Confessions Of A Splenda Stealer

For this week’s installment of “The Splenda Stealer Diet,” we take a look at Maria, my friend and roommate in Hoboken, who enjoys lunches with co-workers in Union Square and has an affinity for iced coffee (nicknamed her morning milkshake, as its 50 percent half coffee, 50 percent half-and-half), freezing and then snacking on chocolate and gummy candy, all while constantly fighting a debilitating, yet delicious craving for Pad Thai. Let’s take a look at her week of eating.

Maria, about to dig into her Hawaiian omelet while on vacay in Maui. She notes that instead of maple syrup on the table, they had coconut syrup!

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This week’s edition of “The Splenda Stealer Diet” is one of the Splenda Stealer’s nearest and dearest, her friend and partner in crime, KC! Once a co-worker/neighbor in Hoboken, KC left the confines of a boring desk job in Midtown Manhattan to live and explore New Zealand for a year.  Now back for practically her third summer in a row (the southern hemisphere was all summery while NYC had blizzards), she has been stationed at her dad’s house in Middletown, NJ, where she spends her time job searching and hanging around the pool in between nibbles of curries, falafel, and Thai food. Let’s take a look at her week of eating.

KC, at the Parua Bay Pub in New Zealand, sipping a Tui--a beer named after the songbird of NZ.

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Confession: for the better part of my days working in midtown Manhattan, I have brown-bagged my lunch, and for the even better (or worse) part of these days, I have unwrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Today, my roommate told me she is amazed at my willpower. But, it’s not willpower, but my obsessive, daily intake of food blogs that has let me get this far. Luckily for me, since I work in the media, I have no blocks on what sites I can visit and so I can gorge myself on food porn anytime I like. If I’m tripping on images of juicy burgers dripping with melted cheese, or squinting from the glint from greasy fried dumplings from Chinatown, it helps me escape the slippery slopes of my food rut.

Since one of my favorite columns on the GrubSt.com site is “The New York Diet,” as a writer, I’m enforcing poetic license, and “borrowing” the idea for a new column for this blog, called, “The Splenda Stealer Diet.”

My goal is to provide a little insight into my contemporaries’ lives, and hopefully, provoke a lot of food envy or empathy for the truly pathetic meals we consume when no one’s looking.

You may not always be able to walk in someone else’s shoes, but you can surely peek inside their lunch bags.

To kick things off, I will start with my mini food-dairy until my twin sis has hers ready to post. (Ahem, twin?)

Me, circa Jan. '09 at Billy's Bakery in Chelsea. My camera broke, so this will fill in while I'm figuring out how to get new pics of myself stuffing my face.

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