Lilac Colored Glasses

You know those commercials for Special K? The ones that say how good it is for your health and how easy it is to lose weight by going on the Special K diet? The one where you eat a bowl of Special K for breakfast and one for lunch and a sensible dinner? Sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it? Especially now that they make like 8 different variations on the traditional Special K.

Well, I still have to lose 60 pounds before the wedding so I’ve been calorie counting and eating healthy again (I make exceptions on weekends…I started having dreams about chocolate fudge ice cream cake and waking up drooling so I figured I better give myself a break one or two days of the week). Breakfast has been consisting of cream of wheat with a tablespoon of jam or maple syrup (the real, fresh, Canadian kind…which we’re running out of quickly….waaah) but I’ll tell you, when I wake up and it’s already close to 80° in the house (we have no AC), the last thing I want to eat is hot cereal.

Hence my epiphany today while cycling past the supermarket: I’ll buy a box of Special K! Then I can still have a healthy, whole grain breakfast without raising the temperature in the room a degree or two. So I went and grabbed a box and glanced at the calories. Hrm…30 grams was a serving and a serving is 115 calories. Okay, well I use 35 grams of cream of wheat (that’s dry, pre-milk) and I’m always full, so 30 grams of Special K can’t be much different, right?

Until I got home and weighed out 30 grams of cereal.

Well, shit! No wonder people lose weight on the Special K diet…they only get 6 mouthfuls of cereal for the first two meals of the day. I mean, come on! I’m making sure that I only eat between 1200-1300 calories a day but to do that I need to feel full after breakfast and there’s no way that’s gonna happen with this cereal. Tomorrow I’m going back to the supermarket and buying a box of All Bran…sure it tastes like lightly sweetened wood chips, but at least it’s a decent amount of lightly sweetened woodchips!