WTF Du Jour

[plumtreeblossom]

Today's WTF comes from the pamphlet inside my box of slimming tea. It includes a "balanced eating plan" and suggested meals. Here is a sample of Dinner:

Roast beef............3 oz.
Mashed potato.........1/2 cup
Green Beans...........1 cup
Cauliflower...........1/2 cup
Green salad/oil&vin...unlimited
Roll..................1
Angel food cake.......1 slice
Fresh berries.........1/2 cup
Slimming tea..........1 cup

Now, I have carefully envisioned all of this food in the above portions plated in front of me, and there is no possible way I could finish all of that in one sitting. I don't even eat that much on Thanksgiving. Maybe if I removed the roll, one of the vegetables, and either the cake or the berries, maybe I could clean my plate. The breakfasts and lunches are similarly generous and similarly vague about some of the portion sizes. But it claims that a whole day's menu only adds up to 1200 calories. I know for good and damn certain that isn't correct. I'm forced to conclude that this eating plan is designed for those accustomed to hoovering an entire large Pizza Hut Meat Lover's and a half-gallon of ice cream in one meal.

But the WTFery goes on. The pamphlet includes a height/weight chart. At 5'3" and medium frame, wearing shoes and clothing, my target weight range should be (wait for it...) 110-122.

Huuuuh?!? In what alternate universe would I look attractive at 110? Clothed and shod, no less? I haven't stepped on a home scale wearing clothes or shoes since ever, because doing so would be patently retarded. I weigh 143 in my spankity pink nakedness, and I just want to get back to 130 and shrink my manly belly. I haven't weighed 110 since age 14, and barring catastrophic illness, I'm quite certain I never will again.

So, thought I, this being Asian slimming tea, perhaps that chart is made for a less broad Asian body type. I could see 110 working for a small-framed Japanese woman of my height. The box sports a trim Asian model and an Asian-influenced font. I read the bottom of the box. Manufactured in Tempe, AZ.

But on the upside, it's delicious and raspberry-y!

Wait, not quite done. Unlimited green salad with oil/vinegar dressing? UNLIMITED? So I can has bathtub or SUV or airplane hangar filled wif salad and EAT IT ALL GONE?!

I don't think that would help my pants fit any better.

Comments

[beowabbit]

Whereas if I were presented with that meal, and nothing else, I would be forced to cook and eat the person who served it to me. :-)

(Unless you served it to me, of course. That would spoil you for other things. In that case, I’d just chug my two-liter bottle of salad dressing to stave off starvation.)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Hee, I thought of you when reading that menu, and thought "Jay could totally finish that."

Oh, and btw, your target weight range per this chart is 134-147. Basically, you're supposed to weigh what I do. Well, hopefully I'll still have the strength to push your wheelchair when you get to goal! ;-)

Want Broken Yolk now.

[vanguardcdk.livejournal.com]

"Whereas if I were presented with that meal, and nothing else, I would be forced to cook and eat the person who served it to me...Unless you served it to me, of course..."

You are so NOT eating that our place now. ~starts boarding up his room~

you can has.

[ladrescher.livejournal.com]

I have just purchased a swimming pool full of salad with oil and vinegar. Party down. No guilt. kthxbye

Re: you can has.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

SALID LADY U IZ TEH AWESOME!! I HEART U!!

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

I dunno I would have to actually see that plated.

Having had a gastric bypass many moons ago I know what 3oz of Roast Beef looks like and it isn't a lot. The 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes is less than 1 baked. I think if you lost the 1 cup of green beans it would be in line for a balanced meal.

Notice there is no listing of beverage other than the tea.

hehehehehe, 110-122lbs, yeah I can only suggest a few weeks of pneumonia for a quick weight loss. Me thinks the fever and hallucinations were not worth it.

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

I forgot, I'm Italian so if you want to borrow the salad tongs and dressing mixing bottle they are yours. Balsamic is the only way to go, all other Vinegars are just gateway vinegars. ;-)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Other than if I'm dreadfully ill, my weight only goes below 130 if I'm in the throes of heartbreak over some romantic collapse/failure. I can't eat at all, and I survive on V-8, coffee, cigarettes and burbon. A cop's diet, minus the donuts. Last time it happened, my weight went down to 126. I looked in the mirror and thought "I may be miserable, but I look fuckin' HAWT."

And that 126 is still above the high target weight on the tea pamphlet! :-)

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even before I read the rest of the entry I was saying, now that's a pretty nice meal if you leave out the green beans. And maybe one other thing.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

There's just no fucking way. My face would look so ugly if I were that gaunt!

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Funny how they're really careful to have you measure out...green beans? yet you can have one "slice" of cake. How big is that slice of cake? Can teh slice be 1/4 cake? What recipe is the angel food cake made from? How much sugar is in that slice? Roll - 1. Small dinner roll, or giant hard roll? and many people think that butter just "goes" on a roll...diets always specify what you put on the roll or if it's dry.

Oil and vinegar dressing? hmm, let's try a cup of generic "vegetible" oil. or a Saturated fat oil.

giggle

[beowabbit]

Roll - 1. Small dinner roll, or giant hard roll?

A cinnamon roll, of course!

(Damn! Now I’m craving a cinnamon roll, and I don’t know where to get one around here!)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Au Bon has awesome ones, if you're near one of their stores...

Love you, my cinnamon bun!

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was imagining a ginormous slice of cake and a huge roll!

[vanguardcdk.livejournal.com]

never do an airplane hangar filled with salad. At that point it gains critical mass and begins to evolve. Three cities have been lost to that.

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

"Feed Me, Seymour!"

[kalliejenn2.livejournal.com]

so it's ok if i eat a salad with one cup of oil on it? that won't add any extra calories, right?

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

Are you really only 5'3"? I thought you were taller.

My goal weight (at 5'5") is usually told to me as 127-135. That's a number I could imagine.

I look at that menu and think it sounds pretty reasonable. Much more variety than I usually have for dinner, but totally edible. As ariesd says, 3 oz of beef is not that much. A cup is about the size of your fist, and I bet that angel food cake slice isn't huge.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's my height. I usually wear heals in non-summer months.

[lifecollage.livejournal.com]

At 5'3" and medium frame, wearing shoes and clothing, my target weight range should be (wait for it...) 110-122.

Snerk. SNERK. BWA HA HA HA HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAH!

5/3" and large-framed...haven't seen 110 lbs. since 4th grade. I've decided that if I ever see the short side of 160 again, I'll be a happy camper. 145 was my Sophomore-year-of-college-I-look-so-HAWT weight. And I mention all of this simply to reinforce that 'standards' of weight should all just get shoved right ou the window, along with standards and markers of intelligence. How do you feel? What do you think of the way clothes fit? How well can you keep up your end of a conversation? Do you feel like you're still learning anything? Those are the important questions, to my mind. /rant

On the ohter hand, that dinner seems about right. Also, the portion size is about right for a 1200 calorie day, especially if breakfast was about 200 calories and lunch about 400.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't care what my pound-weight was if I could flatten out my belly somewhat. I have the worst time with buying pants because of it. I thought I would be able to do that in time for the festival (bawhahaha!), but now that fall is coming and the worst of the heat is over, I can start exercising again.

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

I hate those "what you should weigh" things. I usually recommend that folks go on-line and keep trying all the "what should you weigh" sites until they find one that thy like.

Frankly, percentage body fat is a much better indicator of health, and appearance. i weigh about the same as you do, and while I'd kind of like to be below 140, I'm not all that concerned about it. I was concerned in January when my %BF shot up above 30%. I did lose some weight since then, but more importantly, I built muscle, so my body composition is a lot better.. My size 6 clothes fit me comfortably, I can bike 3 or 4 hours without getting winded, and if I exercise hard enough to get my HR above 200 (I do high intensity interval training), it's down to 120 in less than a minute.

Frankly, the meal doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. I'd probably skip either the mash or the angel cake, and I'd be damned sure that roll was whole grain. And I'd limit the amount of oil to about 1 TBS, but beyond that, it seems fine. 3 oz is a hell of a lot less meat than most people eat at a sitting; most restaurants give you at least 4 times that much in a single serving. And the only fat there is the oil (hopefully olive) - though I think many folks would balk at a roll and/or veggies with no butter.

I've never tried any of those slimming thingies. My mom was bulimic when I was growing up (and she's anorectic now), so I'm pretty wary about any type of diet supplement. Though I do have a protein shake on days when I do weight training - it doesn't replace a meal though, it gets added in.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

I'm the fattest feather-weight person I know. I weigh about the same as you but I'm a size 12. I don't know how my body maximizes its surface area like it does. Maybe I'm a puffer fish.

I should look into getting one of those fat percentage "scales." I once used one and 34% of me was fat, and I was quite a bit slimmer than I am now.

I wish everyone got liposuction so I wouldn't be embarassed of daydreaming about it.

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

It's very hard to get a good estimate of your fat percentage. The scales tend to be pretty inaccurate (they can be off by as much as ten percentage points, so you could get a reading of 34% if you were 24% or if you were 44%). OTOH, they tend to be internally consistent - so if you had one & weighed yourself on it once a month, you could tell if your BF was going up or down.

Its sort of like scales. There are two scale in my gym & when I weigh 148 on one of them, I'm about 143 on the other. Interestingly, when I was over 150, they gave identical readings. They were the kind with the slidy thingies that can go in a 100 lb slot or a 150 slot. I think one of them had a mismatch - because there was a period of over a month where if I slid the thingie into the 150 slot, and had the other slider at 0, it said I was less than that - but if I slid the thingie into the 100 slot & had the other slider at 50, it said I was more than that. It was very disconcerting. It was like Schrodinger's obesity or something.

I generally get my BF measured by one of the trainers at the gym using calipers. Somewhat more accurate than the scale, but still pretty variable. But if you have the same person do it each time, you can notice a trend.

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

While it sounds like your tea is American, its ethos in weight is indeed very east Asian (well, very Japanese, at least). I literally cannot think of one Japanese woman I have spoken with on the subject who doesn't think she needs to drop five kilograms. And should they ever achieve such an extreme weight-loss goal, the vast majority of said women would need immediate hospitalization.

That said, 110 pounds probably is reasonable for a lot of Asian and Asian-descended women of your height. As I'm sure you know, the physical differences between a certain common Asian somatotype and a certain common European somatotype are enormous. On a more personal note, one longs for tits and asses living here -- when I was back in the States, just having so much curvy eye candy was driving me wild (and me without my voluptuous wife most of that time!).

I sometimes wish I kinked on skinny J-girls; the scoping opportunities would be tremendous. But alas, visible ribs leave me stone cold, not rock hard.

A lot of Western women in Japan develop -- or intensify preexisting -- body complexes because nothing here fits them. I wonder if a lot of slight, breastless and hipless Asian women living in the U.S. ever feel a similar, inverted inadequacy when they see the boob-o-rama that is much of American mass media.

In any case, some of us like a tummy on a girl. :)

[joyeous.livejournal.com]

Is it a diuretic tea or something?

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Check the fine print on that chart. If it talking about you in shows and clothes, that means it is assuming a heel of around 2", maybe 3" (they usually say in the fine print), so if you're 5'3", you need to look at he 5'5" line at a minimum, possibly 5'6". Really, honest.

Which is so fucking weird, but I guess it's supposed to make us feel happier and taller.