VICTORY! A POTATO IS INDEED A VEG!

A few years ago, when I went on v 0.1 of my diet, I consulted a bitchy queen of a nutritionist, let's call him Darryl, who went over my weekly diet charts with a fine tooth comb and gallons of contempt. When he looked at how I calculated potatoes into my charts, he stopped.

"A potato counts as a bread and cereal. Here... you've eaten six servings of breads and cereals, NOT four. "

"Whaddayamean, a *potato* is a bread? A potato grows in the soil. It is a vegetable... a root vegetable to be precise, same thing as a carrot, a parsnip or a rutabaga."

"No no no no no..." trilled Darryl-the-Bitch-Nutritionist, "Potatoes have starch. They are more fattening than bread. They are to be classed as bread and cereals. If you have two slices of toast in the morning for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and a meat, two veg and a potato, then you will have had at least five servings of breads and cereals... not counting the bread snacks that you have during the day... and how big the slice of bread is. By the way, a half bagel is a serving."

"Even if it comes from St. Viateur bagel? They're thinner than the 'New York' bagels at Tim Horton's."

"Yes."

My heart sank. It was hard enough to reduce my usually 15-toast-a-day diet down to a measly two, but to then be told, with vicious glee I might add, from Bitchy-Darryl that I couldn't even have one miserable slice of toast if I had a baked potato for supper... well, I could have cried.

And today, almost 5 years later I happen to stumble across the US FDA Food Pyramid Guide and WHAT, my pretties, does it say?

Baked potato — 1 medium
Vegetable Group: counts as 1 cup starchy vegetables

HAH!