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.
 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.  Full Disclosure: These brownies are not 100 percent Drink Your Carbs compliant. The Basic Drink Your Carbs diet eliminates both maple syrup and honey. When it comes to sweeteners, Drink Your Carbs is more restrictive than Paleo or pretty much any other diet we’ve seen. Our reasoning is simple. If we want to continue drinking alcohol, we have to cut calories elsewhere. Eliminating sweeteners is the easiest and most efficient way to accomplish this.
If we want something to finish a meal, our choice is invariably another glass of wine, beer or an occasional Scotch. But even we bust out this recipe for special occasions. If we plan to make dessert for a party, these are our go to choice.  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.
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.”  "You’re going to have to eat that salad if you want dessert." Growing up in Steven’s house, a plate of leafy greens was viewed as a punishment. Each of the kids was required to consume at least a few pieces of iceberg lettuce drowning in bottled ranch dressing. Steven, in particular, responded to it as though he was being asked to eat a live cockroach.
Contrast this with Andrea’s house. There was no iceberg lettuce or store-bought dressing sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup and pumped full of chemicals to increase the shelf life. Her family assembled salads of fresh romaine, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and other vegetables served lightly dressed in a homemade dressing. Throughout the long Colorado summers, Andrea and her siblings would pick fresh greens and vegetables from their garden and then fight over who got to wash and cut them. The downside of all of this “kitchen help” was that someone was invariably served a slug.  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.
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.  Long before marrying Andrea, Steven dated a Cuban girl from Miami. It was a typical college relationship. They were madly in love within days and broken up less than six months later. The relationship had all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned melodrama. Every emotion was amplified by the inexperience and hormones of youth. After the breakup, the girl sacrificed a live chicken in order to curse Steven in a Santeria ritual. Steven probably deserved the curse; he had a tendency to crack inappropriate jokes at times when no words should be spoken. The chicken, however, was completely innocent.
It turns out that, for Steven, a cursed life is largely indistinguishable from a lucky one. Even that crazy relationship turned out to be a lucky break. Out of the wreckage, Steven managed to salvage the girl’s family recipe for traditional Cuban black beans. Over the past 20 years, Andrea has taken that recipe, and, as she’s prone to do, both simplified and perfected it. |
