Greek Yogurt with Blueberries

Greek Yogurt with Blueberries - part of my weight loss challenge

No, this isn't a recipe. I laugh at the idea of me making yogurt from scratch, Greek or any other nationality. Why? Because I don't actually like yogurt. Too sour/bitter, not sweet enough, don't care for the texture.

So it might astound you (or maybe it just astounded me) that I've been eating a serving of Greek yogurt with half a cup of blueberries every day for the last few weeks. I give full credit to the Hungry Girl Diet Book because I got the idea there. It's listed as one of the low-calorie snacks to keep you full but also within range of your supposed calorie intake.

I'm posting this as a snack idea for anyone else trying to lose weight or just eat healthier. Here's the thing. Diets don't work for me. I've tried them all, beginning with the Beverly Hills Diet when I was 16, to moving to mindful eating a la the Beck Diet, to time-restricted eating to low carbing, Atkins, South Beach, paleo, Whole30 and more recently, keto. I lasted 2 days on keto but could never manage to eat enough fat for the diet.

Throughout it all, the only thing that's ever worked for me longer than a few weeks is to count calories. And even then, calorie counting simply sucked. It made me obsessive about weighing all my portions, fretting about logging every morsel I ate, thinking about food all the time, dodging invitations to lunch or dinner because I simply didn't know how many calories I was eating in a restaurant. I'm a numbers person so I was also overly focused on how many calories I had left to go to satisfy the ever-present vortex that was my stomach. Quite frankly, I hate being hungry. In my non-dieting times, I also eat like an adolescent. As in, I love fried foods, salty chips, sweets. Is the last any kind of surprise? Then you haven't read the last 10 years of blog posts.

Anyway, back to the yogurt. I had a vanity goal to lose 10-15 pounds for my niece's wedding this fall. Plus our upcoming family reunion taking place two weeks before that. I've been half-assing trying to lose weight all year. As I run out of time and with the weight loss challenge at work coming up at just the right time, it was time to go full ass.

I mentioned I don't like yogurt. I decided to try Greek yogurt in an eat-your-vegetables (I don't like veggies either) martyrdom mindset. Took the first spoonful. Yep, didn't like it for the aforementioned reasons. But the Hungry Girl Diet Book as well as web searches extolled the benefits of Greek yogurt. So I got the brilliant idea of freezing it or at least partially freezing it. So my inner adolescent could pretend it would be like ice cream.

Astonishingly, this kinda worked. It diminished the texture issue of Greek yogurt being too thick and creamy if it was partially frozen. I say partially frozen because fully frozen makes it too hard to eat. Because let's not kid ourselves, this really isn't ice cream, no matter how much I like to pretend. It's more like ice milk than ice cream when frozen. It's still bitter and sour for my sweets-loving taste buds but adding the fresh blueberries helps. A lot. You can substitute another fruit or berry of your choice but blueberries are also pretty good for you.

Even bigger benefit is because I only partially freeze it, eat the parts that are frozen and put it back to freeze the rest, it takes me awhile to eat a whole serving. 80 calories for the yogurt, 45 calories for the blueberries. Voila, a 125-calorie snack that lasts the afternoon in terms of eating it and keeping me from being hungry.

I'm back to counting calories to lose weight but it hasn't been as onerous as in the past because of foods like these that keep me full and don't have a lot of calories. It still isn't Ben & Jerry's but for my health and my weight loss goals, it'll do. Partly thanks to this snack idea and to the Growing Oatmeal Breakfast I've been eating each morning, as of this writing, I'm now down 3.8 pounds. 11.2 more to go.