Yogurt Follow-up

So I decided to go looking at yogurts again after my last post on them. I spent what felt like 20 minutes reading every label in the dairy section. The good news is that I may have found a vegetarian option. Surprisingly, it was in the store brand.

The ingredients list has the "natural flavorings" wording though, so I am not completely sure. This yogurt uses carrageenan in place of gelatin. So, I seem to have found a vegetarian option. Also, that I should probably read all the labels and not just assume the store brands went for the cheap solution.

Birthday Blowout

Tomorrow is my brithday. In celebration, I went out to dinner with my parents.

Bad News: I don't know how many calories I ate. For anyone familiar with dieting, this is really bad. If you have no idea, you probably ate way too many.

We went to Olive Garden, and had a communcal salad bowl. The dressing being olive oil and vinegar. Lovely, smooth, oily without that greasy feel. Also, pure fat. At least the dressing.

We also had artichoke and spinach dip. Not only high in fat, but saturated fat. (They use cream cheese). Also very tasty. I had about 6 or so little bread slices loaded up with the dip.

Then of course came the dinner. I should have gotten a nice simple noodle and sauce combo with some vegetables on the side. I suppose I did get that, except the vegetables were eggplant parmigiana. (I suck at cooking eggplant. I'm just terrible. I tried soaking them in salt walter, as I was told and failed miserably and had the worst sandwiches ever. Really, worst ever.) The chef did not have my same troubles and I had excellent and fattening breaded and fried eggplant doused in marinara, mozzarella and parmesan. On the side I had a serving of spaghetti and pomodoro sauce I believe.

Of course, all during this time I was eating breadsticks. I had three lovely little breadsticks coated with butter and salt.

Then to top it off, I had a slice of lemon cream cake and two of those little Andes mints.

Convservatively, I ate around 3000 calories in one meal by my estimates.

Oddly though, the scale this morning showed me down to around 326 from 334 on 5/23 when I went to the doctor last. I wonder what the lag time is on weight gain from eating like I did.

Still, I suppose the best lesson I could take from this is that sometimes you can cheat big and not completely obliterate your efforts. I just need to make sure this isn't a weekly or even monthly occurrence.

Don't flush where you drink

I've only worked one day since I decided to stop eating at my desk. One minor failure when my mother stopped by and gave me a muffin.

Normally a muffin, would be a major blow, but in this case it was a very small no-fat muffin that my father made. They make a dozen muffins using oatmeal they grind up in a food processor instead of flour. As best I can estimate it's about 15grams of carbs or less. Much better than typical muffins which are 400+ calories on the low end.

Anyway, that's not what inspired me to post. I have been using water to blunt my cravings between "scheduled" snacks and meals.

While filling up my bottle I noticed something stomach-turning.

The water fountains are right by the bathroom. Whenever someone flushes, the flow into my bottle drops off by a half or more. I know the water going into the bottle is clean (as clean as tap water) but I still get a twinge of disgust when it happens.