Feeling like one slender pig

When my mom was here last week, we did a lot of food shopping. My mom and I are very healthy eaters, both conscious of our weight and the foods we put in our mouths. It's a true treat when my mom cooks for me, because aside from having a homecooked meal, I always know that it will be lowfat (and tasty!) as well.

At the supermarket, my mother went out of her way to look for her new favorite frozen dessert, Slim-a-Bears, a lowfat version of the Klondike Bar. I had never heard of them, but I figured they must be akin to my personal favorite, the Skinny Cows, and happily loaded them in the cart. We each had one that night after dinner, and while I quickly gobbled it up, I detected more than a faint hint of aspartame and decided it wasn't any better than the Nabisco 100 Calorie snack packs I usually have for dessert. It was the only one I bothered to eat. Until tonight.

After turning the heat up to 70 in my apartment, which promptly turned the temperature of the place up to near 80, I had a sudden craving for ice cream. I remembered the Slim-a-Bears in the freezer and went to have a look. And that's when I looked at the package. One bar has 170 calories and 9 grams of fat.

Um, what?

NINE (9!) GRAMS of FAT?! In a "SLIM-a-bear"?! That's kind of misleading, no? I mean, I have no problem ingesting 9 grams of fat - or more! - for a dessert, if I know full and well what I'm getting into. Cheesecake, cupcakes, Toll-House cookies, bring em on! But if I'm buying a diet food, I might actually want one that adheres to my diet, no? My dinner, a Lean Cuisine, had half that many grams of fat. And mind you, it's not like I've never eaten half a jar of peanut butter and called that dinner, but at least I know what nonsense I am ingesting at that point.

Of course I ate it anyway. I had to - I was craving ice cream by then and well, I wanted to take another taste and see if I'd like it any better than the first time, now that my brain wasn't thinking of it as a diet food. And in my opinion? Not worth the 9 grams.

Skinny Cows, by the way, average 2 grams and 140 calories per sandwich. And they are genuinely delicious.