12.22.10 — The Good, the Bad and the Evil

One of my coworkers has made a tradition of bringing in bagels and lox each year. He told everyone ahead of time that we was doing it today, so others brought in some fixings of their own. We ended up with several packages of salmon, I think 3 tubs of cream cheese, a couple tubs of egg salad, some red onion, tons of bagels, a box of crackers appeared and then the gift basket lobster spread and salmon spread from one of this week's gift baskets. There was plenty for everyone.

The primary supplier, CR, wanted to know why I was photographing the spread since it was all "healthy." Well, technically, as long as I'm not eating any of it healthy or not, up on the blog it goes. But, as I explained, the only healthy part of all of that was the salmon. On it's own, salmon is great. It's very low cal and has a ton of protein. However, slathering it with cream cheese and egg salad and carrying it around in a big freakin' bagel tends to crank the calorie total up to 11 (on a scale of 1 to 10). So no, I didn't have any.



You might think that salmon and bagels for a large group might be enough food first thing in the morning. You'd be wrong because 3 big bags of candies showed up. Remember the industrial box of chocolates from a couple days ago? This haul had more.

That had to be enough, right?



Good lord. Yes, that is bacon sticking out of the top of those cupcakes. These monstrosities are french toast and bacon cupcakes with maple buttercream frosting. How in the hell is something like this even legal? I was literally stunned when they were deposited on the kitchen table. The audacity, the sheer lunacy of making cupcakes of this magnatude left me unable to form coherent thoughts. All I could get out when I saw the crazy woman who made them was, "What the hell were you thinking?" I understand now how the villagers felt when they saw Frankenstein's Monster for the first time — burn it and hang the creator for bringing such an abomination into the world.

I forgot to mention that she also brought in crumbled up bacon so people could sprinkle more on top just so they could have bacon in every bite.

Of course, the cupcakes were wiped out quickly.



How do you top that? Well, you don't... ever. But, the craziness of the salmon, chocolates and bacon was brought back into a little balance by the arrival of these home baked cookies by one of our long-time copywriters who is now freelancing (well, she got laid off from here last year and is now freelancing, but still loves us). Naturally, I passed on the cookies, but just looking at them restores some of my faith in my fellow humans. Yes, we are capable of creating great culinary evil, but we can also create with love.

12.22.10 — Random Piece of Meat

Wow. I don't even have to try and mock this one. It's just plain disgusting. I imagine that's what muscles on a fat person look like. I'm sure if some Hannibal had chopped me up for his dinner a few years ago, his knife would have been coated with gloppy lard like this one is. I'm almost getting sick to my stomach just looking at that. How do people find that appetizing? I'll admit, I sometimes take my photos with a bit of an agenda and try to make the food look as bad as possible. I didn't do anything to this one. What you see is what you get, and I don't know about you but I'm getting sick.

Bleh.

12.21.10 — Stuff I Did Eat Today

A coworker asked me recently, "So what DO you eat every day?" Excellent question. Here it is:



Pre-workout snack: 1/2 cup of Kashi Go Lean cereal, 120 calories. Got to fuel the burn.



Breakfast: 3 egg quiches with some salsa, 300 calories. My wife makes these things in bulk on the weekend so that I can just pop a couple into the microwave and get going in the morning.



Daily Snacks: Greek Yogurt with 1/4 cup Kashi Go Lean cereal (in place of granola), 120 calories. 2 apples and 1 orange, approx. 260 calories. I try to space these snacks out to keep from getting too hungry between meals. I eat one of the apples around 9 am, the yogurt/Kashi mix at 11, another apple at about 2-3 and then the orange at 4 or so. In between all of that, I'm usually chewing gum.



Lunch: Taco Salad (chicken, avocado, olives, tomato, salsa, sour cream on baby spinach) and Sugar Free Jello Pudding, 438 calories. One of my favorite salad lunches, also one of the highest calorie salads. My lunches range from just over 300 calories up to 450. Don't let the relatively small size of the container fool you. This would fill a dinner plate and be heaping. Back to an older post, 2.5 cookies or this for lunch. Easy choice.



Dinner: Lasagne with a cup of corn added in, 532 calories. A go-to dinner. My wife makes up a big batch of this, freezes it in appropriate serving sizes so that I have a quick option when there's time to make a normal dinner. Dinners tend to run between 450-550 calories.



After Dinner Snack: 15oz. of watermelon, 140 calories. Depending on how many calories I have left to play with at the end of the day, I might have some pineapple or cantaloupe with the some watermelon, or have some Cheerios (no milk). Cheerios is a great snack because it's fairly low call so long as you don't put milk on it.

So, total calories for today: 1910, just 13 over my target of 1897 (determined by using the LoseIt! weight loss and calorie counting app).

That's a pretty typical day for what I am eating each day.

Back to our regularly scheduled food abstinence blog.

12.21.10 — Solstice Cookies

Didn't the ancients celebrate the Winter Solstice with a traditional tray of soft sugar cookies covered with a glop of sugar icing topped with sugar sprinkles? No? Heathens.

Like so many food items that make it into our office lives, this tasty round of sugar crash waiting to happen just kind of appeared. No email. No announcement. Someone just deposited them in the kitchen this morning. I'm sure it was someone who had to stop at the grocery store on the way into work, saw the cookies and thought they'd do something nice for their coworkers. I can appreciate the gesture. I've done it myself, although I bought a pile of apples the last time I did it.

But, and you knew this was coming, the cookies pack a punch and equal about 2 apples worth of calories (2 really big apples at that) coming in at a whopping 180 calories each. Two of those equals my lunch on some days. Three equals dinner.

Come on, you might say, it's just a cookie. True, but three bites of sugar or a half-pound of apple? Kind of an easy choice.



SP brought in these cookies that his wife made. Everyone raved about them. Honestly, if I weren't doing what I'm doing, I'd be all over the little peanut butter with Hershey's Kiss cookies. Just about any peanut butter/chocolate combo is right up there on the best things in the world. While I might think the red hots embedded in the oatmeal cookies might be a risky choice, I was told it was very good as well.

But, add up one of the delicious cookies from above, 2 (at least) of the peanut butter Kiss cookies and an oatmeal Red Hot cookie, just for curiosity's sake, and you've got probably a good 500-600 calories in your gullet in a matter of minutes. That's a third of my daily calorie budget.

12.20.10 — Gift Basketapalooza

Now this is more like it. When it starts coming in crates, you know someone is serious. Also, this one had a great variety of stuff. High quality chocolates. Flavored popcorn. Champagne in single-serve bottles (single serve at least for the booze hounds in this place). More peppermint bark. Crackers. Lobster spread. Salmon spread.

An aside — I like the easily applied consistency of a "spread," but I have a problem with calling the paté-like substance in conjunction with it's main ingredient an "X spread." Lobster spread just sounds... dirty.



Compare these chocolates with the box o' bulk cellophane in the other post from this morning. Which would you want to jump into and cover your body with? These may suck balls, but just look at them. You want these chocolates inside you and now. The other ones, not so much.



And oh lord, here is the topper. The Danish butter cookie tin. Actually, calling this a tin is inaccurate. It's more like a small industrial drum of cookies. I guarantee that once this monster makes it out into the general population (aka the Kitchen), it will be gone before the end of the day. These things are crack and this office is a willing pool of addicts.

We only have 5 working days before C-Day (yes, we're open and will be here until the wee hours on Christmas Eve — the glamorous advertising life). It took awhile, but the gift basket train is finally rolling in.

12.20.10 — In Bulk

I don't know if this qualifies as a gift basket or just really lazy packaging. It was a big box — like 12" x 24" x 3" or so — full of individually wrapped chocolates, in there grab bag style.

Figuring that the chocolates had to be really good to make up for the haphazard presentation, I asked someone who was walking away with a couple in hand how they were. Not good. I didn't follow up with my next question... then why did you come back for more?

12.17.10 — Son of Gift Basket

Another cracker/chocolate/cookie/pretzel-laden gift basket showed up. None of it even really got my temptation meter to even flicker.

12.15.10 — Brittlegeddon

It came today, my kryptonite, my nemesis, my favorite coworker-supplied food item — LJ's father's peanut brittle.

Just look at it. How can you resist that? It's beautiful. It's flavorful. It's thick with sweetness and crunch. It's got great color and texture. It demands that you take a big slab in your hand and crack off a chunk with your teeth.

The brittle owns your sorry ass.

It's also got something like 140 calories per ounce.

Not per chunk or piece or handful. Per. Ounce.

Just one of those slabs is going to run you 3 or 4 ounces. That's nearly 500 calories for one piece. Imagine, if you will, a gallon-sized zip lock back lying near you, beckoning all day long. So easy to reach in a grab a piece as you walk by. So convenient if you are an hour or so away from lunch and feeling a little peckish. Did you have 2 or 3 pieces? When it got down to crumbs did you take a handful? Do you know how easy it would be to eat a couple thousand calories of this stuff and not even really notice?

Several people, knowing the deep relationship I have with the brittle, reassured me that given my exercise frequency I should be able to have a small piece or two. Surely this is one I could eat.

Too tempting. Too easy to get dragged into to that amber heaven. There is no having just one piece of brittle. And besides — I'm losing weight. I've lost 210 pounds and nearing a gigantic milestone. I don't work out so I can eat more, I work out to crank up my weight loss. Why would I slow myself down for even a day just to have some candy even if it is crystalized, peanut-infused, molasses-colored love?

No, not today my dear peanut brittle. Not today.

12.14.10 — Gift Basket, Ho!

The first gift basket of the season. I honestly expected more of them to have shown up already. This one didn't disappoint as it was loaded with cookies, cheese sticks, kettle corn and two kinds of peppermint bark. It was attacked mere moments from the email announcing its arrival went out.

I'm sure there will be more to come, each more elaborate and overflowing with high calorie tidbits. They will be conveniently placed nearby where the urge to graze will be strong. A nibble here, a chunk there, a handful of this and that — before you know it you've eaten the equivalent of a damn Big Mac.

That isn't the worst news, however. A coworker's father sends us a big batch of peanut brittle each year. She posted a photo of the brittle as it cooled in the snow outside her father's house with the promise that it was on its way.

The brittle may break me. More to come...

12.13.10 — Cupcakes

More Cupcake Royale cupcakes. Yawn.

12.11.10 — Poker Food

Not at work, but food that needed to be resisted nonetheless.

Our monthly poker game potluck – lots of dips, fried food, crackers and sweets. That bowl in the lower right has deep fried mac & cheese balls. The cherry covered things in the upper left are mini cheesecakes. Of course, there was beer, whiskey and all sorts of alcohol to be had.

I brought a couple diced melon trays and probably had about 150 calories worth — which if you track that kind of stuff means I had nearly a pound of watermelon and cantaloupe. Not as satisfying as fried mac & cheese perhaps, but I had a clear conscience.

12.9.10 — Pizza and Balls

Another agency meeting of some sort, another stack of leftover Zeek's pizza. There was maybe a full pizza between two boxes. 10 minutes after it hit the table in the kitchen, gone. I almost had to run back to my desk to get my iPhone. Seriously.



And then late in the afternoon, a tub of Hawaiian chocolate covered macadamia nuts showed up. They smelled good, but I was told that they weren't that good. "They're not worth it," was the instant review.

My coworkers, making my weight loss more difficult and easier all at the same time.

12.8.10 — Cheap Bastards

I didn't even have any and I was irritated.

A client sent this paltry collection of chocolates to the agency today as some sort of seasonal gift. Pah. Wait until the real gift baskets start rolling in from some of our vendors. Now that's a party. This was a poor excuse for holiday cheer.

12.6.10 — Monday Morning Tequila

This is almost the perfect food item for an advertising agency first thing on a Monday morning — Tequila filled chocolates.

The aroma coming out of the plastic container (with a classy gold plastic screw on lid, of course), was super sweet booze. I got a little buzz just breathing that in.

Booze and chocolate have been paired up for a long time. My mom used to make rum balls at Christmas that I absolutely loved, and yes they had real rum in them. It does seem like a good way to absolutely maximize your calorie intake in one bite-sized package. I almost want someone to pound all of these down to see how many it would take to actually get you drunk.

I won't be that person.

12.3.10 — I'm gone for a couple days...

I was out sick a couple days this week. After staying home and resting up, I made it into work this fine Friday to be greeted by what else than more Top Pot donuts.

Is anyone else here just done with the whole donut thing? Isn't it time for the fad to fade and these sugar and fat-laden bombs to be relegated back to the 24-hour coffee shop and the creatures who inhabit them?

And then...



Time for the monthly manager's meeting. Apparently, these meetings are so fun that the only way to lure everyone there is to dangle fried chicken, mashed potatoes, potato salad, rolls and gravy under their noses. When it all came in (from Ezell's again), I walked past the meeting room and got a face full of the smell. It honestly made me a bit queasy. The overwhelming aroma of fried food smothered in grease just about turned me off lunch altogether. If I went off my diet today and was open for food business, I'm not sure I could actually jump into the chicken and fixin's full force. None of it is appetizing anymore.

Bleh.

And just to top it off...



Cookies from Trader Joe's, called Joe Joes. 4 flavors: Double Chocolate, Peppermint, Peanut Butter and Ginger. The Peppermint and Peanut Butter were gone in minutes. Surprisingly, the Double Chocolate are lasting the longest. Each cookie is about a half inch tall and a couple inches across. 130 calories per cookie. A couple people have had one of each. 4 cookies have more calories more than the majority of my meals. One and a half cookies equals about 20 ounces — that's 1.25 pounds of diced watermelon and pineapple (I know this because I've been eating that for my evening snack). Is it any wonder how calories can sneak up on you if you aren't tracking them? Today alone between the donuts, fried chicken and now these cookies, I could have added a cool 2,000 calories minimum to my daily total. That's kind of crazy, and that's how you get to 400+ pounds my friends.