How I lost weight on Weight Watchers without losing my mind – Part 2 of 2

Recently, I posted about my general thoughts on the Weight Watchers program and I wanted to follow that up with my take on exercise and food and if you get nothing else from this post, I hope you’ll walk away knowing at least this much:

1. Exercise is still a four letter word in my vocabulary, except that I spell it with eight letters because if I spelled it like “XRSZ” the way I wanted to, I’d get emails from people complaining What do you have against vowels? You’re not making sense! I can’t understand you! Enunciate! And then I’d have to be all MOM! WHEN DID YOU GET EMAIL?
2. I did not have to resort to eating my own young. It was touch and go there for awhile but luckily, my kids are super fast on their feet, with an uncanny talent for hide and seek.

And as I’ve said before, I am not paid or compensated in any way for any product I mention. So if I say something tastes like candy-coated unicorns dipped in multiple rainbow colored orgasms? It’s because I think it does and there are no guys in business suits in the background, high fiving and fist bumping each other. Same goes if I mention that something tastes like scrotum tampanade, although I don’t expect anyone would be high-fiving or fist bumping each other in that case. Although if they were, wouldn’t that be kind of funny? And not in a good way?

• Disclaimer #1: I’m not going to be getting into any recipes here because you can simply google Weight Watchers recipes to your heart’s content. In fact, google them until the cows come home and then cook them your favorites! Or, cook the cows instead, if that’s your thing. In this post, I’m just going to mention a few of the things that I eat that get me through this program without feeling as if I have to stab somebody.

• Disclaimer #2: I flat out refuse to consume anything that is fat free, except milk. This includes, above anything else, cheese. Even if it’s delivered by Anderson Cooper wearing nothing but a towel and dirty propositions, I will not eat fat free cheese. Life is just too short and I’d rather die fat with a chunk of Gorgonzola shoved in my mouth then live skinny trying to gag down crap so processed that no self-respecting cow/sheep/goat will admit to providing the raw material. Real cheese has fat, people. If it doesn’t, then it has no business calling itself cheese. The best I can manage is reduced-fat and even then, I do so grudgingly and flip it the bird before I eat it. However, Anderson? Feel free to forgo the cheese and just bring the towel and propositions. We’ll make do.

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THINGS I ATE ON WEIGHT WATCHERS

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Water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water and water. And just when you think you can’t possibly drink any more of the stuff … WATER. Seriously, water is your best friend on Weight Watchers. It has zero points, it hydrates you, cleanses your system, fills you up and makes your skin look awesome. At this point, I suppose I could insert any number of jokes about how, with a little more effort, colonics and semen could do the exact same things for you but then you might think less of me than you already do.

As if that’s possible!

Right?

Hello?

Irene’s All Natural Biscotti. Does it taste like real biscotti? Not on your life. Does it taste good? Meh. It’s OK. I buy the chocolate flavor because eating the orange cranberry ones tastes like I’m licking the bottom of my toaster. While I’m not in love with these things as a stand alone product, I can’t say enough about them when they’re used as a vessel for peanut butter. Then, they’re fantastic because at only 20 calories/zero fat per cookie, they’re a crunchy, zero point alternative to a spoon. I buy them more for their texture than anything else because my jaws feel like they’re getting a little workout when I’m eating them. I don’t count the act of eating them as exercise points, though. I tried, but my Weight Watchers leader looked at me kind of weird.

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I may be 43 years old but I’m a child at heart and nothing beats a peanut butter sandwich so I had to find a reasonable alternative to regular, fat-infused peanut butter because a life without peanut butter is a lonely, desolate, soul-sucking thing that I want nothing to do with. Enter Reduced Fat Jif. I’ve tried every other kind of reduced fat peanut butter out there and this one was the only one that actually tasted good and didn’t make my tongue want to slap me. I’ve heard rumors of something called PB2 or some kind of powdered peanut butter but I just can’t go there. It’s bad enough that I’ve gone the reduced fat route with the nectar of the gods … anything more and I fear that my entire digestive system would punch me in the throat.

Arnold Sandwich Things and Thomas Bagel Thins. At one point each, I simply cannot say enough about these two products.  I need bread just as much as I need oxygen but I don’t need the points that traditional bread represents. I make a sandwich with either one of these, using 2 or 3 ounces of deli turkey, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, a slice of 2% pepper jack cheese and some dijon mustard. The sandwich winds up being huge yet only 3 or 4 points, depending on how much turkey I used. When you’re allotted only eighteen points a day on the program, you need to pack as much healthy crap into as few points as possible and these two products help me do that with little effort. I’m all about little effort! Especially when it comes to crap!

Skinny Cow truffle bars taste like candy-coated unicorns dipped in multiple rainbow colored orgasms, I shit you not. If anything kept me on this program, it was Skinny Cow. I eat one every night and they are a vital, crucial, integral part of my daily 18 point allowance. They are, without doubt, one of the best tasting things I have ever put in my mouth.

No offense, Nate.

These toffee crunch bars from Weight Watchers come in a close second to Skinny Cow. However, I only buy them when Wegmans runs out of Skinny Cow and only after I pitch a hissy fit in the frozen food section, hollering WHERE THE HELL IS THE GODDAMN SKINNY COW? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU STARING AT?

I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like a commercial so forgive me … Ronzoni pasta tastes good and it’s good for you. One cup of regular pasta is four points but one cup of Ronzoni pasta is only three and at eighteen points a day, every single point is precious. Now I admit, I will shove as much Ronzoni pasta into that one cup as I possibly can, even if it means I have to jump up and down on it for a few seconds when no one is looking. However, I don’t recommend doing this too often because it wreaks havoc on your measuring cups. And by havoc, I mean it smashes them to smithereens.

Nosh, snack, graze, munch, nibble, forage … whatever. I must have an unlimited supply of snacks immediately on hand or I am grumpy with a capital GIVE ME THAT COOKIE OR I WILL CUT YOU, BITCH.  These are a few of the snacks that I typically scarf down so as not to act out my frustrations by castrating the first human being who crosses my starving path.

1. The Kellogg’s Fiber Plus dark chocolate almond bars taste freakishly good but I warn you, unless your digestive tract can process eighteen grams of fiber at once, do not eat more than one at a time. Unless, of course, you have a grudge against every human being within a twenty mile radius of you. And you hate all living creatures.
2. I found the Blue Ginger Brown Rice Chips at BJ’s Wholesale Club and I admit that my first thought was BLECH, *GAG* THROW UP EVERYWHERE. But I bought them anyway because I was running out of things to complain about to Nate. I was surprised to discover how good they tasted and the fact that I could have thirty-three chips for only 2 points! On the downside, dinner conversation that night was pretty boring.
3. The Laughing Cow light cheese is, simply put, damn good. I’m constantly surprised at how much cheese is actually in one of those wedges. Nate is getting sick and tired of me yelling LOOKIT! LOOKIT! LOOKIT HOW MUCH CHEESE IS IN THIS THING! and having no response at all other than “That’s what she said” which is either totally inappropriate, utterly gross or doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m going with all three.
4. The Jolly Time kettle corn popcorn doesn’t taste anything at all like the good stuff. Shocking, I know! The best I can say about this stuff is that it’s healthy, you can eat a ton of it for very few points and it’s not too terribly God awful. If, however, my taste buds were ever again to come into contact with the real stuff, there’s no telling what they’d do. IT WOULD BE ANARCHY.

That’s about it! Seeing as how this post has become the blog equivalent of War and Peace, I’ll save my bit about exercise for another post and I’ll try not to reference scrotums, colonics or the naked happy with Mr. Cooper when I do because I don’t need any emails that say HEY, DO YOU KISS YOUR MOTHER WITH THAT MOUTH? NOT ANYMORE YOU DON’T. LOVE, MOM.

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