I’m not going to say that I could be the poster child for Yo-Yo dieting, although I would certainly be in the running. And notwithstanding the fact that I allowed my weight to get seriously out of control, I did a homemade sort of turkey chili the other day. As anyone who has done the , “Oh, I’ll have soup and salad to cut back on calories, fats, and carbs” knows, it doesn’t always work as well in practice as in theory. Yes, the soup commercials on television are correct in that a serving size may have only 100 calories, but the problem is that a serving size doesn’t go a long way to filling up most people. On the other hand, two servings will often be adequate and that’s still pretty good from a calorie perspective. It’s the fact that there is a world of difference in soups and if you’re watching carbs, that’s really difficult. Focusing on the calorie side though, that chicken vegetable is probably fine, the loaded baked potato with bacon maybe not so much or the cream of broccoli even though broccoli is a healthy vegetable. As for salad – it’s the same story. Absolutely a good thing unless the cheeses, nuts, garbanzo beans, and croutons are added in.

Anyway, back to the soup that I made where I wanted some substance to it, but in a controlled way. Part of the turkey decision was because I had some frozen turkey stock from Christmas that I needed to use. I went back and forth as to whether to go turkey vegetable or the southwestern flavor and a little spicier won out. I wanted some black beans, but not too many and opted to take one can of a commercial southwestern black bean soup to add into the otherwise homemade. That kept the quantity of beans down while still providing flavor and “volume”, and the other ingredients were all pretty low in calorie, fat, and carbs.

Of course, one of the best soups for all of the above is the spicy seafood stew that I have in an earlier post, but we did that last week.