If A Tree Falls in The Woods

The Urban Legends of Food:

1. Crumbs don't count. You want a cookie, but you feel guilty eating a cookie. So you open the bag and look at the cookies. There are crumbled bits in the bottom of the bag and you reason that normally you would just throw away the bits and you don't want to eat a WHOLE cookie. So instead, you pull out several slivers of cookie-that-once-was and eat them - the equaivalent of one and a half cookies.

2. If no one witnesses it, it didn't really happen. I personally have never been a member of the "purse full of hidden sno-balls and ho-hos" school of food consumption. But I HAVE learned that I enjoy a slice of chocolate cake more if no one is looking at me. I attribute these two things to the same basic principle: what no one else sees can't hurt me. Kind of like how there hasn't been a murder unless you can locate the body... I mean, your thighs will expand but no one can PROVE that it was the brownies that did it.

3. You NEED chocolate. I am told that (shockingly) no one has ever died of chocolate deprivation. If I could magically wish I had never eaten any chocolate - I would probably "POOF!" drop multiple dress sizes and suddenly be super skinny stick woman because chocolate must account for the vast majority of "extra" calories that have passed my lips over the years. Chocolate supposedly has something in it akin to a substance found in marijuana. It gives your body a feeling of euphoria and THAT is why we love it. My reasoning is that I DO need chocolate because I have never done any drugs EVER (seriously). Chocolate is keeping me on the straight and narrow. If I weren't a chocoholic I would be some other kind of junkie. I am actually saving my family and friends years of heartache and the expense of putting me into some fancy rehab clinic by doing Dove bars and Godiva truffles instead of crack.

4. Diet coke will cancel out the cheeseburger. No one REALLY thinks this, right? I mean we KNOW that it doesn’t cancel it out. But it’s kind of like going to the big 50% off sale and when you get home you don’t think “I just spent fifty dollars!” You think, “I just SAVED fifty dollars!” You can see the math flow through a woman’s head as she places her fast food order: “A regular soda is something like, what? like 96 calories for a can so that means a 20 ounce drink is at least 150-200 calories. so the burger is 450 calories but if I add the regular soda it’s 650 total so actually by getting the diet soda I am only eating a 250 calorie burger because the diet soda accounts for the other 200 calories. SCORE!”

5. Eating salad will make me skinny (pass the Thousand Island dressing). Condiments count. They just do. The mayo on your 99% fat free turkey sandwich. The Caesar dressing that takes the salad from 3 grams of fat (in the croutons) to 25 grams of fat total because Caesar dressing is evil fat incarnate. My personal crime is ordering those Subway sandwiches that have “6 grams of fat or less” and then having them put cheese on it. I literally refuse to acknowledge that the cheese adds anything. I tell myself that the cheese is window dressing. It doesn’t count. It’s just on there because the Roast Beef was lonely and sad and needed a companion. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, I tell myself. I am a sucker. I always fall for it.

6. Caffeine cancels out creamer and sugar. I may be the only one. I just stand there at the counter looking at my coffee and then looking at the variety of sweeteners and I think, “I could use artificial sweetener BUT A) it will give me cancer and make my nose fall off (a pet theory of mine) and B) there is so much caffeine in this coffee that it will just jitter away those pesky sugar calories anyway!” Yes. That is my solution. Any sugar/fat that is added to caffeine does not count because the caffeine will shake and twitch away any extra caloric intake. I like this theory and am thinking that I can finally eat Hagen Dazs again. It is high time I tried to make an ice cream float in a quadruple shot of espresso.