Snapple-A-Day Meal Replacement

Yesterday, instead of my normal lunch (whatever twigs and nuts I can scavenge from the bird feeder outside my cubicle window) I had one of them Snapple-a-Day Meal Strawberry Banana Meal Replacement beverages.

The question that I’m sure you’re asking right now is: Well, did it actually replace a meal?

The answer is: What am I, a scientist?

The problem, I realized afterwards, was that I never really committed to it.

One time at Speaker’s Corner in London I listened to this guy who was screaming at the top of his lungs about how if every single person on Earth simultaneously turned their faces away from the sky, the Universe would cease to exist. Drinking a meal replacement beverage is exactly like that.

If you’re going to drink a meal replacement beverage, you have to really believe that the beverage will be replacing a meal. Because after all, it’s just a smoothie with some extra carbs and vitamins in it, and smoothies have long been considered a lunch add-on, not a substitute-for. The large Coffee Mocha shake at Steak & Shake, now there is a fucking meal-replacement. That bitch will put you down for the count. It pummels your stomach into a broken mess and they leans over and yells: “….And stay down!”

11 ounces of strawberry-banana Snapple: not so much.

And so in hindsight what I should not have done is I should not have packed such a tasty-looking sandwich that morning. I should have just packed my bottle of Snapple-a-Day, and then spent the rest of the morning glaring at myself in the mirror, psyching myself up by shouting “You are going to drink the shit out of that juice and be totally sated!” while “Mama Said Knock You Out” blared in the background.

But I was all “just in case.”

All morning I was thinking: “Man I bet that sandwich is going to be good. Of course, I will most likely be so full from my meal-replacement beverage that I will have no use for the aforementioned mouth-watering sandwich of wonderfulness, and in fact probably even thinking about it will cause my stomach to convulse in terror. “No puedo mas!” my poor little spanish-speaking stomach will cry.
I felt that sandwich calling out to me in desparation from the refrigerator all morning. “Please avail yourself of me!” it cried (in English).

In the interest of plugging my stomach’s ear-holes to the cries of the sandwich, I busted out the Snapple-a-Day at 11:30 am. It tasted almost exactly like the Banana-Strawberry smoothie from Fresh Samantha. It had that chalky graininess. It was pretty good. It was pretty filling.

I ate my sandwich 20 minutes later, with little fuss or drama.