News-Record.com

We all miss something different when trying to lose weight.

For Amanda, it's chocolate ice cream and lobster with melted butter. For me it's greasy, bastardized American Chinese take-out.

For Esquire writer Tom Chiarella, it was sandwiches. The writer recently wrote about giving up bread for weight loss and spending A Year Without Sandwiches.

From the article:

I lost weight, but it wasn’t worth it. You give up bread and you figure you’ll miss toast, or the crust of a baguette, or pumpernickel seeds. But what you miss is sun-warm tomatoes between bread. Blood-red slices of roast beef. Paper-thin layers of white onions. Marmalade. The knife-curl of peanut butter. The weight of a tuna salad. None of these works particularly well on its own on a plate. They demand bread.

I figured it would be an easy enough year. I told myself I’d had enough sandwiches and that I’d be better off in the long run. There’s always soup. I went into spring thinking, This isn’t so bad. I might never have another sandwich again. Then one afternoon in early summer, I watched my girlfriend’s daughter slice up a tomato, salt it lightly, and put it between two pieces of Roman Meal. Not long after, I saw a Reuben on the grill in a diner in Albany. Midsummer, I played poker at a game where the only food was a Dagwood, slice your own, made on twenty-four inches of ciabatta. The whole night was a sandwich, noshed inch by inch by five four-flushers and a fish. I didn’t eat a thing.

They've just opened a Jimmy John's downtown -- about a block from my office in Greensboro. Even closer than the one on Tate Street, which cheerfully delivers this far. Not as bad as the McDonald's, KFC and Kabab place that are all less than a block from the High Point office -- but close.

What do you guys have the most trouble passing on?