Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Long before Healthy Choice and Jenny Craig, Mott’s provided these three course, 300 calorie meals. You can see the ad here:

It reads:

Eat 3-course, 300-calorie meals of “forbidden food” and lose up to 5 pounds a week.

Be sleek and slinky. Buckle into a beautiful new beltline. Eat Mott’s Figure Control Meals. They make every other diet seem strictly from hunger.

You eat meals of “forbidden food” like beef stew. Casseroles. Chicken a la king. Appetizer and dessert, as well. Three wickedly wonderful courses. Yet each meal is less than 300 calories!

Why feel starved when you can eat meals that are a pound and a half of deliciousness? Why be bored when you can choose from seven different meals?

Mott’s lowers the calories in 48 other Figure Control Foods, too. Foods you can buy separately, like breakfast drinks. Salad dressings. Pancake syrup. Fruits. Mott’s famous no-calorie sweetener. All are high in satisfying flavor – low in fattening calories.

Take off weight this wicked new way. Lose up to 5 pounds a week. Just fix a delicious, convenient Mott’s Figure Control Meal for lunch and dinner. Slim breakfast down to 300 calories with Mott’s Figure Control Foods. It’s great to be a loser with Mott’s!

I’ve found in the world of processed food, you can only have two out of these three options: low in calories, large serving size or tastes good. If something is low in calories and tastes good, then it MUST be a small serving. If something is a large serving and tastes good, then it MUST be high in calories. If something is low in calories and a large serving, then it MUST taste like cardboard.

Mott’s brags about their Figure Control Foods being low in calories and “a pound and a half of deliciousness.” I know that all three are impossible, so what was it? Were they really delicious? Were they really low in calories? Were they really a large serving? I never got to try them, so I’ll never know, but I suspect that they might have been exaggerating the “deliciousness” of their three course meals.

Ad via: vintage_ads: Mott’s Figure Control Meals