[If you are already on DYC or you’ve been following the blog for some time, you may want to jump straight to the bottom where you can leave us angry comments about being repetitive.]
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We often describe DYC as how to guide for cutting calories and losing weight without giving up alcohol. But this only tells half the story. DYC started as a joke. In many ways, it’s still a joke. It just happens to be a joke that actually works.

We just returned from a trip to the East Coast. We visited friends in New London, New Hampshire. Then we attended a wedding on Cape Cod. The trip was fabulous. The weather was mostly sunny and warm. The wedding took place on a beautiful stretch of beach, no one was pregnant and both the bride and groom looked happy to be there. The trip was a success in every way but one.

We won’t candy coat this. From a dietary perspective, we cheated more often in the past week than we did in the previous three months combined. This dietary lapse, however, did not come as a surprise. We knew that would fall off our diet and exercise routine even before we purchased our tickets. When it comes to divining the future, Uri Geller and Sylvia Brown can only dream of such certainty.

Our not-so-psychic premonition left us with two choices. We could act surprised when our diets faltered and return home to a week of self-loathing and Nightmare Mode. Or, we could plan ahead and perform the DYC equivalent to the Polio Booster. We opted for immunization.

In the aftermath of the legalization of marijuana in California, a friend asked if Drink Your Carbs would be an effective diet for the average weed smoker. Our answer is absolutely. Assuming said smoker is willing to stick to the DYC Food List, it should be more effective than it is for drinkers.

Can you hold our drinks while we go up to the podium to collect our Nobel Prize?
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“Ladies and gentlemen of the Selection Committee, esteemed colleagues and people who snuck in here because they heard about the open bar. This is a huge surprise. Neither of us are doctors. We have only one advanced degree between us. Steven has a Masters degree in Godzilla. Hardly the background from which one expects recognition on this level . . .”

Some people collect stamps and coins. Others fill their homes with old records and vintage toys. There is a man who lives just down the street from us who we’ve been told has a world-class collection of cut glass poodles. He keeps a few on display on a windowsill, but we have yet to be invited in to view the full collection. We have a childhood friend whose mother has filled her house with Lladró figures of children dancing and playing which look like overgrown pieces from a Norman Rockwell themed chess set.
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For us to belittle other people’s collections would be hypocritical. We have so many collections that we can barely track them all. Our shelves are crowded with antique jars, espresso cups and Godzilla toys dating from Steven’s childhood. Hidden in various locations, including under the bed, are seven ukuleles, three guitars, a clarinet and a Theremin. We store enough wine on site that we could stop buying today and last three years. We are truly the Imelda Marcos of athletic equipment, with two surfboards, four bikes, three sets of skis, skateboards, weight vests and more pairs of running shoes than a mid-sized track team. We are also diet book junkies. We cannot walk past a used bookstore without checking out what crazy diet books they have on hand.

1957 was a momentous year in American culture. Wham-O introduced the Frisbee. Dr. Seuss published The Cat in the Hat. The Brooklyn Dodgers moved from New York to Los Angeles, a betrayal that Steven’s Brooklyn-born father is still bitter about. On the political front, Congress authorized the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention to inconvenience Americans by conducting a yearly survey of their health and lifestyle.
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The pattern the CDC has since established is to publish new statistics monthly. The media then takes those figures and converts them into alarming headlines. Numbers showing that obesity continues to trend upward become, “Average American Now Shaped Like Michelin Man.”

Our original plan for this week was to hop on the Hipster Express and review well-known diets for their compatibility with the zombie lifestyle. This sounded more fun that it turned out to be. The problem is that zombies are mono-foodists. They consume the flesh of the living and, like the French, particularly enjoy the delicacy of brains. Neither sweets nor grains hold any interest for them. Zombies appear have the same aversion to fruits and vegetables that vegans have to the traditional zombie diet.
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A dreary list of diets that allow organ meats is probably enough to headline the humor section of the Huffington Post, but we have higher standards.