Never Go to Wal-Mart Hungry, or Day 3 on a Diet

Seriously? This is only Day 3? I would have thought it was about Day 400. It feels like I’ve been hungry for more than a year.

Which is why I should not have gone to Wal-Mart today, or at the very least I should not have gone before consuming something more than one container of yogurt and one Slim-Fast. Probably, I should have had a peanut butter sandwich. In fact, I don’t think I could go amiss with one now.

Nevertheless, items I did not buy at Wal-Mart today include…

BBQ ribs potato chips
Paula Dean’s butter chewy bars
Reeses ice cream
Oreo flavored snack cakes
Frozen pizzas of all varieties

I wouldn’t normally purchase these items. I wouldn’t normally even notice them, but I did today, rendering my feat of not purchasing any of them somewhat heroic.

What I did purchase were items I considered to be reasonable snacks for dieting people–low fat cheese, and 100 calorie snack packs of nuts–and items I considered to be reasonable ingredients for vegetarian chili.

The recipe goes something like this.

Black beans
Pinto beans
Tomatoes
Onions
Spinach
Carrots
Hominy
Morningstar Farms Veggie Crumbles
Chili seasoning

Dump it all into a pot and cook it for a few hours. Seriously, this is delicious. It’s also the most sensible food choice I’ve made since embarking on The Diet. It’s low fat, low sugar, low calorie, and I’m not actually still hungry after eating a cup of it. I’m probably hungry again 30 minutes later, but I win for myself a pleasant 30 minute interlude in which I’m not actually feeling starved.

I’ve also been cooking green beans. They have 44 calories per cup. I could eat four cups of them for the price of one Slim-Fast. I’m thinking of doing that for breakfast tomorrow.

I don’t know how many calories my vegetarian chili has per cup. I’m using Calorie Count at About.com to track what I’m eating. The vegetarian chili varieties listed there have a caloric range of 140-200 per cup. I logged mine in–quite arbitrarily, I might add, having not bothered with a recipe–at 160. That gives me room to eat the chili and the green beans without going over the number of calories in a Slim-Fast.

If you were feeling hungry like me, that would make plenty of sense to you.

In fact, I think I could add the Paula Dean butter chewy bar without going over the number of calories in a six-pack of Slim-Fasts. I’m pretty sure that means it counts as diet food. What a waste of heroism I am for not buying the butter bars.