Cold Weather Vices

Hot chocolate! In particular, Land O' Lakes hot chocolate in wonderful flavors like cinnamon and caramel. I don't have any right now. Last year I ordered it from Amazon. The Reasor's here has it and I did buy a couple of the big containers but they don't have all the flavors.

But anyway, that's gone now and I wasn't going to buy any more because calories. I decided (again) that I'm just going to drink hot tea this winter but last time I was at Walmart I saw they had Great Value salted caramel hot chocolate mix in the big round containers. (which turned out to be only half full. I know stuff settles but really?) I hesitated to buy it because I was like "Ewwww Great Value brand" but "salted caramel" won. I bought it and darn it, it's actually pretty good. Not up there with Land O' Lakes but really not bad and it mixes up as well as Land O' Lakes. It doesn't leave lumps that won't mix no matter how much you stir like some other cheap hot chocolate mixes.

I have some Chocolate Candy Cane tea from The Spice and Tea Exchange and it is heavenly but there's just something about hot cocoa - the creaminess of it - for which there is just no substitute. Someone on Twitter suggested Swiss Miss because it has on 60 calories per packet? Sorry, that makes sense but it also tastes like it only has 60 calories.

There's no fix for this. I will just have to consume less of something else and hope the weather warms up soon.

Eat Your Cake; It's Good For You

Add to the list of questionable scientific studies I want to believe, eating chocolate cake for breakfast is good for you. It allegedly improves cognitive performance, memory, and abstract thinking. And - the really exciting one - it can help you lose weight. Yay! Just the good news we've all been wishing for! Now we can eat chocolate cake every morning and we'll all be thin and smart. What a wonderful world. I love science, don't you?

The scientists say that "your body converts food and energy more efficiently in the morning" plus there are those wonderful, beneficial "flavonoids" in chocolate but I have an additional idea about how this (the weight loss part of it) might work. Believe it or not I actually do tend to lose weight when I eat ice cream as opposed to when I pig out on things like pizza and giant greasy hamburgers. When I eat ice cream it's usually in the evening and because I know I am going to eat ice cream I "save up" during the day by avoiding snacks during the day and maybe eating a little less at supper. I can see some people if they eat cake in the morning "being good" the rest of the day because they think, "I had that slice of cake this morning so I better watch the calories the rest of the day."

Anyway, I don't think I'll be trying the Chocolate Cake Diet, at least not right now. A while back on Twitter I said that if I live to be 100 I'm going to eat ice cream for supper every night and tell people it's my secret for a long life. So maybe I'll add cake to my 100+ diet plan. Cake for breakfast, ice cream for supper = long life. I'll figure out what to have for lunch later.