You know when you are eating your fourth tofu salad of the day for the eighteenth day in a row of this hell we call "diet before bikini season?" And on the salad there is a slab of stupidly healthy tofu that when you bite into it, you close your eyes and tell yourself it's actually a piece of chocolate cake?

Wait, am I the only one who does that?

SoyJoy Bars are something like that.

If you stand in front of the shelves at the grocery store with a blank stare on your face, maybe you're just not able to decide on which of the bazillion protein bars you want to get. If that's the case, why don't you just make your own?

With YouBars, you can make your own, and you don't even have to go to the kitchen to get them; unless your computer's in the kitchen. You just pick all the ingredients you want in your bar, submit your order, and magically, they appear at your door! You get to pick the base, protein source, and any number of dried fruit, nuts, seeds, and other "stuff." The handy ordering form also keeps a running total of nutrition information as you make your choices.

It costs $40 for a box of 12, which comes out to about $3.33 a bar. That's quite a bit more expensive than what you'd pay at the store, but getting to name your own bar might be worth it.

Earlier this month, Erich did a personal taste test review of several of his favorite food bars. He included the Odwalla Food Bar, and said that he likes it.

Well, I have to disagree with his positive assessment of the Odwalla Food Bar. I tried the Superfood, which I knew from the get-go that I wasn't going to love because it's called "Superfood!" Nonetheless, Odwalla has a reputation for making fruits and vegetables taste pretty good as drinks, so I tried it anyway. As chewy as it was, I would have expected a moistness to it, but it was very very dry. I had to drink water with every bite. I think I'd rather "spend" 240 calories on something that tastes a little better.

The 230-calorie Cranberry C Monster was better, only because I could actually recognize the cranberries in the bar. Again, it was chewy, slightly sticky, yet still fairly dry. Because it is sticky, you have to eat it out of the wrapper, which means it makes a lot of "crinkle crinkle" noise, as opposed to removing the entire bar from the wrapper.

Both bars, however, were not as overly sweet as some other bars, and definitely has a lots of vitamins and other "good" stuff."

Somewhere in the course of the English food language, "meal replacement bars" mutated into "protein bars" as a general term. It's just a petty thing for me, but not all meal replacement bars are protein bars.

Anyway, there was a time when I was very very dependent on these bars. I was working as a consultant, flying all over the place, and was forced to eat in airports, in taxi cabs, at my desk, etc. Bars were easy and, in some cases, not too horrible tasting. But I have often wondered, are they really any better than a candy bar? As a short article in iVillage points out, these bars have the same number of calories, sometimes more, than say, a regular sized Snickers bar. These bars sure look like candy bars, and more and more, they have things like chocolate, marshmallows ("s'mores flavor"). If it's a meal replacement, they sure are small for a meal, for I've found that I often want to eat another one because I don't feel full. 

Are the "diet bars" really helping people lose weight? What about the true protein bars that look like canned spam and taste like peanut butter mixed with tree bark? Are they really that useful for athletes? IVillage has a few tips about how to effectively make use of meal replacement bars if you have to.