Carb Guy

This fucking carb bastard is laughing at me. OHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOH

As a child my primary interests were Goldeneye 64 and sour cream, a combination that resulted in me being a fat little son of a bitch with a terrible haircut for the first 13-odd years of my life. Then, puberty threw me a bone* and I hit my growth spurt, so by the time I got to high school I was still aesthetically unappealing in a lot of ways, but no longer overweight.

*There’s a boner joke in here but I’m not going to go looking for it.  

Today, I pride myself on being a relatively lean adult, even though I really have nothing to be proud of. It’s not like at the age of 12 I took the initiative and devised a fitness regimen to get into shape – I just sat around being alive until my hormones made my height more appropriate to my weight. I guess you could say I’ve got a fat little boy deep inside m- OKAY NEXT PARAGRAPH

Since I never did anything to stop being fat, I don’t have any particularly good eating or exercise habits, and my continued thinness is pretty much dumb luck thanks to my metabolism. But I know that won’t last forever, and I’m afraid that when it shuts down I’ll gradually revert back to my prior fatness, kind of like Flowers for Algernon but with an all-you-can-eat Indian lunch buffet.

To that end, I’ve been trying to be healthier this year – I’ve been walking a mile or two at lunch every day, I’ve cut my Diet Coke consumption drastically, and I’ve eaten more salads than I’d care to admit. Through it all, though, my weight has steadfastly remained the same.

Maybe it’s a sign from the universe that some higher power needs me to be exactly this weight, per some intricate plan beyond human comprehension. As a child I was too heavy to fulfill my destiny so the universe made me my current weight; now all attempts to decrease that weight are in vain because the universe needs me to be exactly 175 pounds.

What’s more likely is that I’m fucking something up, so when I went back to the doctor for a followup appointment yesterday I brought the matter up with him. His suggestion was, “Why don’t you try cutting carbs for the next two weeks?” 

Here are some of my Google searches from the past 18 hours:

what are carbs

what foods have carbs

does peanut butter have carbs

how many carbs does peanut butter have

do they make peanut butter without carbs in it

have alison brie and dave franco broken up

What I’ve learned is that pretty much every bachelor food I subsist on – pasta, rice, sandwiches – are choc-a-bloc full of carbs. I’ve also learned that cutting carbs will make me ‘irritable’ for a couple of weeks, because apparently carbs are natural mood enhancers. This does not bode well – I’m pretty irritable even when I’m shoving open faced peanut butter sandwiches and Safeway Select egg noodles into my face, so I might have to join a fight club for the next couple of weeks or something.

I don’t know if this is nine hours of carb-withdrawal talking, but I already hate everything about my new diet.

I’ve spent my time in LA trying as hard as I can to not be an LA guy, and then today when one of my coworkers asked me what I wanted for lunch I found myself saying, “I don’t know – I’m cutting carbs, so maybe a lettuce wrap?” Hey baby, I can give you a ride to lunch in my white convertible 1983 Chrysler LeBaron, so long as you don’t mind me calling my life coach from my car phone. Cocaine’s in the glove box – help yourself!

I also hate calling them ‘carbs’ – as though my fast paced, healthy lifestyle doesn’t allow me to slow down long enough to say ‘-ohydrates’ every time I explain to somebody what I can’t have. Hell, for all my Googling I’m still not sure I could tell you what carbs are – my best explanation is, “They’re like science things in your food that make you happy but also fat.”

I grew up in a family of food lovers, and I always figured that when the time came for me to lose weight I’d just start exercising aggressively so I could keep my preferred diet more or less intact, probably because I always assume that the future version of me is going to be a much smarter, more responsible person than I ever will be. Regular readers will recall that even the thought of exercise is enough to trigger an existential crisis for me, to the point that I’d rather take a shower with John Boehner than go to the gym.

I’m still an overweight 11 year old. I hate sweating and I’m slowly customizing my room so that I can control my lights, TV, and computer without getting out of bed. For me, being lazy isn’t a bad habit – it’s a lifestyle choice. The fact of the matter is that my passion in life is writing, and that activity only rewards people who spend a whole lot of time sitting perfectly still and staring at a screen.

To a lazy person, not doing something is almost always preferable to doing something. So the choice between getting a gym membership, carving time out of my day to go there, and building a workout routine or simply not eating bread, rice, and pasta isn’t really a choice at all.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I’m an asshole to you in the next couple of weeks, it’s not because I’m a dyed in the wool asshole. It’s just because I don’t have enough carbs, and for that reason it’s actually really irresponsible of you to get mad at me because it’s a medical condition beyond my control.

Wow. Actually, this no carb thing is kind of like a ‘get out of shame free’ card! The only way this could be better would be if I was eating a big, fluffy croissant right now.

Truman Capps apologizes to all LeBaron owners.