing such delights? They are for a good cause, after all. Beware, however – altruistic moves can have devastating consequences on your waist line. Here are the top 6 Girl Scout cookie offerings and their calorie counts along with the necessary exercise needed to burn them off. Read the labels and make an educated decision; don’t be swayed by guileless smiles and sweet dispositions.
Probably the most well known Girl Scout cookies are Samoas– a tempting coconut/caramel/chocolate concoction. Dieter beware: just 2 Samoas will set you back 140 calories – and we all know it’s nearly impossible to stop with two cookies. You would need to hand wash your car for 30 minutes in order to burn those babies off your hips!
Following close behind in popularity is the Thin Mint cookie. A serving of Thin Mints is a bit more generous – 4 cookies are 160 calories, or 40 calories per cookie. Eating a sleeve of these treats – not a very difficult task for many – would be 4 servings, or 640 calories. To burn that, you’d need to take two spin classes back to back.
Do-si-dos sound like a more healthy choice. After all, they are a peanut butter cookie – and peanut butter is protein and a good choice, right? Wrong. One serving equals 2 cookies for a total of 120 calories, or the magic number burned in 1 1/2 hour walking at a brisk pace.
Lemon Chalet Cremes have a European sound with a healthy twist. Lemon means fruit and everyone knows that European foods are more tasty, right? These cream filled sandwich cookies are supposed to be one of the low fat choices, but 3 cookies have 170 calories. Digging a garden for 30 minutes burns 170 calories, and you can use that garden to plant some really delicious and nutritious vegetables.
Tagalongs have a great name and are another cookie that you’d think would be healthy. Full of peanut butter enrobed in chocolate, 2 cookies are 140 calories with an astonishing 9 grams of fat. Run at a 5 mph pace for 30 minutes in order to work off those 2 cookies – and these cookies make it tough to stop at just two!
Trefoils, or shortbread, offer the largest serving size of any of the Girl Scout Cookies. For 170 calories, you can have 5 cookies. With those five cookies, be prepared to mow your yard for 30 minutes.
It’s also of interest to note that since 2024 the Girl Scouts have included zero trans fat per serving on the labels of the cookie boxes. Some ingredient labels do list partially hydrogenated oil. This is a primary source of the unhealthy fat. FDA guidelines allow for “0g trans fat” to be shown on a label when the serving is actually any number less than 1g. In the case of the Girl Scouts, this is often the situation. If you are one of those people who just can’t stop at one serving, but instead go on to have two, three or six servings of cookies in a sitting, be sure to calculate accordingly. It all adds up.
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