What? Isn't that the way everyone orders their Girl Scout Cookies? By the carton, by the dozen? People, they only come once a year, so you just can't mess around with that "I'll take two boxes please" thing. These have to last me us twelve months!

When the kids still lived at home, we compiled our order, a few Thin Mints (I really dislike them), Peanut Butter whatevers, I don't even remember the names of the others because really, in my mind there's no reason to make more than one kind - Samoas. Every year I order 12 boxes, one dozen of our favorite kind the only kind we really like.


And $42 is perfectly reasonable to spend on cookies, if you only think of it in increments of $3.50 per month, or even better, $0.12 per day. That's likely laying somewhere in the bottom of my purse, amongst the cracker crumbs and extra ink pens.

So they're sitting here on the kitchen counter and I'm just enjoying looking at them, waiting to move them to the downstairs freezer. (They're even better frozen.) Because we're still working on last year's order, albeit the last box. A few months we've actually missed eating the entire box and so we tucked a box into a meal we delivered to someone, or set them out when the sewing group came over. Sometimes I'm completely sacrificial like that.

Here's how I see it:

75 calories each (and they are nice enough to admit you need two to be a serving, so 150 calories, but then that's a bit like telling us a teensy carton of Hagen Daas has more than one serving in it, come on, especially if it's that Heath Coffee stuff?!), 75 calories each and 16 to a box, so a box is 1200 calories, which is lower than the suggested caloric intake for a typical Weight Watchers Day! I could eat just Samoas every Monday and be sticking to my diet! Makes me a little light-headed to think about it all. If I were to eat the entire twelve boxes in one sitting that would still only be 14,400 calories and since we all know you have to burn 3500 calories to kill the 4.12 pounds I'd gain from eating them all, I'd have to walk

ONE HUNDRED FORTY FOUR MILES TO BURN THEM UP!

Okay, that is a bit much.

Wait, that's to and from the mall 7.2 times. Completely doable.

And if we stick with past behavior and give away a couple boxes here and there, a few of those shopping trips can be by car.

I love it when I make complete sense! Happy Math!

If I were to eat two - cookies, not boxes - with coffee, and call it breakfast, that's only 150 calories, which is a lot less than a bowl of cheerios and way more fun. And I found this in the Parade this morning:

"Wake up Hungry", "Waking up hungry for breakfast is a good sign YOU'VE LIKELY LOST WEIGHT WHILE SLEEPING! (Shoot, who doesn't wake up hungry? I wake up starving, so obviously I'm losing weight!) Too many people eat late at night and then wake up with a food hangover. Instead, make sure to fuel up during the day and diet by night. Eat every FOUR HOURS: breakfast at 7 am, FIRST LUNCH AT 11 AM, SECOND LUNCH at 3 pm, following by a light evening meal." Nancy Clark, author of Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook.

That Nancy, what's not to love about her thinking. I can live with no Samoas after 7 pm, if it means I get to eat like a Hobbit guiltfree, SECOND LUNCH INDEED!

I swear sometimes life is just so rich and good I can barely stand it. Where are those tennis shoes anyway? BTW, if my math turns out to be wacky, I don't really need to know that. I'm happy with it just the way it is!

Labels: Girl Talk