Eye-opening Fast Food

As many of you know, I have become an avid Weight Watcher. This is my fourth time around, so you would think I have the system down pat. But I always seem to fall off the wagon when I've hit lifetime and on maintenance.

This time is different.

Why?

Because I have a plan. Before when I would do Weight Watchers, I would by the Fat Free this and the Low Cal that, but when it came around to eating that crap when I was at my goal weight, well, it didn't happen.

Have you ever eaten Fat Free Cheddar Cheese? Ever try to melt it in a recipe? It doesn't melt. It doesn't do anything. It just sits there like a lump of orange plastic . . . tastes like plastic, too.

This time, I'm not getting sucked into trying to find 'alternate' ways to satisfy my cravings. If I want to eat raw cookie dough, I will! I'll just measure it out and calculate the Weight Watchers points.

Sorry, I'm digressing. Anyway, last week my kidlet wanted to eat at Panda Express. I knew ahead of time that I would get the kid's meal with the chow mein and black pepper chicken. I had looked at the nutritional values posted inside the restaurant and knew those were the best choices.

When we finished our errands, I needed to calculate my WW points. I will give it to the Panda Express people, their site is freaking awesome!

I pulled up Panda Express the site and clicked MENU (don't click nutritional info at this time). Under MENU, on the left side, click Panda Kid's Meal, then click what you want in your kid's meal. Or Build a Meal.

Now look at the nutritional information.

I plugged that into my Weight Watcher calculator and my kid's meal was 10 points. I only get 29 points per day. So this was 1/3 of my daily allotment. I didn't eat the cookie or fortune cookie and I did get a diet soda.

I played around with this site a little, plugging in rice instead of noodles--13 points
Orange chicken instead of black pepper chicken--15 points.

I decided to play with the 2-entree meal, choosing chow mein, black pepper chicken and orange chicken--26 points!

WOW.

It weighed 19.8 ounces, 1050 calories, 46 grams of fat and here's the whopper 2680 mgs of sodium . It really makes you think. Do you really NEED that? And do you really WANT all that?

Just a little 'food for thought'.

Later, Peeps!