Cheating on Omaha Steaks

Do you get daily e-mails from Omaha Steaks, or is it just me?

Seems like a day doesn't go by without another limited-time today-only offer from Omaha Steaks for some fabulous assortment of irresistibly delicious food at a price so low you can't help but click it.

Or maybe it's just me.

So far, I have not ordered anything.

Something on the web site always talks me out of it. The steaks are too small to serve to guests. The shipping cost outweighs the price discount. The special Private Reserve section on the web site makes me wonder if the ordinary Omaha Steaks are no better than the beef in the local supermarket. The calories in the free side dishes are more than I want to consume in a day. They sell pet food?

But they almost got me this week. There was a free shipping offer, and a box of free sirloin steaks, and a pretty good deal on an assortment that wasn't padded out with hot dogs and cheesy potatoes. They even talked me into loading my cart with one of their upsell items, a caramel apple pastry dessert that just looked too good to be legal.

By this point the web site had made me so hungry for a steak that instead of ordering the frozen assortment, I got in the car and went to the supermarket.

On the way to the checkout line I happened to go through one of the frozen food aisles, and it happened to be the frozen food aisle where the frozen desserts happened to be.

I wasn't looking for them, honest.

What do you think I saw there. A frozen caramel apple pastry dessert from the "Culinary Circle" brand, which apparently is the house brand of Albertson's and Jewel-Osco.

Turns out it's made by a company called Chudleigh's, which supplies the identical product to Omaha Steaks. Chudleigh's calls it a "caramel apple blossom." Omaha Steaks calls it "caramel apple tartlet."

I bought it.

It was out-of-this-world good.

Now, if you're counting calories, you should know that this is not a low-calorie food. Each pastry is about 360 calories. I cut it in half and had it for dessert on two consecutive days. It's bikini season, you know.

Here's a link to the stores that carry Chudleigh's products.

(Neither the website operator nor the writer has received any promotional consideration or compensation for this post.)


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The Italian Chandelier Diet

There's a joke e-mail going around that lists the number of calories burned by different types of -- let's call it adult activity (this is a family-friendly blog). I don't want to go into too much detail here, but apparently if you do the Italian chandelier at the age of sixty and find the G-spot, you can eat an entire cheesecake without gaining weight.

No wonder people sign up for those AARP cruises. Shuffleboard is just a cover story.

If you've ever tried to lose weight by exercising, you've probably already discovered that it's a big lie designed to sell workout machines and gym memberships. Fitness for health is a fine idea, but if you want to look good in a swimsuit it's not enough to get you there.

The most frustrating thing about exercising is that the same activity burns fewer and fewer calories as you lose weight. This helps explain the "plateau" phenomenon. You can go on a diet and start exercising and lose, let's say, five pounds in a week. Then, without changing anything, you'll lose three pounds in a week. Then one pound. Then, nothing.

The less you weigh, the fewer calories your body burns doing exactly the same thing.

The good news is that you can lose weight without exercising at all. Once you figure out how many calories your body burns just doing what you normally do, you can lose a pound every week by eating 500 calories a day less than that.

For the purposes of weight loss, it doesn't matter what you eat or when. As long as you eat 500 calories a day less than you burn, you can make it up as you go along and still lose a pound a week, every week.

Don't tell anybody that's what you're doing. Tell them it's some complicated diet that sounds like a biological weapons program in Iran. That's what they want to hear. Anyway, it's none of their business how you're losing weight.

Tell them you're doing the Italian chandelier.

Let them wonder how you lost twenty pounds changing light bulbs.

If you'd like more information on how to find out how many calories your body burns and how you can make calorie-counting less of a pain, pick up my book, "How to Make Money and Lose Weight." It's all in there.


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