The Drink Your Carbs Blog: A Blog For Dieters Who Don’t Want To Give Up Alcohol

Getting Older

6/26/2021

Andrea’s older brother is a fast runner. He is not Usain Bolt fast, but when he competes in smaller 10k races and Half Marathons, he often wins his age category. He has been running since high school. His collection of plaques and medals is now so large that they could be melted down and used to cast a life-sized bronze statue of him frozen in the classic victory pose. At age 46, he still puts in around 50 miles of training per week.

For most of his life, running was enough to keep him rail thin. In the past few years, however, something shifted. No matter how much he ran and no matter how often he raced, he slowly began to put on weight. For the first time in his life, he had to start thinking about what he ate rather than simply how many calories he burned. There is no getting around it: getting old sucks.

The Effects Of Alcohol On Post-Exercise Recovery

6/30/2017

We do not promote binge drinking. We do not binge drink. We have, however, occasionally gone beyond our own healthy drinking guidelines. It is far from a regular occurrence. When it has happened, it is almost always following a particularly long and intense workout. On the theory that “we earned the extra calories,” we allow ourselves to call for one more round.

We recently came across several new studies that forced us to rethink our behavior. It turns out that the aftermath of a killer workout is exactly the wrong time to indulge. The days when we hit the gym the hardest are days that we should be the most restrained.

Don’t take this wrong. We still believe that alcohol is fully compatible with serious athletics. In fact, in lesser quantities it may benefit recovery. The key appears to be dosage. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We will let the research tell the story.

Walking And Running Burn The Same Calories Per Mile, Or Do They?

6/28/2016

Walking and running burn the same number of calories per mile. It is an oft repeated mantra that we have all heard thousands of times. This idea is rooted in eighth-grade physics, specifically the equation “work = force x distance.”

For those who were distracted or otherwise missed that lecture, the point is that it takes a defined amount of energy to move a body of mass over a measured distance. The speed of the object is not taken into account. Therefore, running and walking should require the same amount of energy to cover the same distance.

This is usually presented as great news for walkers. “Take a stroll around the block,” the thinking goes. “It’ll burn just as many calories mile for mile as if you sprinted it.” The only problem with this doctrine is that it is absolutely not true.

CrossFit Is Not Dangerous: Injuries From CrossFit Compared To Other Athletics

11/25/2013

If you are unfamiliar with CrossFit, your cable package clearly doesn’t include ESPN3. About a year ago, ESPN3 dumped its 24/7 uninterrupted coverage of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in favor of endless reruns of the CrossFit Games. Increased publicity has led, predictably, to increased criticism.

We have been CrossFitting for nearly five years. We decided that it was time to add our voices to this contentious debate.

The DYC 30-Day Challenge (2013)

1/4/2013

We received no fewer than thirty year-end offers for diets, cleanses and gym memberships. They arrived by email, Twitter, Facebook and even in the form of old-fashioned mail. Each one promised to make us thinner and fitter in the New Year as long as we were willing to part with a credit card number. We have no idea how many of these came from legitimate businesses. Most of the pitches carried the desperate air of a letter from a Nigerian Prince: “I need a little money up front, but I only have you best interests in mind.”

At DYC, we do things differently. We start each year by spending 30 days in Austerity Mode. Anyone is welcome to join us. No purchase is necessary.

Folsom Street Fair And Crossfit Fight Gone Bad

9/28/2012

This past weekend in San Francisco saw both the Folsom Street Fair and a Fight Gone Bad fundraiser at our Crossfit gym. The similarities between the two events took us by surprise.

Folsom Street Fair is the world’s largest celebration of “Leather Pride,” including fetish fashion, bondage and sadomasochism. Folsom Street is closed to traffic and multiple stages are erected on which kinky, typically backroom activities are brought into the full light of day. While there are also artists and vendors, the main attraction is the opportunity to be strapped to any number of medieval contraptions and spanked into submission while strangers cheer you on.

By the standards of Folsom Street, our lives are admittedly vanilla. When we want to experience pain and humiliation in public, we simply go to the gym.

Last Place

6/27/2012

[This dispatch comes directly from Steven. Andrea has never placed in last in a road race. Probably never will.]

I knew I was coming in last the moment we pulled into the parking lot. The race was small. 140 runners showed up to circumnavigate the narrow trail around the Boulder Reservoir, not far from where the Colorado wildfires are currently raging. I could see the other runners gathering near the starting line. The crowd looked far too fit. It turned out that a bunch of them were Olympic hopefuls and University of Colorado track stars using the race as a training run. But I didn’t know that at the time. I simply looked around for the weakest person there, and not finding him or her realized that person must therefore be me.

Crossfit Total

1/3/2012

It’s one thing to make a vague New Year’s resolution. It is a wholly different thing to test yourself objectively and use that test as a benchmark to revisit later in the year. For example, instead of just resolving to lose weight, you can step onto a scale and write down the number you see. That number becomes the baseline to which you will compare all trips to the scale throughout 2012. If anyone sees your number, feel free to tell them it’s the combination to your gym locker. If you are not obsessed with weight but instead want to improve you body shape—which we think is actually a healthier approach—take off your shirt and snap a picture. But don’t carry that picture around on your cellphone unless you don’t care if it winds up on TMZ.

There are lots of ways to set a benchmark. The key is finding something that can be evaluated or measured in a repeatable way. In that spirit, today our gym took us through a series of heavy lifts known as the Crossfit Total.