Baboon Pirates

Scribbles and Scrawls from an unrepentant swashbuckling primate.

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Location: Texas, United States

Friday, January 22, 2010

Project LOLA - Day 126

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream!

More than 4 months into the Long Overdue Lifestyle Adjustment, and I'm still managing to stick with it.

Mostly...

There's been some hits & misses. Mostly, it's me missing double cheeseburgers and chilidogs.

I'm really amazed I haven't broken down and had a fast food gorge or gone to a Chinese or pizza buffet and put the fear of God into the cooks. I keep telling myself it's OK to go have a steak once in a while, but can't bring myself to do that, either. It's not the steak so much as it is all the other goodies, the baked 'tater, the warm sourdough loaf with real butter, the thick slab of cheesecake for dessert...

It's easier just to say no to all of it.

I seem to have settled into a groove of about 2000-2100 calories a day. I just couldn't stick with 1800. I finally decided that rather than get out of bed hungry at 11 pm and go hork down a container of yogurt and a handful of pretzels, I'd just tack on an additional 300 calories with dinner, and avoid the munchies later on. You can eat a crapload of carrots and sugar snap peas for 300 calories...

Some ideas haven't worked out too well. Beef broth, for starters. Why drink hot tea and think about food? Have a hot cup of broth and have the illusion of eating steak! Wrong... It's way too salty, and it really doesn't taste very good. If you were to lay underneath a bull, spraying its 'nads with a hose and drinking the scrotal runoff, that's about all the beef taste you get from a can of broth.

OTOH, at the local HEB I've found Baxter's soups, which aren't cheap, but are low cal and taste pretty good. The Lentil & Smokey Bacon is excellent, and only 220 calories for the whole can.

Snyder's pumpernickel and onion pretzel sticks are pretty darned good, and a double handful is only 200 calories.

I made the mistake of going into the local Central Market, which is a Foodie's Paradise. Not only was their sushi much more spendy than the regular HEB, the whole place is set up as a diet-failure zone. There's free samples of everything all over the store!! Walking through the bakery section was pure torture. They sell about 40 different kinds of bread, and each type has a bag of sliced up samples luring you in with their seductive aroma... I only ate 2 or 3 or 12. Better that than the whole loaf, I suppose.

On the way out the door, a smallish wedge of Cotswold cheese leaped into my basket while I was surreptitiously dry-humping the giant wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano. I tried to make the wedge last more than one day, but I'm just no good at long-term relationships...