Day 5 - Facing the Dragon. Neighborhood Barbecues.

Yesterday I faced the dragon, the ultimate in temptation: the neighborhood barbecue!

            First of all, I like my neighbors, but I don’t really know them that well. Allison has had some good interactions with them, but I’m a little bit more an unknown quantity to them. Our across the street neighbors invited everyone over, and made it a potluck, so everyone had to bring something. I didn’t learn about this until 1:00 in the afternoon when I was getting peckish for lunch and Allison said, “Oh, we’re going to a potluck barbecue at 3:00.” Well fuck! Three o’clock? Really? That’s a super bad time to have a barbecue. You can’t call that late lunch, or early dinner. What the hell is it? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s David isn’t going to eat for another two hours, and then when that grill goes live he’s going to devour everything fatty and good he can get his hands on o’clock.”

            We didn’t have anything to bring to the party, so I decided to head to the store. I knew I was going to be brining salad, of course, but that couldn’t be the only thing. Well, 24 sausages later I was heading through the checkout, and it was there that I did the smartest thing ever, yet the thing everyone else would suggest is a really bad idea: I bought a small bag of Ruffle’s Sour Cream and Cheddar potato chips. In the grand scheme of things potato chips are really bad for you. Even I know this. Even I, a guy who can easily polish off a full sized bag of these fried, glistening, jewels of all that is wrong with the American waistline, knows they are a bad choice. And yet… they weren’t.

            I at them with gusto, to be sure, but I didn’t slide over to the Price Chopper deli counter and order up a couple slices of pizza, which had been my plan. Instead, I had a small bag of potato chips, and in doing so I knew I would be able to make it to this cursed three o’clock barbecue without feeling the need to punch people in the face in order to get to the burgers and hot dogs.

            I brought multiple packages of kielbasa, bratwursts, and even beer brats, but I only ate two. I know two is a lot, but each one contains 210 calories – seriously the Internet is awesome for getting calorie counts on things – so combined with the fresh baked potato buns, of which each has 110 calories – each one weighed in at about 320 calories. So 640 calories all totaled. Most importantly, I also ate a huge mixed green salad with cukes, tomatoes, nuts, peppers, smoked blue cheese – not too much – and balsamic vinaigrette.

            Just so we’re clear, in order to understand how bad potato chips are for you, the little bag of Ruffles had 160 calories. What this means is a small bag of potato chips is equal to half a sausage and bun. That’s a fuck ton of calories for a small bag of crisps. I had no freaking idea. If you’d asked me before I started this silliness, I would have said a fatty cheddar cheese filled – oh yea, did I mention that I got the cheddar sausages, and that that’s the item I’m pulling the calorie count from? Yea, it’s like that – fucking sausage would be WAY worse for you than a small bag of potato chips. Of course, had you actually asked me, I would have been dead fucking wrong.

            Oh!!! Oh!!! Yea, here’s the other thing that’s super fucking crazy. Guess how many calories are in the salad… Go on, guess.

            Well, I finally looked it up, and I was REALLY surprised. I would have guessed four or five hundred. (I eat really big salads.) No, not at all! This one, which I didn’t put any meats on or anything like that, except a really small amount of smoked blue cheese, came out, according to the Intertuberwebs, at 91 calories… Well, I knew the Website I was looking at must have been talking about a side salad so I cranked it up by three times, so it shook out to 273 calories. Holy Shit Batman! You really can pretty much eat all the salad you want. (Which, for the most part, is more than I really want to eat, given what I want to eat is a fucking rib eye steak… But still…)

            When you’re lining up for the food table at your next barbecue, think had about the chips you put on your plate. I mean, it is the easiest thing in the world to just put a big pile of them right beside you hamburgers and such, and you will quickly find you just added several hundred calories to your day.

            I had a late night snack of celery and peanut butter, about two tablespoons, which rings in 188 calories.

Drum roll, please… My total caloric intake for the day? 1261!

I will admit that yesterday was a very light day for me, and I know I would have eaten more than that, but

            Also, the barbecue was a good time, although I did have a tough time resisting the desire to comfort eat, given I was a bit uneasy with all the folks there, who seem to really like each other, and know each other well. I mean, I’m an easy guy to get along with, and for some reason I am not really enveloped in the neighborhood scene.

            Maybe I need to invite the gang over for salad.