Greater Rome Times

I’m on a diet again.  Well, still, actually.  I’ve come to realize that once you are a certain age, your body refuses to act like it did when you were a teenager.   If you don’t want to have more chins than a Chinese phonebook, you can never really be “off” a diet.

You can eat salads and tofu for three months and lose a couple of pounds or at least not gain any.  But eat just one donut, sundae, or Three Musketeers bar, none of which weigh more than a few ounces, and you will practically double your weight.  Where is the physics in that?

One day, I decided to test that theory.  After my shower I was dressed in a towel and standing on my scale.  I picked up a S’mores flavored granola bar and looked down.  The scale barely moved.  I took one bite and watched the scale as it registered another 10 pounds.  I swear it happened!

The diet I’m trying to stick to is a low-carb diet.  It’s the one where you eat eggs for breakfast, and whatever you can put in them to make them taste better.  For lunch you have a salad.  To relieve the monotony of so many salads, I pick a different dressing every day.  And for dinner, there is the traditional slab-of-meat-and-veggies fare.  No starches, no breads, nothing that actually tastes good.

Why do diet products have to smell like my son’s gym shoes and taste like antiseptic?  Is there anything that you can eat that tastes good, yet won’t make you gain 10 pounds just by glancing at it?

A chocoholic like me absolutely requires a taste of something sweet every now and then, though I know that even an after-dinner mint will put me back into the fat zone again.  So I have convinced myself that sugar-free chocolate is good for me.

I once found a chocolate-covered black raspberry ice cream bar that said it only had one carb in it.  In the back of my mind, I knew that it probably had more than its fair share of other bad stuff in it, but I was willing to have the wool pulled over my eyes just for a chance to taste that slice of heaven.

I considered the fact that it was a diet product and it might taste like something I’d find in the back my refrigerator (My refrigerator hasn’t seen a sponge since I Love Lucy went off the air),  but if it was even close to the real thing, I was willing to take that chance.

One taste told me that:  1.) It couldn’t possibly be a diet product.  And 2.)  It was now my number one choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner until I got sick of chocolate-covered black raspberry ice cream.  The chances of that ever happening were about the same as my refrigerator getting cleaned out.

I bought a box of them and put them in the freezer.  Unfortunately, that was the wrong place to put something that I wanted to savor, since it was accessible to everyone in the house.  By the time the next meal came around, I reached in the freezer, only to pull out an empty box.  My stomach growled in disappointment. 

I have never found those particular ice cream bars again.  The manufacturers probably figured out that they tasted good.  They knew that those yummy morsels of nirvana couldn’t actually be considered a diet product so they pulled them off the shelves.  Now that I have tasted them, however, I am going to find it nearly impossible to stay on a diet without them. 

You can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her new book.