Dieting in the Big Apple just got a whole lot easier now that chain restaurants are posting the calorie counts of their foods on prominently displayed menu boards. The law requiring such disclosure went into effect in May but enforcement was delayed until last Friday to allow companies to implement the required changes.

Not that everyone’s eager to learn their Cinnabon buns contain a whopping 850 calories each, .

“I’m going to eat whatever I’m going to eat,” said Erika Roberson, 19, after eating at an Applebee’s restaurant. Of course, she’s nineteen years old so perhaps her metabolism can handle the 2,027 calories in an Applebee’s Riblet meal.

But give her a few years to the point where her metabolism slows and salads seem like a more sensible choice. Or not, because even the

Frankly, I love the thought of seeing calorie counts on menus. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t expect the counts to contain too many surprises. When you order burgers and fries or ribs and slaw you know your plate is a diet-buster.

But what about the hidden chef tricks (like melting pats of butter on plain grilled skinless chicken breasts to improve flavor) that turn seemingly innocent meals into diet land mines? Would you, for instance, have suspected that Pecan-Crusted chicken salad at TGI Friday’s contains 1,360 calories — the equivalent of three double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s?!

I can’t say that calorie counts would necessarily scare me off from ordering an item I was having a serious jones for. But they would enable me to budget the rest of that day’s calories (and possibly the next day’s, too) accordingly. And that means I’d feel better about eating out more often. It also means I’m likely to spend what’s left of our discretionary budget at those restaurants that make my life easier: those who don’t sabotage my diet while still offering choices my non-dieting family members can enjoy, too.

These days, people are cutting back on discretionary spending — whether it’s shopping second-hand or not at all, switching policies to cheap life insurance or going without altogether in favor of filling the tank or taking on second and sometimes even third jobs. One of the first things to go: spending money dining out. Restaurants would be smart to do what they can to attract business, particularly if that means by doing something as simple as posting the calorie content of their menu items.

That’s the new catchphrase for Chubby Mommy, and with it comes a whole new look for the site.

Tell me what you see that’s buggy, will ya? After all, typing comments burns off calories, too!

We’re back from our trek up to visit the in-laws in Minnesota. All in all, it was a good visit: the weather was nice, the food was fine, and even my fibromyalgia seemed to cooperate. The only bad part was my failure to anticipate just how warm it would be up North this summer. Usually when we go up there it’s a good 20 degrees cooler than here in Kansas. This year, however, the summer temps are only just now breaking 90 degrees here, so I counted on much cooler temps at the lake.

Silly me.

By our third day there I’m sure my in-laws began to wonder why I kept wearing the same pair of shorts day in and day out. It’s just so hard to find shorts that fit in the seat without binding at the waist, or which fit at the waist without bunching up between my legs every time I take a step. So far, despite many trips to the mall, I’ve only found one pair that I like.

Fortunately, I remembered to pack all three of my favorite sunglasses. This prompted no end of teasing from my husband who noted that I have more womens sunglasses than I do shorts. What can I say? Sunglasses are a whole lot easier to buy, especially online, and they make such great fashion accessories I just can’t settle on one pair.

My very favorites are my retro-looking cat’s eye sunglasses. When you’ve got a round face like mine it’s important to balance that out by picking frames with angles. (Angular faced gals, on the other hand, should go for round styles while those of you with oval faces are lucky and can pull off any frame style.) My husband can’t stand them, but then he still likes those 1980s style multi-colored reflective sunglasses that make him look like a fly.

Unfortunately, I lost my favorite pair of sunglasses in the lake and wasn’t about to try diving for them. They’re only $15 after all, which is peanuts compared to the cost of a bathing suit (something else I don’t own). So I wound up spending the rest of the week swapping between my Blues Brother-style black sunglasses and my Chanel-style shield shades. The only problem was that I kept forgetting which pair I was wearing and, while the Raybans work great at holding my hair out of my eyes, the Chanel knockoffs have a fitted nose bridge that kept ripping my bangs out every time I pushed them to the top of my head. And, meanwhile, the two pairs are shaped very differently, something which led to some freakish tan lines on my face.

But all of that pales in comparison to the most important thing about our trip: I made it through a week at the lake in Minnesota without one single mosquito bite. Not one! Maybe the funky shorts chased them away?

Leo Babuata has posted a wonderful list of easy (and sexy) ways to lose 50 pounds in a year.

And when he says “easy”, he means it: some are as simple as substituting veggies for chips just one snack per day. Oh, there’s not a lot of ground-breaking info there, but it’s still good, solid weight loss advice.

My favorite:

If you can get 15 minutes of sex in a day, you can burn 150 calories.

Honey, if I could get fifteen minutes of sex in a day I probably wouldn’t find half of my favorite foods nearly as attractive.

Ever since Sunday, when we through a somewhat “impromptu” neighborhood BBQ party, I’ve been mostly flat on my back. This, of course, is due in part to the combination of incredibly bad allergies and overexerting myself, something that a person with fibromyalgia should know better than to do.

But never in my life have I experienced the kind of incapacitation I endured yesterday. We’re talking pain, serious pain: the kind that left me literally in tears most of the day as every joint in my body, from my ankles to my neck, felt like someone had taken a baseball bat and whacked me. Repeatedly.

At one point just getting to the bathroom left me in such agony I seriously contemplated asking my husband to bring home a pack of adult diapers because, let’s face it, I wasn’t about to risk his back by asking him to carry me to the toilet.

By evening I felt quite a bit better thanks to the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, which is to say that I’d stopped begging for death and had merely resigned myself to another night of excruciating discomfort. And what was my husband’s response upon seeing me finally stand upright as I hobbled my way to the bathroom? He suggested we go outside to join our neighbors for cocktails on the front lawn while our children all played in the cul de sac.

Uh-uh. No way. That kind of “summer time fun” is precisely what landed me on the sofa all day yesterday and I wasn’t about to put myself through a repeat performance. So out he went to mingle with the neighbors while I remained indoors where both the A/C filter and a generous dose of Benadryl kept me, if not wholly comfortable, at least mostly symptom-free.

Later, after the sun went down and all the kiddies (and their parents) had gone back into their respective homes, my husband casually said it was a shame I “didn’t feel like” joining everyone else to socialize. Like it was a choice I’d made freely. Like I’d somehow spurned their company. Like it was utterly selfish of me to not want to spend yet another day gasping for breath and ignoring the feeling that someone was slowly pushing an ice pick through every joint in my body at the same time.

Yeah, I’m selfish, all right: the only thing I accomplished yesterday was rolling from one side to the other while managing not to bite through my own tongue as I tried not to scream from the pain. Silly me. Next time I think I might have to find my own ice pick and give my husband an object lesson just so he knows what it feels like when he volunteers me to throw a party at which his only responsibility is remembering to put his beer down before turning the meat on the grill.