The Great Hump Day Debacle 2008

The day was September 17th though I remember it just like it was a week ago. The stage was set for a healthy treat to be a part of our office "healthy lives: colorful choices program" which encourages its participants to eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables.

Ugh, I can't believe corn made it into this awesome picture!

Every Wednesday they offer a hump day treat to help you get some of the colors in. This week was no different and this is what they offered:

Healthy Alternative?

I quickly emailed the person in charge to see if there was a mistake, but apparently it wasn't a mistake. This was their response:

Thank you for your thoughts and we on the Health Services Team discussed using ice cream for the hump day treat and we decided that we wanted to let associates know that they can still have some treats in a healthy diet.

They further went on to say they used fat free ice cream and a host of fruit options, granola, and coconut to make it "healthy" and it only totaled 160 calories with 3g of fat. Thorough answer but I can't imagine the portions were well controlled. Ice cream sundaes lend themself to a free for all environment.

My concerns further lie in the fact that in an office environment you are bombarded with poor food choices from cakes, muffins, cookies and the like. There seems to be a celebration on a weekly basis. Just this past month in fact I've been offered an oversized muffin 6 times, large cookies 8 times, fat boy ice cream sandwiches 4 times, cake and now this. All in all in this month(which isn't even over yet) I've passed on about 10,000 calories (that's more than 3lbs using the 3500 calorie standard).

Offering a treat like this only makes the problem worse and using the argument that the ice cream is fat free rather than full fat is akin to comparing Nsync with the Back Street Boys or high fructose corn syrup with sugar. Crappy processed calories are crappy calories. I still can't believe people still fear fat. I thought it went out with the 90's but apparently I was wrong.

Now don't get me wrong, I indulge from time to time and agree that having some freedom in your eating plan is important, but using it in a program like this doesn't make sense. We already have means to get garbage food into our system and the program goal should work toward offering the alternative, not more of the same helping to bring us closer to center. And if you are going to have ice cream go all out and have some real ice cream, none of this processed garbage nonsense. That's like saying freakin' when you should have just dropped the F bomb and been done with it.