I lost a pound today, bringing my total number of pounds lost to 0 since I set my lose–50–pounds goal nearly six months ago. I’m going to celebrate by making homemade eggnog, the leftovers of which I will use to eat French toast for the next week.
Early on in my health journey (earlier on, I suppose), I tried eating a bunch of Sweetgreen. We live near one. I could walk to it. Walking is good for being healthy. Eating healthy is good for being healthy. The problem is that I fucking hate Sweetgreen. It’s not that I don’t like the food—although I often don’t, and it’s depressing to eat something just because you’re trying to be healthier, and I always get hungry so quickly afterwards that it doesn’t feel like a full meal anyway—but that I hate Sweetgreen itself. The idea. The institution. And the biggest problem is this:
All of the reasons I hate Sweetgreen are very small and inconsequential.
If you’re going to hate something, you want good reasons. I hate Fetch, too, a package delivery service that no longer services my home (because I moved, because I hated it so much), but my reasons for that are big and good. My Sweetgreen reasons are small and bad. When I say them aloud, I sound like a petty loser. I am a petty loser, to be fair, but I don’t like sounding like one!
My reasons:
- The one near my house didn’t have ripe avocados for a while. They would either give you no avocados or they would give you an avocado that was somehow crunchy. Around this time, there was also a night where they were out of the normal cheese and I panicked and accepted their suggestion to substitute parmesan on a Southwestern-style salad. It sucked. I ate a sad, sucky salad and I was hungry again fourteen minutes later.
- Ordering online is a pain. You have to make an account—there’s no guest checkout—and the search feature doesn’t work on your phone, so you either have to open your computer or scroll through every Sweetgreen location in the United States in the hopes of finding your own. (This reason might be fair of me. This is a wild thing to not fix.)
- Their broccoli is mostly stems. Who the fuck wants to eat broccoli stems? What kind of sick fucking pervert cuts the good parts off of broccoli and makes you eat the stems? (I would argue that this one is also fair.)
- It gives me the shits. “Oh, not used to fiber?” people say, and they laugh, but I *am* used to fiber! I eat a lot of beans!!! Sure, I smother them with shredded cheese, but I don’t think cheese cancels out fiber. I’m used to fiber. Sweetgreen is just a diarrhea instigator. I think the real way Sweetgreen helps people lose weight is that none of it gets absorbed and it takes thirty minutes of pain to let it out, thirty minutes during which you can’t snack to make up for the food you didn’t eat when you were trying to eat Sweetgreen. (I will concede that this one is probably not fair. I am probably the problem here.)
Down with Sweetgreen! The good thing is that I can generally lose a little weight if I exercise and eat Jersey Mike’s. Jersey Mike’s has to be healthy. Did you see all those abs on Jersey Shore?? Definitely losing 50 pounds these next six months. It’s gonna be a Hot Stu Summer.
