Haters gonna hate

Last night, while I was crushing wings at bdubs like a starving predator, a rugby teammate told me I was fucking hilarious.  I contemplated this statement while I continued to jam deep fried chicken into my mouth and arrived at the conclusion that he was absolutely right.

Too bad being a clown and making half-drunk people laugh isn't terribly interesting.  And neither is what I do with my life. My life is equally as interesting as jury duty, and people would rather churn butter than read about my stupid bullshit.  But guess what?  I give a sum total of zero fucks what you think about me or my life.  I do what I do.  So I'm gonna write this blog anyways.  Haters gonna hate.

This blog will be about rugby, my job as chemical dependency counselor, my experiences with a ketogenic diet, my interest in cooking (and eating) like a man, and whatever else I choose to write about.  So lets get started.

First post.

I'm currently on a ketogenic diet.  I've lost a metric ass-load of weight in about two American-standard hot-seconds.  In order to explain how keto works, one must grasp the basics of the body's metabolism.  Strap yourself in, here comes the broscience.

Glucose (sugar) is broken down by insulin and converted to glycogen to be burned for energy.  This is a good thing.  However, the Standard American Diet (SAD) causes people to flood their body with carbohydrates (which metabolize into glucose) and sugar.  In fact, people consume so many carbs and sugar that the body cannot produce enough insulin to keep up.  The body isn't stupid.  It knows how important it is to have enough fuel to power the body throughout the day, and it isn't about to let all that perfectly good glucose go to waste.  So like a hoarder packing their house full of garbage, the body stores all that extra energy in - you guessed it - fat.  There's no off-switch for this.  Exceed the amount of sugar your insulin can metabolize, and you will gain fat.  Conversely, if you deprive your body of carbs and sugar, it will have to rely on it's fat stores for energy.  If you're a fat-shit like me, you've got plenty to spare.  Start using your fat stores for energy, and you will lose weight.  It's simple.  The goal of a ketogenic diet is to limit carbohydrate intake in order to force your body into using ketones to break down fat stores for brain fuel, rather than using insulin to convert your dietary carbs for energy.  I won't get into all the detail of how this works, but I encourage you to visit www.reddit.com/r/keto and read the FAQs.

Needless to say, I love ketones.  They hunt down fat and kill it with extreme prejudice. They're like a roid-raging Arnold Schwarzenegger chasing a panicked Linda Hamilton through the streets of 1980s Los Angeles - except in this analogy Sarah Conner is a fat cell and the Terminator is a ketone.

"My last name is really hard to spell without Google!"

Sounds great right? Cue the haters.

"But Brad!  How can I live if I can't eat anything?  Everything has carbs!" she said angrily as she began to suck doughnut glaze from underneath her fingernails.  "If you want to lose weight you need to eat lots of bread, rice, and pasta.  Trust me, I've been on lots of diets!  I lost five pounds seventeen years ago eating nothing but cake batter and pasta while main-lining Mountain Dew.  There's no fat in Mountain Dew!"

Sadly, she was killed by Japanese whalers later that day.  Whale Wars was on the scene, but the crew of the Sea Shepherd was too busy to intervene as they were trying to un-wedge their captain from the door of an Old Country Buffet.

"Bring me the Wookie... and a dentist."

I'm sure you're wondering: "What the hell can I eat if I can't have carbs?"  One word: fat, protein, and fiber.  Well, that's three words. Let me try again.  Delicious shit.  Meh, close enough.  The main reason why this diet works for me is that I can eat copious amounts of delicious shit - fat, protein, and fiber - all while having the energy to maintain an extremely active lifestyle consisting of rugby, power lifting, and 54 hour work weeks.  I eat gigantic burgers (no bun) covered in bacon and cheese, massive steaks, hot wings, and anything else that is full of fat and protein, but no carbs.  Everything I eat tastes amazing, makes me full as shit, and gives me so much fucking energy I can't sit still.  I'm throwing more weight around in the gym than ever before, sleeping better, and dropping pounds like Chargers wide receivers drop passes in the 4th quarter.

I don't have it in me to be clever.  I hate Philip Rivers and everything about the organization he plays for.  I'm not even joking.  Fuck the Chargers.

Keto is flexible enough to accommodate my hectic schedule and so easy that even the mouth-breathing hermaphrodite Philip Rivers could do it.  But what makes this diet the absolute, undisputed champion of all other diets is that it affords me one epic cheat day a week.  In order to make sure my metabolism doesn't over-produce ketones (creating a nasty condition called ketoacidosis) I have to hit the reset button each week.  Basically, I get to consume anything and everything in front of me.  6 days of discipline affords me 24 hours to wreck every buffet in town or attempt to put the local Pizza Hut out of business.  Most importantly it satisfies my urge to eat like a fat kid.  It's a great reward, and flooding my system with carbs after a week of deprivation is an amazing, euphoric high.

It's like this, only with more bread.

In upcoming posts I'll be sharing my favorite keto-friendly recipes, as well as those that I save for my cheat days.  If you want to try keto, I recommend visiting that reddit page I posted above.  Oh, and one more thing.

Haters gonna hate.