This was prompted by a post from someone else, but it really belongs over here.
Because of the gall bladder removal, I'm trying to eat a low-fat diet for the next while (defined as sometime between "until I talk to the doctor" and "from now until when he tells me I can relax some"). I also have relatively little appetite (though it's better than it was a few days ago), and I don't actually think I should be living entirely off my stored body fat. So I'm taking advantage of the availability of low-fat and no-fat foods, which to some extent has been driven by various weight-loss diet fads. At the same time, I'm actively seeking out calories, and noticing that, say, a can of condensed vegetable soup has 90 calories per serving. I've liked this stuff since I was a kid; that only five of those calories are from fat makes it suitable right now, but that's not a lot of energy from a bowl of soup. Now, some of this is logical: I don't want them pouring sugar into the soup just to add calories. On the other hand, I'm eating a lot of sorbet, which I suspect has a nutritional profile somewhere between simple syrup and fruit juice. But it tastes good, and I could get it down a week ago when almost everything solid tasted incredibly dry. There were days right after I came home from the hospital when the sugar in my tea has been a significant portion of my caloric intake (3-4 cups of tea, 1 teaspoon sugar each, so we're not talking about a lot of calories*.)
At other times, I've been bemused to see labels cheerfully proclaiming things like maple syrup "a fat-free food" (and olive oil as containing no sugar, the inverse idea). True, but I would have thought obvious. Then again, the grapes I'm about to have qualify, and some people assume all fruit and vegetables do, and then grab an avocado. Last week, I cheerfully poured plenty of maple syrup into my oatmeal, along with cinnamon, dried fruit, and just a little lowfat milk: anything that adds flavor and energy without adding fat is useful to me right now.
The odd thing is that I expected to be craving chocolate by now, and even had figured out an answer: make hot chocolate with the lowfat milk, cocoa powder, sugar, and vanilla and orange extract. I haven't bothered yet.
*For my non-North American friends: calories are a metric unit of food energy that Americans use where you'd be using kilojoules. Just to complicate matters, the "calorie" of ordinary conversation and food labels is actually a kilocalorie. For reference, there are about 15 of these in a teaspoonful of sugar.