Holiday Diet Rules

I don’t know about you guys, but the holidays always wreak havoc on my diet. The rest of the year, I’m pretty good. Not too much sugar. Lots of fruit and veggies. Just a morsel or two of chocolate. Actually, when you think about it, I’m super good! Until Thanksgiving. From that fateful Thursday all through December every year, I’m terrible, terrible, terrible. Not to be trusted around cookies, ice cream, frozen yogurt, candy … ugh, this is making me hungry. But there’s hope. I was sifting through some old papers at home and look what I found. It’s a set of rules for a holiday diet guaranteed to make your taste buds very, very happy. See for yourself:

1. If you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories.

2. If you drink a diet soda with a candy bar, the calories in the candy bar are cancelled out by the diet soda.

3. When you eat with someone else, calories don’t count if you don’t eat more than they do.

4. Food used for medicinal purposes NEVER count; i.e. hot chocolate, toast and Sarah Lee Cheesecake.

5. If you fatten up everyone else around you, then you look thinner.

6. Movie related foods do not have additional calories because they are part of the entertainment and are not part of one’s personal fuel, such as Milk Duds, buttered pop corn, Junior Mints and Tootsie Rolls.

7. Cookie pieces contain no calories. The process of breaking causes calorie leakage.

8. Things licked off knives or spoons have no calories if you are in the process of preparing something; i.e. peanut butter on knife when you’re making a sandwich and ice cream on spoon when you’re making a sundae.

9. Foods that are the same color have the same number of calories; i.e. spinach and pistachio ice cream, mushrooms and white chocolate. NOTE: Chocolate is a universal color and may be substituted for any other food color.

So these are the official rules. And, over the years, I’ve found a 10th rule I really couldn’t live without:

If you add fruit to the top of any food, you get to subtract calories from the original food. Like if you have pound cake — that’s fattening. If you put strawberries on top, it’s much less fattening. If you put enough strawberries on top, the original food has no calories at all.

Works for me!