Schrödinger's Dick and Denying My Femininity

(Subtitle: Why the idea of "go take a bubble bath" sucks.)

My friend, Jeanne, brought me this book: Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet to take a look at. She said she doesn't quite follow their diet ideas as being "easy and idiot-proof" and at first glance I'm inclined to agree with it. Looks complicated, and any diet where you have to take 8 different vitamin supplements is - in my humble opinion - just wrong! Diet part of it aside, most diet books don't actually contain 250 pages of dry, boring, gastronomical information... and this would be the part my friend thought I would find interesting. The non-eating part, the, as you may, philosophy behind the plate.

Last night, I read about half this book.

Someone take away my stick before I beat these two women to death.

I started out with a dislike of India almost immediately. I understand that part of their "point" is to take away all those soft curvy lies that we (I love how they love to speak for "all women" here. I call BULLSHIT!) women use to placate ourselves about our weight issues. However, I find the last paragraph of her "How I got here" spiel to be particularly offensive.

"It wasn't okay. It didn't look nice, or even a little bit nice. It was utterly grotesque. A few times in the previous couple of months, I'd decided at the last minute not to attend a party that I'd really been looking forward to. I told my boyfriend it was because I was tired. I wasn't tired at all. I was too fat. I had, for the first time ever, become embarrassed to be seen in public, is the truth of it. I had nothing to wear. I was Giant bloody Haystacks."

Given, that in this particular little rant of self-loathing, she's in a size 18 (a size, as you may recall, I was personally thrilled to get into)... well, let's just say I didn't have loads of sympathy for her.

Following this particularly long and vile outspewing, they spend a lot of time trying to tell you (the faithful reader) that in order to follow a diet plan and lose weight, you must love yourself first.

Can I beat my head on the wall, please? How many activity points is that? Better yet, can I beat HER head against the wall, please.

Didn't we just go into long details about how much they hated themselves? And, by implication, if a size 18 is grotesque, surely a size 24 in the height of repulsiveness. How, then, having freshly come from this, is the reader supposed to turn it all around with a short list of things they like about themselves?

Keeping in mind that these two ladies are British, and the brits have an entirely different philosophy on life (no offense to whomever reads this blog that might be British) that totally doesn't agree with how I live and how I think... they recommend getting a diet buddy and then not telling anyone else that you're doing a food plan. At all. They do condescend to say that you don't have to follow this advice, but doing so will prevent other nosy people from telling you what you can and can't eat and giving you odd looks and then if you don't do so well, you won't feel you let people down.

I've found that being accountable to someone or something else other than myself really helps me. If nothing else, my pride doesn't want to let me fail. I can't bear the idea of all my friends thinking that I'm a complete fuck up. Even if they wouldn't think that - and trust me, I doubt my friends actually would - I would feel that they did. I used that pride to help me quit smoking. Pride may be one of God's seven deadly sins, but I totally believe that's because pride makes us rely on ourselves, rather than God, and God is a bit of a jealous bastard.

Then... and here comes the bit where I want to scream... there comes The List.

The List is that catalogs all the things they can think of that are non-food ways to reward yourself. Or show yourself some "real love", as they call it.

The List shows up in every freaking diet book and plan on the planet.

Inevitably, on the list, are these things: take a bubble bath, get a pedicure, buy something, take a walk, get a massage, watch a girlie movie, get a make over.

Indulge me a moment.

Take. A. Bubble. Bath.

Excuse me. Please. What the fuck? Is there some guide for "female relaxation methods" that was published in the 1800's that applies to all women, universally, and I missed it?

Take a bath? What?

This is supposed to make me feel better?

Ok, let's look at this for just a minute. We have someone (ourselves) who, for whatever reason, has decided to go on a diet/foodplan/lifestyle change/whathaveyou. And you're telling me that I'll feel better... by getting naked, hoping in the tub, and soaking my troubles away. Calgon, take me away!

I don't know what kind of bath tub these ladies have, but... mine's a 3/4 sized tub. I barely FIT in the freaking thing. Filling it up as close to full as I can, I can... get about 1/2 of myself wet at a time. So, I can soak my butt. And watch my boobs, belly, and thighs protruding out of soap suds like some blubbery islands. Or I can lay propped on my elbows, with my feet sticking out, and my butt and back freezing off. The top half of me is cold, the bottom half, too warm. I can't move around easily - shaving my legs while in the tub usually makes my hip hurt. And getting OUT of the bath is a major effort - generally involving my using both hands and wondering if the support bar is going to give way at any minute.

How, exactly, is this supposed to make me feel better?

I spend 15-20 minutes being uncomfortable, confronted - brutally so - with all my naked lack of glory. (That is, of course, assuming that Darcy doesn't come looking for me in the first three minutes, ask me what I'm doing, complain she doesn't have any juice, and offer to squirt me with her bath toys - and their cold water that's still inside them from her last bath...)

I've talked to several heavy-set friends of mine. None of them enjoy taking a bath. I've even talked to my skinny friend, and she says "Not especially. I get bored." She thought it was an interesting question and polled her friends. I got answers back like this:

• I never take a bath.
• I prefer showers.
• Sometimes. I find it more trouble than it's worth.
• The bubbles get in my hair.
• I'm too fat in the water.
• I feel like a dirty teabag soaking in dirty water.

So, why, tell me, does everyone suggest this?

Some of the other suggestions, manicure, pedicure, massage: I understand that other people like these things, but I don't. First off, I'm excessively uncomfortable with people I don't know well touching me. I really don't like it.

Secondly, I have this issue with manicured nails. I did it for a while, back when I worked at a convenience store, and honestly, the money I put into my nails was something I couldn't really afford, but I did it anyway. And then I noticed that the more elaborate the acrylic nail job was on other women, the less good jobs they had. Ticket takers, cashiers, waitresses... It seemed (to me) to be a badge of the lower class; see, I can afford to get my nails done! The more wealthy women had the silk wraps, and simple, understated nails, if they bothered to get their nails done at all. I couldn't afford the acrylics, so the silk was decidedly out. (Not to mention the stuff smells terrible and it hurts like hell when one of the nails pops off...) And, in talking to some guys, most of them don't even notice the nail job, unless it's badly done, and the ones that do notice it don't really like it. The acrylic nails don't "feel" real against the skin during a particularly passionate kiss, and thus, aren't very appealing to men. So, I stopped doing it.

Third, the idea of a pedicure makes my skin crawl. I don't want someone messing with my feet, thanks. (Also, I currently have a nail fungus that while I've gotten it to stop spreading, will take the better part of at least another year before my toenails stop looking weird and yellow and thick, and I can't have polish on my nails until it's gone. And I don't want anyone really observing my feet very closely while I'm taking care of that.

Fourth: I don't like professional massages. I've gotten them as gifts a few times. Aside from the general creeped out from having some strange person touching my back, the process itself tends to be painful and I feel like complete crap afterwards. That's probably my own fault, as I have no idea how to communicate my feelings to a masseuse. But at $50 a pop, I don't think it's worth the money to learn. My husband does a perfectly good job at helping me relax with a back rub, and I don't spend all my time wondering why he is doing it. (I have that problem with some types of doctors, too. I can't imagine, for instance, that the money is good enough to be a gynecologist, for example. Or a dentist. Or a proctologist. I could go on for a while, but you get the idea...)

Fifth: I don't wear makeup. Almost never. I don't do a good job applying it. I never know what to buy. I don't know how to use what I've got. And I never, ever look better wearing makeup. If I'm very lucky, I don't look worse. And frankly, I'm not interested in spending the money to learn that particular "feminine skill" either.

Sixth: I don't like girlie movies, 90% of the time. I think Julia Roberts is a plague upon the face of the earth. I don't like deliberate "make you cry" movies, and I think the whole genre of romantic comedy was made by some cruel writer and directors who have are acting out some teenage angst fantasy and putting their worst rivals in the position of the heroine. Romantic comedies always have these... wincey, cringey, public humiliation scenes that make me desperately ashamed of my species.

I mean, I know... these are just to give me "some ideas." But I find it difficult to not have the idea of strangling the idiots who assume that all women are the same. Do you know how many pairs of shoes I own? Five. My idea of a good movie tends to have lots of explosions, snappy one liners, and martial arts. Or aliens. I've never seen the inside of a Macy's or Dillards. I wouldn't know what to do with a $100 shopping spree at the perfume counter.

I'm just not a woman's woman.

[Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice (remember Alice? This is a song about Alice), Alice came by and with a few nasty words to Obie on the side, bailed us out of jail, and we went back to the church, had another thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat,and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to court.]

Then (and this is as far as I've gotten in the book, and probably as far as I intend to get) there's this little gem:

If you haven't lost any weight, you haven't been following the diet properly. It's as simple as that. You've either cheated, or some carbs have snuck in when you weren't looking... Vigilance, my dears, at all times. We mean it when we say that the smallest indulgence will completely derail the diet at this stage. Consider yourself chastised and go back to Day One. The thing about our diet is, it works. All you have to do is do it properly.

Yeah. There couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the diet plan of a couple of ladies with no formal education in medicine, dietary needs, or nutrition. It must be YOU, the reader, who's doing something wrong. You must be a cheater! Shame! Shame!

Fuck that.

Anyways... at bed time last night, while doing my nightly routine, I was noticing something. I used to have one roll of belly fat. Then, for a while, I had two. Last night, I noticed that I now have three distinct jelly rolls. One that starts under my boobs and ends just at my sternum. Then another that starts at the sternum and ends at about my navel. Then the third starts at the navel and hangs over my waist. YUCK.

And the skin on my belly is a little too big for these rolls, so I have all the lovely skin texture of an orange. Dimpled, is what Thomas called it, when I complained about it to him.

"Definitely unattractive," I muttered. "And it's only likely to get worse as I lose more weight. How lovely. I'll be thinner, but I'll have all this baggy skin all everywhere. Nasty."

"Leslie doesn't have baggy skin," he suggested. Leslie is this girl at our weight watcher's meetings that I really like and think she looks marvelous. She's about 25 pounds from goal, but I think she's just perfect as is.

"You don't know that," I said. "Her clothes cover it up." I notice she never wears shorts. Or sleeveless shirts.

"Pfft. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist."

"Dear heart," I said, hands on my hips. "Most people can't see your dick, either, but I assure you, it is always there."

"Maybe not," he said. "Maybe I have Schrödinger's dick."

"I think I'll go sleep on the sofa, now."

Situation, Resolved

I think I've been pretty lucky, all the way around. I recognize that this isn't the case for a lot of people attempting to lose weight and make a lifestyle change (DIET. DIET DIET DIET!!! Argh. I feel so PC when I say Lifestyle change... )

I'm in a fairly controlled environment. Much like the traditional white laboratory rat.

I'm a housewife. With a pre-school aged child. Without access to a car. Without lots of real life friends in the area.

You can't get much more controlled than that.

I don't get unexpected leftover birthday cake in the company office. I don't have co-workers with mini chocolate bars on their desks. I don't have to go out for business lunches. I don't even have loads of friends who show up on the weekends and want to go out for drinks.

My husband's doing this lifestyle change with me, so I don't have to contend with fixing one meal for him and one meal for myself. (The way my mother always did, except what she did was fixed him dinner and didn't bother to eat her own dinner for days at a time...) My daughter? She's so much of a not-sweets-aholic that she's still got most of a bucket of Halloween candy left over. (It's perched on the corner of the top of my desk, but most of the time, it doesn't tempt me.) My husband does the grocery shopping with me, so he'd know if I gave into an impulse buy and brought something into the house that we shouldn't eat.

I do a lot of my non-grocery shopping on line. I love the convenience of having something shipped to me, and then I don't have to go to the mall and fight with crowds and lines and not finding what I want. And thus, don't have to walk by the Aunt Annie's pretzels, or the Cinnabon, or whatever it is that smells good. I don't even watch a lot of TV... (have you ever noticed that they don't show those dreamy, slow food swirl type commercials for broccoli? Just cheeseburgers and ice cream and ... well, you know the drill.)

I really don't deal with temptation on a regular basis.

This makes me very lucky.

On the other hand, it does mean that when I get a craving, it's an actual craving. (As opposed to an environmentally created impulse.)

Last week, I desperately wanted ice cream. And not just any ice cream. Cold Stone.

So, I looked it up. For a Like It size, most of the Cold Stone ice cream runs from 8 to 10 points. Mix-ins can run from 1 to 5 points each. The Love It size is ~16 and I don't even like to think about 23 points of Gotta Have It! (For the record, I never ate a Gotta Have It. I usually got the Love It size...)

I mentioned it to Thomas. More than a few times, I'm pretty sure.

Finally, we decided that if we'd been really good this week, we'd go get some... since we couldn't save up points during the day for an indulgence, we'd have to use our WPAs. So, we did.

Both of us got the same thing, dark chocolate, no mix-ins in the Like It size. 8 points.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

I enjoyed every single bite. And I ate it very slowly.

Did I love it enough to wear it? (That's my leader's motivational thing, when she's facing an ice cream, or a cookie... of course, Beth also sprays her leftover food with Windex before she throws it away because - she admits this - she has been known to fish something OUT OF THE TRASH to eat it. She says you can't wash it off. That she knows this... worries me. Just a little bit.) Not really.

But I didn't have to. I'm down another pound this week. (Thomas is down 2 pounds this week.)

Would we have weighed in at less, if we hadn't had ice cream? Probably.

Does it matter? No.

Situation; Resolved.

Say that Again?

Here's a picture of our fruit bowl, just after getting back from the grocery store and putting things away. (We have strawberries in the fridge, as well as some frozen blackberries and raspberries.)

In our fruit bowl are three bananas, (one ripe and 2 a little less than ripe) one avocado, three mirabelle plums, 2 red "delicious" apples (which I think aren't very, and Thomas likes quite a lot. I'm more into the granny smith or Macintosh varieties.) and three Grāpples.

Well, what the heck is a grāpple, you might ask.

Good question. Apparently it's an apple that's been soaked on grape flavoring. Not even real grape juice, just artificial grape flavoring.

(As a note, it's pronounced Grape - el, not grapple as in to "wrestle or grasp".)

I'd seen them in the store a few times, but we've always passed them up. They're sold in little plastic cartons of four grapples apiece. For $5.99. That's right... that's $1.50 per grapple. Most of the rest of the apples at our grocery store range from ~$.62 each to $1.01 each... and they're cheaper if you buy them in a bag, or on sale. ( Generally speaking, at least one brand of apple is on sale every week. )

This time, Thomas noticed them. He picked up the little sealed package and turned it over several times, trying to figure out what it was... Finally, he sighed and said "Well, interesting idea, but they're pretty spendy." I countered with, "If you want to try it, we can... one of the bits of advice I'm constantly being given for sticking on plan is to try new things. You never know when you'll find something you like." (I used this particular advice on the mirabelle plums, which are, by the way, fantastic! If a bit wet and sticky.)

I had one this morning, as part of my morning snack. A grāpple is about 90 calories, with 3 grams of fiber, so standard for an apple. They do smell very much like grapes. Concord grapes, as a further matter of fact, which are my favorite kind of grape. The skin is yellow and red, giving the grāpple a not-quite-ripe look, and as it was enclosed in the little plastic package, hard to get a good look at in-store. There were numerous little nicks and blackmarks over the skin (I tried to take a picture of these, but my camera is not so good with the close-up shots.) and I might not have selected these in the store if I could have seen the marks, but they didn't penetrate the skin, so the fruit underneath wasn't bruised or bad. (Or bruised in the middle, which seems to be a horribly weird side effect to force-growing fruits, and I don't like it one bit. I don't want my apple to look perfect on the outside and sort of brown and fibrous in the middle.)

The grape smell was a lot stronger than the grape taste. (In fact, the smell is so strong that it's clinging to my hands over an hour later. I'm not sure I care for that too much.) Mostly, it tasted like an apple. Same crunch, same apple-taste.

I wasn't all that impressed, and at $1.50 each, I probably will not be buying them again, unless they prove a bigger hit with Darcy and Thomas.

Thomas's boss's boss, Shreyas, kept him over two and a half hours late on Wednesday for a meeting to address the issue of people quitting left, right and center from EFC. ("Wait, wait, let me get this straight... Shreyas kept everyone two and a half hours PAST quitting time to discuss WHY people were quitting?? Did anyone point out the obvious to him? Or like your two and a half percent raise that still doesn't bring you up to the MINIMUM of the pay range they were originally offering for the position?") which has screwed our week up royally. Wednesday is our normal grocery shopping day, but by the time Thomas got home, it was past dinner time, and if we'd gone to the store first, we wouldn't have eaten until at least 8:30... and then Thursday is one of our walking nights...

Thinking we might not get our walk in last night, I decided to do some free weights yesterday... I did 20 each of 7 different free weight exercises and 10 crunches and 10 pushups. It took me about 15 minutes to do them, and while it was only a 3 pound weight (in each hand), I was shaking by the end of some of the reps. Gotta work on that, I expect. Of course, Thomas came home early (not much early, like maybe 20 minutes) and we went for our walk promptly. Being in a bit of a hurry, since we needed to do the grocery shopping, I walked at his pace instead of him walking at mine, which meant we did the whole 2.2 miles in a little less than 27 minutes. Which is a good deal faster than I like to walk. (That's a 12 and a half minute mile... sheesh, no wonder I was out of breath and a little footsore last night. Literally, when I went to bed, the heel of each foot was painful to the touch.) He did the whole walk pulling Darcy behind him in her wagon (she was walking with us for a while, but ended up with such bad blisters on the back of her heels that I'm letting her ride for a while until they heal up.) so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

But then we got home and turned around and went right back out to do the grocery shopping, so I didn't get much rest, either.

On the other hand, Thomas brought me these yesterday... aren't they nice?

You Deserve the Limelight

A few months ago, I discovered something about myself. I'm a fan of limes.

You'd think it wouldn't take til I was nearly 36 years old to figure this out, wouldn't you? Heh.

Several years ago, my friend Carol got addicted to those Hint of Lime tortilla chips, but I couldn't stand them. From that, I decided that I must not like lime much (It's not like lime stuff had come up in my life much before that... lemons, yes. Oranges, yes - I hate oranges, but it had at least come up. Grapefruits, yes - ditto on grapefruits! YUCK!)

That's all beside the point, I suspect. Didn't know limes were my thing. Until one night, we were eating out at Don Pablo's and I got the Carnitas meal, which is an assemble it yourself taco with pulled pork, avocado, tomato, onion, and lime wedges. I always have liked the assemble it yourself stuff, it's fun to play with my food at the table. And I was in the mood to try something new. And I love avocados, and pulled pork, so I thought I would try it.

It was amazingly good. (Not entirely healthy, but I can still eat it, if I allot for it in my daily points... Don Pablo's does have available Nutrition Information, thus they get a nice linky...) And one of the things I noticed about eating it is that I was immediately in a much better mood than could easily be explained by simply having dinner out with a friend (especially as the friend I was going out with was Toby, and Toby has a distressing habit of chewing with his mouth open and slurping his soup, which makes me seriously sick to my stomach - one of the reasons we tend to do Don Pablo's with him is that it's almost always too noisy in there for me to be able to hear him slurping and smacking and otherwise carrying on as if he'd never been told that was rude.)

I noticed the same effect the next day, when I opened my box of leftovers and the lime smell filled the room.

Now, admittedly, I class aromatherapy in with the same group of crystal twinkie faux mysticism naturopathic medicine that has a great commercial following here in the US. Which is to say, my inner cynic likes to make fun of it.

That being said, if a thing works, why knock it? Even if it is completely in my head that the smell and taste of limes makes me feel better, isn't my mood entirely in my head anyway?

I started seeking out lime-flavored things, especially as I started this lifestyle change. My particular favorites are Diet Coke Lime (Diet Pepsi makes a lime, too, but I think the Diet Coke's version smells and tastes better), Dentyne Blast, Cool Lime chewing gum, Truelime flavor packets for my water, and Weight Watcher's Key Lime pie dessert.

Two weigh ins ago, I made my 10 pound marker, and I bought myself a little reward. (I thought about not using it until I'm back to 10 pounds after this week's gain, but that's sort of silly, don't you think? I did lose those 10 pounds, and if TOM snuck a little bit of it back on me, it should go away next week...)

Anyway, here it is... lime-scented, glitter lip gloss.

I do have to say that one thing I've always found attractive about myself is my mouth. I have full, pouty lips (well, maybe not as full as Angelina Joline, but personally, I think she looks like a bee stung her on her lip, ok?) and this lip gloss both smells and tastes good.

Thomas... is not so keen on it, but that's because I keep getting glitter on his mouth.

Commercial Break

I've made some discoveries in the last few weeks that have made this food plan a little more bearable, so I thought I'd talk about them... things I've tried and liked, things I've tried and NOT liked...

The most recent discover is Ronzoni pasta.

I really, really hate wheat products. When I was a kid, I liked Wonderbread - did you ever tear the crusts off a piece of wonderbread and roll the remaining bread around in your hand til you got a little doughy ball? I loved those. My favorite sandwiches were peanut butter and marshmallow fluff or Miracle Whip and banana. (I know, I know. Lots of you are making faces at me at the moment. Or you might be nodding knowingly and thinking of your own weird concoctions... feel free to share, I always love knowing I'm not alone in my bizarre behaviors). My grandparents used to try to get me to eat Wheat Bread, and I just couldn't. I'd rather have no sandwich than a sandwich on wheat. (As a note, my grandparents were also the sort who would force you to sit at the table until you'd eaten every last FREAKING bite of something you absolutely hated, even if it meant you were at the table until 3am. If anyone in my life ever gets fried chicken livers near me again, I promise you, I will punch your lights out.) Fortunately, I only had to sit at the table one day about the wheat bread thing, and after that I got to make my own sandwich, so whatever I wanted was fine.

I don't think that's why I hate wheat bread. I always assumed, growing up, that it was something I'd like more when I was older... an acquired taste that I never acquired. Like American beer. I did eventually come to love raw tomatoes. And lima beans. (I've always loved esoteric "grown up" foods like escargot, sushi, caviar, bleu cheese, and asparagus)

There's just something about wheat bread and wheat products that are unappealing to me. I think it's the smell. If I manage to put enough mustard or tangy sauce or onions on a sandwich, and breathe through my mouth, I can eat a wheat bread sandwich. It's still forcing myself to do it, but I can.

The thing is, I don't want to force myself to eat things I don't like. And I have managed to find some white bread options that I can live with, as far as sandwiches go. Or wheat products that don't quite have the same overwhelming rotten hay smell. The Flat Out light wraps are a favorite around here. Especially the Italian Herb and Sun-dried Tomato ones.

I've tried wheat pasta. Oh, my god, I thought I was going to be sick. The rotten hay smell was not only in my bowl, but it stuck to everything. My fork reeked of it, and my fingers, and I could smell it on my own breath for hours after I ate, even having brushed my teeth. TWICE.

I sighed a lot about it, and had just come to the conclusion that I was going to have to just add in the extra point to have the white pasta, when Ronzoni came in to save the day.

Warning: It's a little stickier than regular pasta, and somehow it seems wrong to add a teaspoon of oil to the water (why get back the point I just saved??). You'll want to have your sauce ready before the pasta is, so you can just add the sauce straight to the pasta. (And stir it in immediately, instead of leaving the sauce piled on top. makes for a less picturesque presentation, but hey... can't have everything.) And the package is, like every other freaking 'healthy' product out there, more expensive than regular pasta. And only contains seven servings, instead of the typical 8.

That being said, it's quite good. We had spaghetti last night and I was much happier with it. So was Darcy. Thomas says he doesn't care, that the wheat pasta works for him.

The second - and for me, more important - discoveries I've made (or had suggested to me, thanks ladies from the WW SAHM group!) are low point cheeses that are actually edible.

Sargento has come out with two light cheese slices, and light mozzarella cheese sticks that are 1 point a stick or slice.

Now, I love cheese. I have always loved cheese. Take the freaking chocolate if you want, I don't need it, but damn, leave me my cheese. And my god, is it points expensive! Finding low points alternatives have made me very happy. And I must say, the swiss in particular, is very tasty.

I eat cheese in omelets, in sandwiches, on salad, in soups, and on bagels... Which leads me to my other cheese discovery...

Laughing Cow cheese wedges. Very squishy and spreadable, it's got slightly more "bite" than cream cheese. Which makes up, I think, for the fact that my bagels and English muffins have grown slightly less tasty. (Weight Watchers bagels and Thomas 100 calorie English muffins.) Also, these spread nicely on crackers. And at one point for two cheese wedges, these are a great snack.

I have had some bad food discoveries as well. (Not just the above-mentioned whole wheat pasta, which I gleefully threw in the trash this morning!)

Weight Watchers Yogurt. Good in theory, tasteless in practice. I want my key lime yogurt to TASTE like something, not just look green.

Progresso Light Soup. (Just 0 points!) And half your daily allowance of sodium. My christ! Which I might not mind so much, except salt is exactly what it tastes like. I have low blood pressure anyway, so sodium isn't big on my list of concerns, really, except that I don't want my food to taste like a vegetable flavored salt lick. I threw my cans out the other day because I wasn't going to eat them.

Sugar Free Dove chocolate bites. Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of the sugar-free chocolates are pretty tasty. I got rather well accustomed to them on the diabetic diet when I was pregnant. (Keep in mind that sugar free does not mean low calorie, they're only a point or two below regular chocolates... for me, it's all about the individually wrapped chocolate. Portion control!) These... are not tasty. They have a weird, dry - almost crumbly - feel in the mouth, and then leave a weird, waxy aftertaste.

So, those are my recent food discoveries. Feel free to share your own...