The Notebook and the Litte Red Cups

So last night "Temptation" wanted to go out to dinner, big surprise.  The kitchen is a disaster and neither of us has any desire to clean it and I fired the maid last month so cooking was totally out of the question.  He suggests a buffet and the prime rib restaurant we've been eating at a lot lately.  I'm sick of prime rib and I was REALLY lucky to make it out of the buffet with my self-control in tact the first time so I didn't feel like tempting fate.  So he told me to choose a spot, I went online, looked up Red Robin and found a grilled chicken sandwich that was alrighty, when I told him where we were going he suggested Sweet Tomato instead.  Fine with me, I've been begging to go to Sweet Tomato for months but he doesn't like it there because it's mostly a giant salad bar and he's not a veggie-lover.

So I asked him for an extra 20 minutes to "plan" my Sweet Tomato (ST) adventure and I hit their website with a notebook.  Anyone who has been to ST knows that they rotate their menu, usually according to some kind of theme, so you never really know for sure what they'll be serving.  For those of you who aren't familiar with ST, it's a giant salad bar.  You walk in the door, grab a tray and a plate (I used to get two plates) load up on salad, pay at the end of the bar, sit down and then they have a big selection of soups, a little pasta bar and some bread and dessert items as well.  It's a cousin to Souper Salad.  Anyway, so I went to their website, pulled up the menu for our local location and wrote down a handful of things in my notebook that sounded both delicious and decently healthy (deliberately avoiding the cream-based soups, chocolate muffins etc).  I also wrote down a couple of items that I knew were probably a little bit higher in calories because I figured they would tempt me if I didn't.

Next I went to their nutritional info pages and I wrote down the number of calories in a 1 cup serving for each item that I put in my notebook.  I called ahead and asked them how big their soup cups were ... 1 cup.  LOVELY!  So this is how you eat at ST when your counting.  I took my notebook in the restaurant with me, who cares who's looking?!  Better to be gawked at for having a notebook on my tray than to be gawked at because I'm eating enough for a small marine platoon right?  Then, I got my tray but instead of a plate I had "Temptation" sneak around to the soup bar (he does that anyway because he likes to see what his soup options are before building his salad) and grab me four of the soup cups.  I then carefully measured my salad quantities into the 1-cup dishes, counting the calories for each salad as I went.  When I got to the table I totaled up my salad calories and determined how many were left for soup or pasta.  This even permitted me a smidgen of dessert: cranberry apple cobbler.  This is how you do it at the Sweet Tomato!



Food:
5 glasses of water
1 cup of coffee with creamer
1 banana
1 red pear
1 cup boiled spinach w/lemon, salt & pepper
1 cup fat free yogurt
1 chicken and bean burrito
2 Tbsps green goddess dressing
1 cup of spaghetti noodles
1 cup of spaghetti sauce with ground beef
1 slice garlic cheese toast
1 Reese's 100 calorie snack pack
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Daily Caloric Intake: 1,518


Exercise:
150 crunches
30 leg curls (front) both legs
30 leg lifts (front) each leg
20 minutes speed walking in the mall
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Daily Caloric Burn: 370