In The Accidental Tourist, the novel that made me go out and buy everything else written by Anne Tyler, Sarah Leary leaves her husband Macon. When he asks why, she gives this as one reason: that the best house in the world could be up for sale, but Macon wouldn’t consider buying it if he just purchased address labels for their old one because he wouldn’t want the labels to go to waste.

Once she leaves him, his quirkiness becomes even more apparent. He makes time and energy savings his new hobby.

Usually formal and fastidious in his appearance, Macon starts wearing sweat suits as both pajamas and clothes (yet keeps wearing his dressy black tie shoes since he doesn’t own sneakers) and only showers every other day. He sews his bed linens together in a way that eliminates the need to make the bed every morning, and he even ties the clothes basket in the basement underneath the laundry shoot to his deceased son’s skateboard because pushing is quicker than carrying.

If Macon would have only made saving calories his new hobby, he could have remedied something that bothered him went from wearing dress pants with a belt to sweatpants with a drawstring: His belly stuck out.

Today’s column encourages you to be just a bit like Macon and develop the suggested hobby: saving calories by replacing some of the higher-calorie foods you regularly use and enjoy with similar lower-calorie substitutes. While last week you read how increasing NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, could help you burn an additional 100 calories or so a day, you can create an even a far greater caloric deficit each day if you make a few of the aforementioned swaps.

I’ve done this for 30-plus years and have had no problem maintaining the lower-than-normal body weight (for my height, body type, and age) I need to best climb hills on a bicycle. Possibly the most significant savings of calories for me occurred when I stopped eating a healthier alternative to standard spaghetti, a 100 percent whole wheat variety, and started eating a type just as healthy but far lower in calories, shirataki spaghetti.

Five dry ounces of whole wheat pasta, the amount I used to limit myself to, equals 450 calories. But I never felt filled up and always wanted to eat more.

Sixteen ounces of Nasoya’s shirataki spaghetti noodles, sold ready-made and in a liquid you drain away, only totals 60 calories, yet it does a far better job of appeasing my appetite.

The cal count is so low because shirataki spaghetti noodles are made of konjour flour, chickpea flour, and potato starch instead of whole wheat durum semolina. And I like the taste just as much as whole wheat pasta.

Currently, I’m eating 16 ounces of these noodles seven times a week, so I’m consuming 420 calories. If I’d be eating five ounces of whole wheat pasta instead, I’d be ingesting 2730 calories more each week.

In other words, this swap allows me to eat 10,000 fewer calories each month without any sense of sacrifice. While not every swap I make creates as great a deficit, over time they certainly do add up.

For years, I ate about four cups of Kashi’s original seven-grain puffed cereal as my after-supper snack. I stopped because it’s no longer offered on the East Coast and having it regularly shipped from California became cost prohibitive.

Instead, I now eat puffed wheat and save something even more valuable to me than the $2 difference per box: a total of 1120 calories each week.

It’s swaps like these that allow me to keep my food volume high and my caloric total low. It’s swaps like these that made another teacher who helped me chaperone the high school cross-country team years ago when we traveled to State College to say, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone your size eat quite as much as you do.”

So look for food swaps to save calories every day. A great way to start is with condiments and dressings, particularly salad dressings.

One teaspoon of any oil constitutes about 120 calories, most salad dressings use some sort of oil, and most people drown their salads in dressing rather than lightly coat them. Because of this, if you regularly consume salads and change to a reduced-calorie dressing, the savings is significant.

Moreover, you can also create even more savings by selecting lower-calorie extras to add to the base of the salad. Double up on the cherry tomatoes and cucumber slices, cut out the croutons and cheese, and you can easily eliminate 100 calories.

Selecting leaner cuts of red meat, eating poultry on occasion instead of red meat, and baking or broiling meat, poultry, and fish instead of frying are other great ways to consume fewer calories without reducing your total volume of food.