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.

11.29.10 — Jelly Bean Roulette

Um... yeah, right.

I watched someone get the Puke, Canned Dog Food and Rotten Egg flavors. Even if I was eating everything under the Sun I'd be passing on this one.

11.9.10 — Sigh (and Candy)

Top Pot. Again. For like the billionth time.

Is this what waterboarding feels like? A constant, steady, unrelenting drip, drip, drip until you can't take it anymore and just give over your will to your torturer? You find yourself so helpless against the quiet barrage that you don't have a choice any longer and let the inevitable happen?

Sigh.

I chew my gum. I eat my apple. I mix my granola into my greek yogurt and take a few more drips on the forehead. The inevitable does not happen today.



More Halloween leftovers appeared in our row this afternoon. Eh. Not really even a little tempted.

11.2.10 — Uh Oh and More Candy

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

An unexpected challenger enters the room.

I had been girding myself against the traditional bite- and fun-sized post-Halloween onslaught. But, like a prize heavyweight fighter who had prepared to go all rope-a-dope on his normal class of opponents and suddenly finding himself facing an goddamn ninja horde, I find myself unable to withstand the lure of these soft, chewy circles of cookie heaven.

Well, almost.

See, unbeknownst to the ninjas, that heavyweight fighter came into the arena packing an AK-47 and whole lot of fucking ammo. Result? A lot of dead ninjas.

You may not be fun-sized, you cookies, but I will eat none of you this day.



Another batch of leftover Halloween candy appeared In the late afternoon. The Poprocks don't do much for me, but everything else would have normally been on my Definitely Fly List, especially the Reese's cup. You got your chocolate on my peanut butter? You got your peanut butter in my chocolate? Sounds like a recipe for a party in my mouth. Those two flavors together is on my top ten list of favorite things, along with the Blues Brothers movie (original only, the sequel sucked ass), the words magma and waffles, and reading LOL Cats captions. I once did an experimented with Peanut Butter Captain Crunch and Coco Puffs to try and find the perfect ration to produce a reasonable chocolate peanut butter breakfast cereal. Turns out to be about 25% Captain and 75% Puffs (the Captain has a powerful flavor).

Wistful ramblings aside, the photo is here so I didn't eat any of it.

11.1.10 — The Day After

Hmmm. I was expecting a lot more. I mean everyone takes their leftover candy from Halloween night to the office the next day. I think my coworkers are getting annoyed that I'm putting everything they bring in up on this blog.

Someone asked me today how long I'm going to keep this up. I answered, "Until I start eating it." She said I needed to start eating stuff soon. She then said she didn't bring in her leftovers mainly because she didn't want to end up on this blog.

I do know that people are no longer telling me when stuff shows up in the kitchen. I've had to "discover" stuff more and more. I don't think they are hiding it from me yet, but they also aren't being so blatant about dropping off food.

That's okay. We're getting into that special season. Now that Halloween is done, it's time for Christmas with a slight detour for Thanksgiving. The last few months have been nothing.

10.27.10 — Pumpkin Pie and The Lingering

It's been a slow week for goodies. The best my coworkers could come up with were these Pumpkin Pie cookies. After announcing my new weight loss achievement (201 lbs. lost), maybe they taking it easy on me? Yeah, I didn't think so either. We don't call Judy the Snackasaurus because she has tiny forearms and hands.

Still, the dollop of cream cheese did make these a little intriguing. Eh, who am I kidding. They looked kind of sad, and they were all stuck together in a unnatural kind of cookie mass.

Speaking of stuck together...



They just won't die. I can see now why old people have bowls full of hard candies that have melded into one ginormous chunk. These things linger beyond any kind of normal life span. Seriously, a bowl of ANYTHING is gone sometimes in moments around this office. The fact that the Ranchers have survived almost a whole week is nothing short of amazing... and a little scary.

10.22.10 — Jolly, My Ass

Talk about a name that is not much more than a couple random nouns jammed together that have nothing to do with what the actual product is: Jolly Rancher. What the hell is a jolly rancher? Some old dude standing in a cow-pie covered field with a stupid smile on his face holding a government check paying him thousands to not grow crops in one hand while he pounds a big sign into the ground with the other hand that says something brilliant about cutting deficits and stopping the welfare state. Go Tea Party!

Fuck the jolly ranchers out there and fuck this stick-to-your-teeth, too hard to chew and too slimy to sit there, over-sugared diabetic coma in a small plastic wrapper.

10.8.10 — Candy from the Sea

Our boss took a couple weeks of vaca and went out to Cannon Beach. This is what he brought us — a box of salt water taffy from Bruce's Candy Kitchen. I don't think an individual piece of taffy would do that much damage to my daily calorie budget (my fillings on the other hand...), but taffy tends to be a little like Lay's Potato Chips — you can't eat just one. So, I eat none.



He also brought this back. Called "Sea Foam," it is apparently a honeycomb (bees, not cereal) based confection dipped in chocolate. Each of those chunks are between 1-2 inches across. Someone who ate one said they taste just like Violet Crumbles, an Aussie treat. I was so intrigued that I was ready to give in and try one out. One of my more level-headed office mates talked me off the ledge.

10.4.10 — A Uwajimaya Run

Judy went up to Uwajimaya's and brought back a grab bag of snacks. Thanks to a recent visitor to Seattle from the Philippines, I've tried the BOY Bawang Corn Snacks. Holy crap those things are tasty — kind of like Corn Nuts but not as hard, lightly flavored with garlic and salt, and waaaaay too easy to go handful after handful straight to open, gaping maw. It was hard to resist them.



More from the trip to Uwajimaya. I don't need to crack one of these open to know my future doesn't include eating fortune cookies.

9.29.10 — Candy Crate

A coworker was inspired to bring this back to the office this afternoon — a box of "nostalgic" candy from the 70s. Not seen are some Pixie Stix, Candy Cigarettes and other assorted hard-shelled gobs of sugar high just waiting to happen. I did have a jawbreaker, figuring that it was small enough that it wouldn't be that bad. It wasn't in the photo, so all the rest still technically qualifies as Stuff I Didn't Eat Today material.

9.7.10 — What didn't stay in Vegas

Our Photoshop guru went to The Photoshop World convention in Las Vegas last week and brought back this bag of M&Ms, color coded to our agency's color scheme. I figured since they were from Vegas, they were dirty whore M&Ms - sure, they'll satisfy your "needs" in the short term but they'll more than likely slip you a rufie, steal your wallet and sell your credit cards to her dealer for a dime bag. Oh sure, it'll be fun your friends said. No one will ever know, they said. Try explaining all of that to the nice detective who is less than impressed with your choice of tiger print underwear. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Bullshit. Herpes is forever my friend. For-ev-er.

Total weight loss: 188.5