Day 118: Power Up!

I really wanted a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch today. Really, really, really. But, since I didn't have the required ingredients and I'd already spent money on a latte this morning and I am trying to gear up to lose some weight (this whole food blogging things can really put the pounds on you--during the month of May I'm going to make a real effort to cut the calories while still having one thing I've never had before every day--and until then I'm trying to gradually shrink my stomach so I don't fall into the old diet-and-binge trap that so often happens during the first week of hunger), I didn't have a grilled cheese. Instead, I had the Power Bar I had hanging around, waiting to be ingested as a food I don't like.

Power Bars have changed, I think, since I last ate them. They've never been my choice of energy bar. If I'm going to have an energy bar I usually opt for Luna. Once, when a friend and I backpacked around Europe, we packed a supply of energy bars to bring with us, since we wouldn't have much money for food and we figured energy bars had vitamins. We bought them en masse at Costco. A lot of mine were Luna, and I pilfered SlimFast bars from my mom's supply, and because my friend thought they were the best, I brought Balance Bars, too. The Balance Bars had the distinctly plasticky/medicinal/"healthy" taste that I had noticed in Power Bars, and even on days when we'd walked twelve miles, slept poorly on possibly unlaundered sheets, and been given only a single hard roll and tea as our "continental breakfast" at the hostel, I would usually opt for the SlimFast or the Luna. Starvation withstanding, the Balance Bars were that bad.

So maybe I should have had a Balance Bar today, but as I recalled, Power Bars were even more plasticky and grainy, so I figured I'd go for the worst of the worst. And yet, when I bit into my Power Bar, it was way less disgusting than imagined. Yeah, it was an energy bar, but it was remarkably palatable. And it had a bunch of vitamins. So now I'm healthy and junk.

I do wonder if I should have had a chocolate Power Bar. Mine was vanilla. I think, perhaps, the flavor I was responding to was the carob, which is unnecessary in a vanilla bar. Or maybe they've just started making them differently? Or my palate is different? I've heard rumors that they make energy bars taste bad on purpose because otherwise people wouldn't believe they were eating health food, but I don't think I buy that. Perhaps there will be a chocolate Power Bar in my future, just to see.