Don't Brush your Teeth with a Bowl of Frosted Flakes

How many times is the mantra on any way of eating to be prepared?

Notice I admit willingly I dropped out of Girl Scouts at an early age, and preparation has been my way of life only rarely. I tend to fly by the seat of my extra big jumpers, but when it comes to things in general, it’s not so good to be this unprepared.

Case in point: Tuesday night.

I was at a meeting and literally starving the entire time. I KNEW I should have made oopsie rolls that morning so that I could have been prepared to have my face meet with a bacon guacamole burger. HA! I hadn’t made any food to take with me, thinking it’s be simple to just grab something on the way home. I ended up at Carl’s Jr and ate half of their taco salad instead.

Gasp. Swoon. Yes, I know it’s a high-carb food item. With the beans, the bowl, and whatever the heck coats the meat (hopefully it’s not Carl Jr), I was never under any assumptions I was getting something that was induction friendly.

Still, my attitude is that this is a way of living for LIFE, there are going to be those days you have something that you want because it’s decadent.

The problem was as such:

I am noshing down some righteousness and am STUFFED half way through the salad. You’re probably like, “OMG! That’s so great! You stopped eating it, right?”

Danged tootin. I didn’t mind not finishing something. High carb or not, you don’t fall face first into a taco salad and eat your way out or else drown in beany delight. I had no issues not finishing the meal. In fact, I didn’t even take it with me.

I arrived at home and had a funky armpit taste in my mouth. I mean, I was smacking my lips and thinking, “This is like I ate a combat boot or something.” In my penultimate wisdom, I decided to eat a bowl of frosted flakes to remove myself from the military footwear flavor afterglow. I could say that the little flakes were crunchy, sweet, and hit the spot, coupled with some cold milk, but that’s the part where the ominous music is cued.

No sooner did I finish the bowl of cereal when I became sick. I mean REALLY stomach-wrenchingly ill.

I’m sure somewhere in the physiological manifesto there is a subtle rule, hidden under subsection ‘WTH Were you Thinking’ that says, “Thou shalt not remove the flavor from weird Mexican food knock offs with frosted flakes.”

Who knew? It seemed like an interesting idea at the time.

I had a screaming, pounding headache within 20 minutes of flakey corn syrup solid badness, and ended up in bed with misery indescribable. My legs crawled and prickled for two hours so I wasn’t even restful, and I felt like I had a hairball. I finally zonked out hours later and awoke in the morning.

Now, usually, when you have a dream that you ate something really craptacular, you get upset in the dream, you wake up, and then you smile because you know it was only a figment of your sleep cycles. WELL! Imagine this. You wake up, smack your lips together. Now you have a bad taste in your mouth, and it’s only partially because the dog fell asleep on your head. You’re not sure where you are, but you know you did a bad thing last night.

Eating a high-carb, high sodium meal should be a planned event, and something enjoyed–and then burned off via exercise later. Instead, mine was like the morning after of a raucous college party, only you’re a member of Dumba Dumba U and your mouth tastes indescribably bad. Your fingers are already swelling due to the amazing amounts of sodium in the meals you ingested, and now you have carb hangover to boot. Way to go, Ace!

Oh, I’m back on track today with no problems. I did fine yesterday, too. You have to be reasonable about this stuff. (This is a way of eating for life, so you don’t go ‘on and off’ low-carb.) If you eat something that tastes terribly afterwards, brush your teeth. Get right on the treadmill or go for a walk. Drink some water and know there’s going to be some water weight retention due to the vastnaminous amounts of sodium you just sucked into your body like Jessica Simpson does orange fake tanning spray.

Just never, whatever you do, for the love of all that is practical and not sparkly legwarmers coupled with moon boots, ever use Kelloggs products as a mouthwash.