The Empty Calorie Curse

I love food. I love good food but I also love food that tastes good and is inherently bad. Like butter, bacon or chocolate. Or all manner of baked goods (with real butter), potatoes (with butter), pasta with cream sauces, butter, Ruffles and dip, double stuff oreos and bread, bread and more bread! (Preferably with butter.)  Oh …and cheese. Good cheese. Like wonderfully decadent gorgonzola or a nice ages Cheddar on a hunk of bread. Anything with sour cream, cream cheese, any cheese. Yum!

I spend a lot of my time attempting to exercise will power to avoid these foods or at least talk myself out of them and into better choices. Like a salad. Now a salad can be tasty especially if you add a smattering of croutons (bread) but a salad is not a ho-ho. I generally feel good about eating a salad and bad about eating a ho-ho… but the badness can’t always dissuade me from eating a ho-ho. I am the type of person that can justify the ho-ho because I ate the salad. It’s the cheeseburger/diet coke theory. As if the diet coke negates all the badness (goodness) of the cheeseburger.

And I do exercise. I really do. I consistently exercise 3-4 days a week + weights. I don’t think it does much. Or maybe it does. Let’s just say it doesn’t help me lose weight but it prevents me from weighing 400 pounds because I like cheese, bread and wine. And olives. Did I mention olives?

I’ve been kicking around the idea of giving up baked goods, candy and such for a fixed period of time. Just to see if I could do it. And if I could do it,  would it result in the number on the scale going down? I’m thinking baked goods, candy and sweets are the thing to give up because I have an insufferable sweet tooth. It would be only slightly harder to give up coffee than to give up sweets. And sweets will be quite a challenge. Giving up coffee would be a risk to society at large. I wouldn’t recommend it. There could be tragedy.

Reality says an experiment like this before the holidays is plain dumb so I’m not going to even attempt it until after New Years. I’m already a grade A number one cranky pants during the holidays. The cookies make the whole solo act of shopping, wrapping, decorating, entertaining, baking, cooking and otherwise executing a fabulous Christmas singlehandedly tolerable. I’d never survive the 3 months and 12 days of Christmas without a Russian Tea Cake or Krumkakke to hang onto. But I am definitely putting it on my list of things to accomplish this winter. I need to dream up a cute little name for the challenge. And then I’ll blog about it, gain a zillion followers, write a book and then they’ll make a movie with Meryl Streep. Kidding.

I have about 2 months to start planning the challenge. This will be a good thing. Yes. A good thing. I can feel it. And it will probably make a great story or at least an amusing anecdote for my reader of one.