Grape Scott! (A Revelation)

Instead of eating this delicious Butterfinger, I was
consuming mass quantities of grapes!

So, I had an interesting weight loss event occur last week. I had gone up several pounds due to issues associated with the snack cart, and I had finally hit a point where I had decided to make a change. At that point I decided that I would not eat any of my extra weekly Weight Watchers points, and that I would swear off desserts and all other sweets. It was a tough proposition, but I was doing a great job! I was eating grapes instead of all manner of other snacks, including items from the snack cart and various sweets. And boy, did I eat grapes!

I ate grapes anytime I so much as looked at the snack cart, the shiny outside of the Doritos bag reflecting my longing countenance back to me. I ate grapes anytime I thought of chocolate, which was often. (You know how conventional wisdom holds that men think about sex many times each day? Well, I think about chocolate at least that often.) Plus, whenever I would typically want to scarf down a bag of honey mustard pretzels, or a king size Butterfinger out of emotional frustration or boredom, well, now I would just inhale mountains of grapes! You might think my grape consumption sounds excessive, but I was all set, because on Weight Watchers grapes are a free food.

I have mentioned free foods on Weight Watchers before in this post and, as their name implies, they are a glorious thing! The name alone creates excitement in me. After all, who doesn’t love getting something for free? Free foods on Weight Watchers are foods that have zero points values, which means that you can eat as much as you want of them without incurring any damage to your weekly plan. I was riding high, because I was not eating any of my extra weekly points, I was eating as many grapes as I wanted, and I was on my way to quick weight loss. Everything was perfect, right? Wrong!

When I weighed in at the end of the week, I actually found that I had gained back all of the weight I had lost the week before. During the prior week, I had lain off all of the extra foods, but not consumed any grapes, and I had adopted my grape regimen due to the hunger I had felt during that week. The upside of being hungry so often was that I lost six pounds during that week. Well, last week I gained all six of those pounds back! I felt devastated, forlorn, despondent, and a host of other thesaurus-worthy words. How could I have gained that weight back? I had done everything right!

Now, you may not believe me here, but the fact that my weight gain might have had something to do with my grape consumption did not even occur to me until halfway through the week. Remember, grapes are a free food, which means they are zero points, which means that eating them is like swallowing air (at least that was my mindset.) Sitting at my desk at work last Thursday, it suddenly dawned on me that grapes have calories. I thought back to what my mom had told me about grapes several weeks earlier—that they have two calories per grape. I quickly typed “calories in grapes” into Google, and the screen confirmed this fact for me. My brain really got to working then!

“So,” I thought, “If each grape has two calories, then if you eat enough grapes, the grapes would have points values on Weight Watchers.” Clearly, my intellect was now functioning at the same level as that of your typical raccoon or opossum!

My thoughts continued. “That means that if I ate a whole bunch of grapes, then they might have had a whole bunch of points!” Clearly, I had reached an Einstein-like level in my thinking about food, and, in that moment, the whole “Weight Watchers free foods” house of cards came tumbling down. In that moment of clarity, I realized what most little kids realize the first time they pick up an item in the grocery store that their moms then refuse to buy them because it is too expensive—nothing in life is free. There are no zero points values foods. Every food, even a two-calorie grape, marks a little tick against my daily points allowance.

It was then that I began to understand that my grapes—my glorious, healthy, calorically nonexistent grapes—just might be responsible for my weight gain. I set about the unpleasant task of figuring out just how many points the quantity of grapes I had consumed during the week would have had, you know, if grapes had points values and all. First I entered the nutrition information for one grape. The Weight Watchers app told me that one grape had zero points, and that it took twelve grapes to equal one point.

I then figured out the approximate number of grapes I ate, and here's where you are going to decide I am a lunatic who should never have access to fruit again. I ate about two Costco containers full of grapes during the week, and each container was—ohmygod—four pounds! I began to wonder how it was possible for one human being to consume that many grapes in a seven-day period and not, you know, get sick or die or something. Using a statistic that told me about how many grapes made up a pound, which I know was accurate because I got it from Google, I then figured out that I ate approximately 700 grapes, which added up to a value of about 30 points.

I, like this fox, was really digging the grapes.

I only get 33 points per day, so, as you can see, it was as though I had eaten an entire day's worth of additional points in the form of fruit. I mean, for that many points I could have had one and a half Gigi’s cupcakes, or a whole bunch of candy corn, or, at the very least, I could have had my grapes in the form of wine. Then I at least I could have claimed inebriation as my reason for not realizing that eating eight pounds of fruit in a week's period means that either I am a lunatic or that I might be turning into a wild forest animal that people will one day write fables about.

So, in summary, I learned a lot from the grape escapade, primarily that eating tons of any food, even a healthy one, will cause weight gain. I also learned that eating a bowling ball's weight in grapes can give you a wicked upset stomach. I hope that you will take my experience as a reminder that nothing in life is free, including fruits, and that you must carefully consider even the most well-intentioned plans, and work to ferret out any possible unintended consequences of your actions. Oh, and don't eat eight pounds of anything. Ever.

Butterfinger image courtesy of http://www.sweetfreestuff.com/free-king-size-butterfinger-at-kum-go/

Fox image courtesy of http://www.witandwisdomstories.com/the-fox-and-the-grapes/