Sugar Detox: Day 25

Day 25: The Ultimate Test.

Jen: What would you like to do after dinner? Jack: Go get ice cream. Jen: Absolutely not! Jack: *gives Jen puppy-dog eyes* Jen: I’ll drive.

What was I supposed to do, tell him no?

Yeah, I probably should have told him no.

Cold Stone Creamery is the best cold-slab ice cream shop in town. If you’re not familiar with it, then you make me sad, and we’d never be friends in real life, so I’m not going to take the time to explain what kind of awesome place it is.

I am a creature of habit. I get the same thing every time I go. Cake batter ice cream with cookie dough and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. If I’ve had a bad day, I’ll get chocolate cake batter or dark chocolate ice cream with fudge instead of the plain cake batter.

Not this time. I went into battle prepared.

First, I ate a solid healthy dinner and drank a bottle of water.

Second, I found a Cold Stone Creamery calorie calculator and calculated the damage done by my normal dish-o-awesome (left side of the photo).

I thought that maybe my normal sweet treat would have been 500 calories. I get the small dish, so it can’t be that bad, right?

WRONG!

Look at those numbers, 720 calories and 75 grams of sugar.

If I wanted to get that and still stay under my 15 grams of sugar rule, I’d have to eat 1/5 of a small cup. That’s maybe five good bites.

Forget that. I’d never stop at five bites.

I spent the next 10 minutes playing around with the nutrition calculator, combining different flavors of ice cream and mixers until I came out with something I could eat, enjoy and not break my diet.

I finally settled on a choice of cheesecake ice cream with strawberries, as shown by the nutrition label on the right. Only 350 calories and 35 grams of sugar. This means I could eat slightly less than half (160 calories and 15 grams of sugar) of a small cup and still stay withing my rules.

It was delicious. I savored every bite like it was the last cup of ice cream I would ever see.

And guess what? I stopped at half. Thanks to eating dinner and drinking water before we went, I was already pretty full. That kept me from binging and getting an entire pint of ice cream.

Some of you might be thinking that saving 550 calories isn’t that big of a deal. I did the math, trust me, it’s a big deal when you are as lazy as I am.

Had I eaten my traditional choice, I would have had to spend an HOUR in a step aerobics class, or an hour jogging to burn off 550 calories.

An HOUR.

Chew on that.