Reese Half-Pound Peanut Butter Cup and Other Walmart Autrocities

Avert your eyes, dieters! (Photo: The Internet)

I noticed these yesterday during a frantic trip through the calorie-laden landmines of Walmart. It's the half-pound Reese Peanut Butter Cup, the food fantasy of fat kids everywhere.

Good news, though, as it only has 190 calories and 11 grams of fat per serving. Bad news: one of these monster peanut butter cups is six servings. Like I would EVER eat one sixth of any peanut butter cup, no matter how humungus!

On the corners of every aisle at Walmart are bags of chocolate candy for a very low price. Calorically speaking, it's easy to get a fix with little money. And easy to overdose, something I've done a lot in my day and something I'm trying to learn how to avoid.

My strategy: To not think of the first, endorphin-releasing bite of such snacks but to instead think of my last bite (after I've consumed the 2000 calories.) That's when I feel sick physically and am filled with regret. Avoiding such pitfalls is not an easy thing to do but imagining the end result instead of the initial benefit is a tactic that is part of my obesity-fighting arsenal.

Other food landmines at Walmart include boxes of doughnuts for $1.00. Less if they're on clearance, which they are every day. In the outside world, you can't buy a single dougnut for 70 cents, but at Walmart you can get a whole box.

I'm economically challenged so I shop there, but there are a whole lot of ethical reasons why I wouldn't if I could afford to. However, I have been impressed from time to time at some of the environmental efforts Walmart makes to improve their image as well as their bottom line.

I just wish one day they'd tackle all the temptations they are happy to display in every corner of their stores that affect our health when we give in to the temptation. The more economically-challenged you are, the more likely you're going spend your money on the cheapest, unhealthiest foods.

Keeping Certain Foods Out of the House

The philosophy: Don't completely cut out the foods you love.

The reality: Having those foods around leads to over-consumption and unrestrained eating.

I keep most of those bad foods that gave me problems out of my house these days, mostly desserts and take-out pizzas. But something new crept in. I needed to make sure I had snackable foods around so I didn't overeat but one of those snacks was liked too much by me and has become a problem I now have to banish from my kitchen.

It's simple and maybe a little unusual: Wheat Thins crackers and cheddar cheese. They go so well together. It all stems from a night when I was super hungry and I started to combine these two items I found in the kitchen. I really enjoyed it and began looking to recreate that original experience of pleasure. This is a problem because it leads to emotional eating. Emotional eating leads to an over consumption of calories.

I've decided I can't easily beat this problem, so I have to just not buy Wheat Thins crackers. I can keep the cheese for other things, but the combination has been unhelpful.

OMG! I Think I May Have Gotten In Touch With My "I'm Full" Signal Again!

I hate to jinx myself but I think I've been getting the "full" signal from my stomach lately and now all I have to do is listen to it.

It's been tempting to ignore it because it has come at unexpected times, like early on in a feeding. But I've been heeding it lately and expecting that I was wrong to do so, only to find that I did, in fact, have enough to eat (because I didn't get hungry again right away.) I always want to eat until my stomach is literally full and straining to contain my meal. That's the signal I've been using to stop eating rather than the proper "I'm full" signal which we learned about in Craving Change.

My job now is to get to know that signal and get to trust it. For me, I worry about getting hungry after the table is cleared and there's no more food around. That's been a long-standing problem for me. Having snacks around that I can eat if I do get hungry will help put me at ease. This all fits in with eating smaller meals in larger numbers rather than three big meals.

Try fishing around for your "I'm full signal" next time you eat. It might just be calling you but you're not hearing it.

I'll keep you up to date on how my signal-listening is going.

Vices: Chips and Dip

This is the first post in a series about the foods that got me into trouble over the years. I hope to explain my relationship with these foods so I can better understand why I binged on them.

I can't remember the first time I ate chips and dip but I imagine it may have been at one of the many parties my parents and the three neighbours they had on their short street hosted. It was the seventies when I was a kid and neighbours liked to party with neighbours.

There were lots of New Year's Eve parties, wedding anniversaries and "it's a hot night, you should come over" parties. Many of them included chips and dip as the central, if not only snack. Perhaps I associate chips and dip with happiness, happy people, or, more likely, happy parents. But that's a whole other blog post, or a whole other blog. Or perhaps a book I have yet to write.

Philadelphia cream cheese dips by Kraft were all the rage. Onion was my favourite, but just about any flavour got my happy-endorphins flowing when the creamy paste hit my taste buds. A salty, fatty potato chip alone is enough to make that happen, adding a creamy high-fat dip to the mix became drug-like.

Chips and dip eventually found its way into our home on non-party occasions. It may have been used as a treat for me when I was left alone, babysat by my older brothers. Or on Christmas Day and other holidays as a family treat, often consumed mostly by me. It became my favourite "food" in the whole world.

Soon I devised ways to get this heavenly treat all by myself by taking in pop bottles for refunds or convincing my parents to buy it at the grocery store every once in a while.

Both my parents worked and my neighbours were very close to my family so I'd spend a lot of time with them. One evening, when over playing with another kid, I was treated to home-made chip dip, made with whipped cream cheese, a splash of milk and chopped onions from the garden. I had never tasted anything so good. The kid whose mother made it got to use her fingers to clean out the bowl at the end. I was envious.

This image looks to me as a favorite drink might to an alcoholic.

I quickly moved to making my own dips based on this recipe, sometimes with onion but mostly without any added flavouring. When I could get my hands on a block of cream cheese and a bag of potato chips, and had the house to myself, it was a party of one. It was an intimate, sensuous session of freedom and gluttony. I was probably only nine years old but the recipe and the habit has followed me to this day. I've even decided as recently as a couple years ago that chips and dip would make a fine meal to be consumed alone in my car in a grocery store parking lot.

I usually serve chips and dip when entertaining. In the last decade I've combined flavoured cream cheese such a chive and onion with a little milk and whipped it up with an electric mixer, sometimes adding a little sour cream or mayo. It's very good and without exception has received rave reviews from my guests. You can't go wrong serving chips and dip, I always say.

Yet I somehow rarely allowed myself to have chips and dip in the last fifteen years. If I was entertaining, that was one exception, or if I was at someone else's house. But, like Peanut Buster Parfaits at DQ and chocolate milkshakes, it was forbidden by me. Still, so many other things weren't that should have been. I'll talk about those in future posts in the coming weeks and months.

But a kid whipping up his own chip dip and consuming the whole thing by himself with a large bag of potato chips was a kid destined to be an obese adult.