Smoke Your Carbs

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.

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Full disclosure: we are not smokers. Our drug of choice is wine. We like the taste of wine. We enjoy sharing it with friends. The ritual of opening, pouring and tasting wine relaxes us at the end of the day. We indulge in beer and hard alcohol as well, but mostly, we drink wine.

We have a lot of friends whose drug of choice is not alcohol, but rather marijuana. If you ask them why they enjoy it, their list is identical to our justifications for our wine habit. Considering that we open a bottle most nights, criticizing their lifestyle would make us serious hypocrites. Perhaps we’re hypocrites anyway since we drink wine at the dining room table while we make our friends go outside to smoke.

Fact: Yes, we have both tried marijuana. Yes, we inhaled. What the hell was Bill Clinton thinking? If you don’t want to smoke, just say “no thank you.” Nobody’s going to hold it against you. No one cares. Wasting your friend’s weed by pretending to smoke and not inhaling is both unnecessary and uncool.

We would be justifiably upset if President Clinton allowed us to pour him a glass of pricey Cabernet just to see him dump it into a potted plant to avoid swallowing. Say “no” and we’ll happily bring you a non-alcoholic alternative. Say “yes” with no intention of drinking the glass and you will not be invited back.

All successful dieting, including DYC, comes down to calories in vs. calories out. If you consume more calories than you burn, you put on weight. If you burn more calories than you consume you lose weight. This creates an issue for Drink Your Carbs that is non-existent in diets that prohibit alcohol. Alcohol contains calories that must be burned and/or offset.

Fortunately, the American diet is overloaded with high calorie, low nutrition foods. These calories can be easily eliminated without any perceptible loss in the quantity of food eaten or in daily nutrition. The key is exchanging sugars, starches and heavily processed foods for all of the lean meats, fresh fruits and vegetables you can hold down. This exchange, in combination with an exercise requirement, is the weight loss engine behind DYC. 

The advantage of smoking your carbs: Half a bottle of wine at dinner adds between 250 and 275 calories to your day. A couple of pints of beer can easily add 300 calories or more. Smoking has its own issues, but it’s calorie free.

The rule-of-thumb for weight loss is that you have to earn and/or cut 3500 calories to lose one pound. It doesn’t require fancy, Nate Silver math to see that smoking instead of drinking your carbs will speed weight loss. If anything, the biggest worry diet-wise will be making sure you get enough calories. Take it from us, if your calorie intake drops too low you turn into a complete idiot. Steven did it once in the lead up to a DYC Competition. For two full weeks, he basically suffered from early onset Alzheimer’s. He would ask Andrea a question, listen intently to the answer and then ask the same question again. He would’ve fit in perfectly with the audience at last month’s Town Hall Debate For Undecided Voters.

There are a few other things to keep in mind if you are considering smoking your carbs: 

If you are also a drinker, no problem: Most of the smokers we know are also huge fans of craft beer. They can walk down a line of taps describing every beer in excruciating detail, how it was made, transported and even in what type of glass it should be served. Listening to them talk about beer is like listening to David Axelrod describe the vagaries of rural Pennsylvania voters. The detail is so fine that it occasionally blurs the line between expert and stalker. If this is you, it’s not a problem.

Just stick to Basic DYC and you’ll be fine.

Unless you get all of your health information from Phillip Morris internal memos, you probably already know that smoking is bad for you: We’re not your mom. We’re not going to tell you how to live your life. Nor are we going to wade into the quagmire of whether smoking pot is better or worse than cigarettes. It’s like that age-old debate over whether it’s better to be shot or stabbed.

​We know there are alternatives like vaporizers, but we have no idea if these are easier on the lungs. To be honest, we don’t even fully understand how vaporization works. We’ve seen dozens of vaporizers in all shapes and sizes, yet they remain as enigmatic as Donald Trump’s choice of toupee.

The best we can do is encourage you to ask your doctor for his or her preferred method of ingesting. 

Back Away From The Brownie: The obvious alternative to smoking is eating. Unfortunately, the ubiquitous brownie turns zero calories of marijuana into 250 calories of little-to-no nutritional value. And this assumes you limit yourself to one.

DYC strictly enforces a No Mixer Rule on drinkers. The idea is simple. Mixers are forbidden because mixers take a 95-calorie shot of tequila and turn it into a 350-calorie day-glo margarita. Simple syrup, added fruit juice and sickly sweet liquors should be avoided because they are unjustifiably high in calories. This same reasoning must be applied to Smoking Your Carbs.

Let the DYC Food List be your guide. You don’t have to count calories or cut portion sizes. Some foods, however, will have to go. Baked goods are out, as are candies and other confections. We know that this isn’t easy, but eliminating these foods is the best way to reduce calories without resorting to the mind-numbing drudgery of counting calories.

Infused butter, lard and olive oil are all fine for cooking. Tinctures are also okay, as long as they aren’t of the sweetened variety. Sadly, that’s pretty much it. On the bright side, if Smoking Your Carbs catches on it’s just a matter of time before healthy, low-carb treats start appearing at your local dispensary. It’ll be a glorious day when someone walks into his or her local shop, looks around and asks, “When did you stop carrying brownies and lollipops, and what the hell is ‘Wake ‘n’ Bacon’ and ‘Smoked TH-Seabass?’”

Fight The Munchies: Why has no one bred a marijuana strain that reduces the munchies effect? A team in Israel recently patented a strain with no THC; we assume their target market is people who just like the taste. Our point is: considering the sophistication of modern breeders, this should be feasible.

Until someone breeds the perfect Smoke Your Carbs strain, we recommend a different approach. The first thing you should do is eliminate all non-Drink Your Carbs foods your home. Everything labeled “Avoid” on the Food List has to go. Donate your unopened cans to a local homeless shelter. Throw a party and serve the remainder to friends and family. Do whatever it takes to get these foods out of your life before you begin.

If the only choices in your home are healthy foods, you are extremely likely to eat those foods when the munchies hit. As our pot-smoking, marathon running friend once said, “It doesn’t matter what you eat high. You’re super into it, so it might as well be something good for you.” 

The Tyranny of Exercise: Our Standard refrain is that the exercise requirement turns Drink Your Carbs into a self-correcting system. If you can’t get up in the morning and go for a run or face some hideous workout at the gym it’s time to dial the drinking way back. The tyranny of exercise acts like a biofeedback loop. If there is a problem, it’ll let you know long before your friends and family have to stage an Intervention.

A marijuana hangover is just not the same thing as a hangover from drinking cheap vodka. It’s like comparing being mauled by a bear to being mauled by a Pomeranian. The “Get Up In The Morning” rule just doesn’t apply. So, forget about rules and start exercising anyway.

​If you need ideas for how to start, check out our exercise recommendations. Just skim through the bits about drinking and try to focus on the parts where we talk about how exercise is supposed to hurt.

Not being smokers, this represents everything we know about this topic. It is, however, extremely likely that we missed something obvious. The perfect Smoke Your Carbs edible may already exist. There may be other factors affecting the diets of marijuana smokers that we failed to mention. We are admittedly not experts. Feel free to add comments and condemnations below. If we can’t take the criticism, at least we can be comforted by the fact that we live in California where emotional distress will qualify us for a medical marijuana card.

A Final Word From A Pot Smoking Lawyer Friend: We will never understand why our drug of choice, wine, has been deemed socially acceptable while marijuana has been judged worthy of jail time. It’s wrong and it’s stupid, but it is still Federal Law. It sucks, but until the Feds relent and allow states to decriminalize weed we have been advised to insist that we are kidding.

This is totally unrelated, but it’s an important part of building our TV Psychic resume: We think Diane Sawyer is the next celebrity to have a full-fledged Charlie Sheen-style meltdown. Normally we try to avoid going this far off topic, but we wanted to get our prediction in before someone else calls it.