Good things, small packages
Oct 17th, 2008 by heidi
Just about anyone who’s ever gone on a paid-diet (and by this I mean Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.) knows that part of the fun? of dieting is that you get to think up foods to eat that ALMOST taste like yummy food, but not quite. Witness “delicious” options like, oh, spaghetti sauce on rice cakes because you’re nearly out of points and pasta is too many points, or espresso drinks made with skim milk and NEVER whipped cream, pasta alfredo made with non-fat evaporated milk, or the horror of artificial sweeteners. You might hit on a lucky one that tastes pretty good, but generally, as a replacement for the “full-fat” or “sinful” option you really want, they fall short bigtime.
As a non-dieter, I make healthier choices if I can tolerate them, but it’s an incredible joy to do so because I want to, rather than because I feel like I have to. Those bagels in the fridge? Whole-wheat, seven grams of fiber each, and not particularly yummy unless drowned in cream cheese. I know I need the fiber, so I eat them, but I DO drown them in cream cheese (and when I really feel like a yummier plain bagel instead, I have it). In my diet days, I would have picked those bagels because they were low in points, eaten a scraping of butter on them, felt virtuous because I was eating a low-point food, but really, really wanted a plain bagel with lots of cream cheese.
So. One of the few “dieter” foods that I would eat in a heartbeat because it’s damn good, not because it is low-cal? Peanut butter on caramel popcorn cakes. At WW you’d scrape a little spoonful of peanut butter over it, and it would be 2-3 points. These days I put on a tablespoon or two of peanut butter on it, have no idea how many points it is, eat two, and LOVE THEM. SO VERY GOOD!! Caramel popcorn cakes are actually pretty good “diet food” anyway, but with peanut butter on them they just taste incredible. They used to be my stand-in for the chocolate bars I wasn’t allowed to eat, but these days I like them just because they’re tasty and the chocolate bar would make me feel a little icky afterwards – too sickly sweet and rich.
But if I never have spaghetti sauce on a rice cake again trying to save points, it’ll be too soon.
