The two most frightening words in the English language are “extra crispy.”

We were reminded of this on a recent visit to the Hopkinton State Fair in New Hampshire. Some of the foods available from the vendors could rightly be described as homicidal. They had taken the least healthy foods that science has ever produced and found a way to more than double the calories without adding even a single useful nutrient.

All of those bright colors and food additives sheathed in oily breading got us wondering: exactly how many calories does deep-frying add? We knew that frying was bad, but we wanted to know how bad. That question turned out to be far more difficult to answer than we imagined.

Over 15 years ago, we visited the Galapagos Islands. Anyone who has studied Charles Darwin knows that these islands can have a strong and lasting impact on a young mind. Our trip lasted seven days. To this day, we show our affection for one another by performing the mating dance of the blue-footed booby.
​
When it comes to eating salad, we still channel our inner giant tortoise. The tortoises of the Galapagos grow to five feet in diameter and can weigh over 800 pounds. We never saw these giants in the wild, but at the Conservation Center we watched them devour leaves by the bushel. Their movements were slow and deliberate. Their focus was absolute. Imagine a speed-eating contest filmed in Matrix Bullet Time.

The tortoises were unperturbed by visitors. In fact, they could give a rat’s ass about the noise and the photographs as long as no one got between them and their leafy greens.

We serve our nightly salad from a bowl better sized for movie theater popcorn. As far as we are concerned—and we assure you that the tortoises agree—there is no such thing as too much salad.

To be clear, we are not vegetarians like the giant tortoises. Nor are we adherents to the raw food movement. We just love salad.

The best thing about the Mayan apocalypse is that there is no point in preparing for it. This is the lazy man’s Y2K. For those too young to remember, Y2K was when computers threatened, at the stroke of midnight in the year 2000, to prank us by giving us the wrong time. This sounds silly in retrospect, but at the time people were terrified to the point of hoarding canned food.
​
In the case of the Mayan apocalypse, hoarding is exactly the wrong strategy. After all, if the entire planet is reduced to a smoldering cinder, your stockpile of MREs and ammunition will do you no good. If the Earth is doomed, consuming is the smart move. To that end, we’ve been drinking the top end out of our wine cellar.

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.

We were recently accused by a website called TheFix.com of promoting drunkorexia. We’ll be honest. Until the charge was leveled, we’d never heard the term. It turns out that drunkorexia is a recently coined amalgamation of drunkenness and anorexia. It refers to an eating disorder wherein people abstain from eating in favor of drinking alcohol. We have no idea how many people suffer from drunkorexia. The term has yet to make Wikipedia, so obviously it falls short of epidemic. But even one sufferer is too many. Anorexia is straight up dangerous. Adding binge drinking to the mix is train wreck in process.

Our guess is that The Fix never actually visited Drink Your Carbs. Rather, they read our name somewhere and imagined us emaciated and sipping at mid-morning cocktails like Patsy from the British comedy series Absolutely Fabulous.

Recently, close friends told us that they were so inspired by the Drink your Carbs diet that they decided to jump into Austerity Mode in spite of the fact that they’d never experimented with Basic Drink Your Carbs. Austerity Mode is the strictest form of DYC. Virtually all carbohydrates come from vegetables, fruit, beans and low-fat dairy. This is DYC so alcohol is allowed, but cereal grains, starchy tubers such as potatoes and added sweeteners are fully eliminated. Our friends lasted three days before abandoning the effort. Frankly, we’re impressed by their fortitude. Most people wouldn’t have made it past lunchtime.
​
Make no mistake about it: going cold turkey on sugar and starch is a shock to the body. It brings all the symptoms associated with addiction withdrawal. (We were planning to list the symptoms here, but instead we’ll just recommend that you rent Sid and Nancy.) Until Pfizer invents a nicotine patch for people addicted to carbs, there are only two ways to get past these cravings: go cold turkey and suffer or slowly withdraw the simple carbs from your diet in order to diminish the cravings at a measured pace.

If you’re new to Drink Your Carbs, diving straight into Austerity Mode is a little like kicking a heroine habit without methadone or so much as a single therapy session. Consider instead taking baby steps.