 Andrea is the cook in our house. Steven is in charge of dishes. In most households this would be an unfair division of labor. In our household, it balances out perfectly because when Andrea cooks she uses every pan, dish and utensil in the kitchen. Andrea cooks like our four-year-old nephew eats. It’s a joyous, full-body experience. Nothing is left untouched. The aftermath looks like the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
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 We are not to be trusted. We will lie to you. We will tell you that your outfit matches if we think you are too fragile to hear otherwise. We will tell you how much we enjoyed dinner with your new boyfriend. If we are performing a card trick, we will look you square in the eye and tell you that your card is “lost in the deck,” even though we know exactly where to find it.
We will not, however, lie to you when it matters. You will never hear us say, “You’re guaranteed to double your money” or “To us, that lump looks harmless.” Nor will we try to convince you that cocktails are just as enjoyable under the No Mixer rule. The sad truth is that most cocktails are now off limits.  Hello. My name is Steven. I used to hate kale. Now I love it.
When did it become a virtue to never change your mind? Watch any recent political coverage and the conclusion is unavoidable. We, as a country, have decided that new information should have no impact on opinions and beliefs. If you abandon a single conviction you held in seventh grade, you’re a weak-minded flip-flopper. It doesn’t matter what life experiences you’ve had between then and now. New evidence be damned. Changing your mind for any reason betrays you as indecisive and lacking in backbone. Go ahead and accuse me of being un-American. I have flip flopped on kale. I used to think that kale was far too bitter. It turns that my dislike of kale had everything to do with how it was prepared. The minute I tasted Andrea’s kale it became my favorite vegetable. Andrea and I are now in complete agreement that kale is the world’s most perfect vegetable. It’s low-calorie and high-nutrition. It’s delicious. It is the perfect compliment to any Drink Your Carbs meal. National Public Radio recently ran a history of USDA dietary advice from 1943 to the present. The only problem is that they forgot the most important one: the Drink Your Carbs Food Pyramid, the only pyramid that allows dieters to continue enjoying alcohol.  We recently discovered an article we had missed. Last year, the New York Times weighed in on dieting and alcohol. Their conclusion was the same as ours: they are fully compatible as long as your calories in don’t exceed your calories expended. They don’t mention us by name, but their suggestions are eerily similar to our Food List and Exercise Recommendations.
 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.
 Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, except for Santa who trying to choke down his billionth cookie of the evening.
In our experience, the over-21 set tends to be Santa skeptical. Some people get hung up on the impracticality of delivering presents to the roughly 2.2 billion Christians worldwide. Others concern themselves with the physics of flying reindeer or the difficulty of stuffing a morbidly obese man down the narrow flue of a modern chimney. At Drink Your Carbs, our skepticism springs from the sheer volume of cookies left on hearths that, for politeness reasons, Santa is required to consume.  Can you hold our drinks while we go up to the podium to collect our Nobel Prize?
“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.
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.  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. |
