Something Chicken This Way Comes
While in line for lunch today, awaiting the rapid-fire sandwich artist to look up long enough to recognize me and toss my wrap into the warmer, I realized that just as this particular sandwich chain supports me in my loss, it also conspired in my downfall.
I’ve been a customer of this franchise for years, switching over time from the seafood & crab to the tuna to the BMT, tinkering until I found the Perfect Sub. After much experimentation, I landed finally on the meatball marinara, whereupon I ate lunch there so often that the owners stopped giving me their ‘buy 6 get 1 free’ punch cards.
I'm rather neutral on meatball subs in general, largely because they come on crusty bread, which I dislike. This particular meatball sub comes on soft bread, and that is only the beginning. This sub is evil: evil in that must-eat-until-I-faint kind of way. I adore everything about it: the smell of the bread, the softness of the meat, the goo of the cheese, and all of it mixed up with banana peppers and extra sauce. The combination of smell and texture lull me into a dizzy, drooling mess not too far removed from the insides of the hoagie roll.
I never bothered to look up the nutrition information, and I blipped over the obvious problems of the sandwich, preferring to enjoy my food rather than dissect it. But here are some of the most glaring issues with the Meatball Bliss: it is made of cow, or really, some cow-like substitute, so the fat runs rampant in every marinara-laden bite. Even though the bread is marketed as wheat or whole wheat, I just know it’s some white bread derivative, and every time I chomped down, my old schoolteacher’s voice rang in my head, ‘the whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead.’ I wasn't eating a meatball sub, but rather this pile of red sauce mush that had more fat grams in a foot long than most adults should have all day (48). But I didn’t care. It’s tasty softness lured me in, and though I entered the line each time with intent to choose something less like the poster child for “On Top of Spaghetti”, I would walk past the counter, see the red sauce and order the meatball sub.
At the end, right before I began my weight loss, I’d order a full foot long and eat half of it on the way home, not daring to alert anyone in my household that I could toss back twelve inches of Meatball Porn with barely more than a burp. That proved interesting in its own way, since the nature of the sandwich dictates that it spray itself all over me as proof of my gluttony. I took to wearing dark clothes whenever I ‘volunteered’ to go out for sandwiches. Even then, I had my share of pulling off to the side of the road to clean the sauce ejaculation from my shirt.
Really, though, the meatball sub was just the figurehead to a whole host of eating disorders, including an inability to eat any meal without dessert, including breakfast. I gave it all up to lose this weight, and, after that 2 week window where I was constantly hungry and continually jonesing for anything bad for me, I stopped missing it. I see the meatballs still, whenever I go in to order my lean meat wrap. I’m no longer tempted. It’s juicy tendrils can’t reach me: I’ve exchanged my tomato-stained face for a bland, shapeless poultry boob.
Where once there was pork, or beef, or the much-discussed meatball extravaganza, there is now turkey or, most often, chicken. I’m not crazy about it, to be honest. Chicken is the animal-meat equivalent of tofu. It has no real taste on its own, though it does a fair job of absorbing whatever flavors cook alongside it. The reason so many things taste like chicken is that chicken has no taste. And it’s not just the hormone-infested, dead-cow-parts-fed, 6-birds-to-a-cage produced by the name brands. I’ve had grain fed, free range chickens who were scratching around in the organic dirt just a few hours before I’ve ingested them, and while their taste is less manufactured than their conveyor-belt counterparts, they're just not that tasty. I’m fine with it, because I don’t eat chicken for its taste. I eat it for its low fat and its versatility. After all, something that tastes like nothing can go with anything.
Howard and I stir fry often, and we’ve tossed a lot of poultry in with the shallots and the ‘shrooms. I prefer turkey, but turkey connotes cold weather and food coma and something family-centric that I can only stomach about once a week. Chicken reigns supreme at the wok and in the fridge. It's now a staple in my diet; the kind of thing I will always have in the house, because I will always need it for the next meal. So long, my dear bovine friend. Something chicken this way comes.
I weighed in this morning at 198.0 pounds. It seems that Howard and his Mama were right: my body sometimes conspires to make a fool of me. I am all right with being my physiology’s witless dupe. Especially when I am down 53.0 pounds and I may have, just possibly, passed the halfway mark on my journey downward. Now if only I could get my hands on my wallet and reward myself for all this success. I actually walked away from a $95 perfume purchase, refusing to get it for myself because it was too expensive. This, after spending $400 extra on school clothes for my son, because I just couldn’t stop buying those adorable rugby shirts. I need help. But that’s a post for another time.
A the Cheep
I’ve been a customer of this franchise for years, switching over time from the seafood & crab to the tuna to the BMT, tinkering until I found the Perfect Sub. After much experimentation, I landed finally on the meatball marinara, whereupon I ate lunch there so often that the owners stopped giving me their ‘buy 6 get 1 free’ punch cards.
I'm rather neutral on meatball subs in general, largely because they come on crusty bread, which I dislike. This particular meatball sub comes on soft bread, and that is only the beginning. This sub is evil: evil in that must-eat-until-I-faint kind of way. I adore everything about it: the smell of the bread, the softness of the meat, the goo of the cheese, and all of it mixed up with banana peppers and extra sauce. The combination of smell and texture lull me into a dizzy, drooling mess not too far removed from the insides of the hoagie roll.
I never bothered to look up the nutrition information, and I blipped over the obvious problems of the sandwich, preferring to enjoy my food rather than dissect it. But here are some of the most glaring issues with the Meatball Bliss: it is made of cow, or really, some cow-like substitute, so the fat runs rampant in every marinara-laden bite. Even though the bread is marketed as wheat or whole wheat, I just know it’s some white bread derivative, and every time I chomped down, my old schoolteacher’s voice rang in my head, ‘the whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead.’ I wasn't eating a meatball sub, but rather this pile of red sauce mush that had more fat grams in a foot long than most adults should have all day (48). But I didn’t care. It’s tasty softness lured me in, and though I entered the line each time with intent to choose something less like the poster child for “On Top of Spaghetti”, I would walk past the counter, see the red sauce and order the meatball sub.
At the end, right before I began my weight loss, I’d order a full foot long and eat half of it on the way home, not daring to alert anyone in my household that I could toss back twelve inches of Meatball Porn with barely more than a burp. That proved interesting in its own way, since the nature of the sandwich dictates that it spray itself all over me as proof of my gluttony. I took to wearing dark clothes whenever I ‘volunteered’ to go out for sandwiches. Even then, I had my share of pulling off to the side of the road to clean the sauce ejaculation from my shirt.
Really, though, the meatball sub was just the figurehead to a whole host of eating disorders, including an inability to eat any meal without dessert, including breakfast. I gave it all up to lose this weight, and, after that 2 week window where I was constantly hungry and continually jonesing for anything bad for me, I stopped missing it. I see the meatballs still, whenever I go in to order my lean meat wrap. I’m no longer tempted. It’s juicy tendrils can’t reach me: I’ve exchanged my tomato-stained face for a bland, shapeless poultry boob.
Where once there was pork, or beef, or the much-discussed meatball extravaganza, there is now turkey or, most often, chicken. I’m not crazy about it, to be honest. Chicken is the animal-meat equivalent of tofu. It has no real taste on its own, though it does a fair job of absorbing whatever flavors cook alongside it. The reason so many things taste like chicken is that chicken has no taste. And it’s not just the hormone-infested, dead-cow-parts-fed, 6-birds-to-a-cage produced by the name brands. I’ve had grain fed, free range chickens who were scratching around in the organic dirt just a few hours before I’ve ingested them, and while their taste is less manufactured than their conveyor-belt counterparts, they're just not that tasty. I’m fine with it, because I don’t eat chicken for its taste. I eat it for its low fat and its versatility. After all, something that tastes like nothing can go with anything.
Howard and I stir fry often, and we’ve tossed a lot of poultry in with the shallots and the ‘shrooms. I prefer turkey, but turkey connotes cold weather and food coma and something family-centric that I can only stomach about once a week. Chicken reigns supreme at the wok and in the fridge. It's now a staple in my diet; the kind of thing I will always have in the house, because I will always need it for the next meal. So long, my dear bovine friend. Something chicken this way comes.
I weighed in this morning at 198.0 pounds. It seems that Howard and his Mama were right: my body sometimes conspires to make a fool of me. I am all right with being my physiology’s witless dupe. Especially when I am down 53.0 pounds and I may have, just possibly, passed the halfway mark on my journey downward. Now if only I could get my hands on my wallet and reward myself for all this success. I actually walked away from a $95 perfume purchase, refusing to get it for myself because it was too expensive. This, after spending $400 extra on school clothes for my son, because I just couldn’t stop buying those adorable rugby shirts. I need help. But that’s a post for another time.
A the Cheep
posted by Former Fat Girl Gone Skinny | 12:57 PM
1 Comments:
Chicken tonight?
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