Checkpoint 1

Checkpoint 1

The only vegan thing they had at Pyrmont Park Cafe was my doppio.

We held our two week progress check at Pyrmont Park Café. I used to love this place, but now knowing that they have nothing on their menu to cater for temporary vegans, I feel temporarily ostracised.

Tones Beefcake Update:

As I walked over to Tone at the swings, I immediately noticed his shoulders had broadened. At this point I should point out that this blog will have moderately gay undertones. Here is a quick snap, I warned him so he could flex:

Incredible how quickly your body reacts to area specific weight training.

Duges Six-pack update:

Duges showed up shortly afterwards, so I got a quick abs progress shot:

This lighting was all wrong, according to Duges, but I can’t really argue, he is a lighting professional. Can’t really argue with the sun though. He showed me a selfie with correct lighting, which I was able to convince him to text to me, with one proviso:

 

 

He was right, much better lighting. And kudos for having the guts to post a selfie. I think obscuring your face might help – having a stupid “why-am-I-doing-this” look on my face may be why I was so reluctant to post mine.

Later Duges texted me this one:

Sorry Duges I did try to Photoshop out that rash near your groin, but I don’t have Photoshop.

I did put Duges at long shot for this event, just on account of the inherent difficulty. In fact truth be told I put myself as the hare and the other three just as arguing about who gets to be tortoise. But Duges is firming to favourite now. You are looking yoked Duges, and I say that with every last ounce of heterosexuality that a man can still claim, while receiving and transmitting selfies of his mates. I am tossing up whether to change the blog title from obligatevegan to fiftyshadesofgay. Wow, I thought I made that up, but just googled "Fifty Shades of Gay" - there is already a gay porn film with that title. Please don't google anything written here, it is probably all stolen.

 

Chucks Weight-cut update:

No show from Chuck, possibly too weak to move. He is doing well though, lost 5.5kgs in 2 weeks and lowest body fat since 1997, so great progress. Kilos get harder and harder to lose the further you go though, so it is still uphill from here. I have primed him on the 24 hour MMA weight-cut technique, but he has not responded so may not be keen. It is probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but an interesting way to lose 5kg of water weight. It is fairly simple, you spend a couple of days drinking as much as possible, then 24hrs our from weigh-in, stop drinking and eating completely. The excess water intake in the days before speeds up your urination process, which doesn’t immediately slow down when you stop drinking, so you expel quite a bit of the body's liquid reserves. Then as often as you can you bath or shower for 30 minutes. In a really hot shower you can lose half a kilo in thirty minutes. This rate decrease as the 24hrs goes on, but it adds up pretty quickly. Of course, you can die doing it, ask Andreas Munzer. Which you can't do, he is dead. 

 

I haven't asked for a selfie from Chuck. I imagine even asking for one may end our friendship forever. Selfies are a little difficult for Chuck, given that his phone is from 1994, and probably has no camera. Side-challenge: get a selfie of Chuck by the end of this, somehow. This will have to do for now:

 

 

RIP Breville. 

In week our my faithful Breville blender, which we have had for ten years or so, died. It had mixed literally thousands of margaritas. If at any time in the last decade you woke up passed out on our floor, feeling like you had been margarita-boarded, odds are the Breville was involved. But when it got loaded up with vegan plant matter day after day, it finally blew up like a meth lab. It was a no-brainer to get the Blendtec, check it out:

 

I like knowing that my blender hates my iphone as much as I do.

I can’t spank on about the Blendtec hard enough, it is an awesome machine. I am a big fan of the design concept: “let’s just attach a blender jug to a lawnmower engine”. I also looked at the Vitamix, but having to stand there stuffing everything down constantly with what looks like a giant black dildo, is ridonkulous. The Blendtec blades suck everything into themselves, so you just pull the ripcord and walk away. And it liquefies everything properly too, kale stems and celery stalks, everything just gets destroyed. It is the Cain Velasquez of blenders.

 

The Blendtec kale shakes tear through your system like a runaway luge. In fact my whole digestion schedule has been jacked by this diet. On an all-meat-diet, I used to go days between serious toilet visits if I wanted to. Now it is several times a day. And there is no arguing either: once I get the signal,  I have to start looking for ablution facilities immediately. The clock starts ticking, and if I have not found a bathroom in less than an hour, I am positive my bowels will start making decisions I will regret. In my carnivore days, I was able to always enjoy the comforts of my own bathroom. Now, under the ruthless bowel dictatorship regime, I am in every god-awful public toilet in the state. I feel like a location scout for Trainspotting II.

 

I am guessing it is better for you not to let your own raw sewage sit in your system for days at a time, but I am not sure about the health impacts of breathing in all that public toilet stench.

 

These are all things I did not foresee when I agreed to this stupid bet.

 

Please, bacon, come at me.   

The blogger, in happier times

Got vegan?

Got Vegan?

I have decided not to tell people about the bet. People I don’t know, that is. I want to know what it feels like to be sneered at by carnivores the way I normally sneer at vegans. So when asking for vegan food, I don’t jump into “it’s for a bet, I really eat meat, loads of it”…instead, I just let it wash over them.  I want to be judged and rejected by people I would normally judge and reject.

So far society has let me down. No ridicule, no anger, no meat-eaters beating me over the head with gnawed shin bones. People are always polite and apologetic. Or sometimes just confused. I imagine that the true intent behind their standard apology is kind of:

“No, sorry. Sorry you are so lame.”

Country people have produced the best responses. Still always polite, but funny. A girl at the Powerhouse in Armidale told me not only did the hotel have no vegan, but nowhere in the entire town had vegan. That was on day one, so I was half worried that while I was in my room eating the emergency can of baked beans I brought with me, she would call her brother who would grab a couple of their cousins and come round later to go to work on me with a star picket and an old axe handle.

Further into the bet, I am getting more self-righteous about my fake veganism. To add to the impact, I always put my glasses on, not sure why. The more old-school the bloke behind the counter, the more I need to confess my dirty little vegan secret. A 150kg tattooed BP manager, who I asked:

“Do you have any vegan ice-creams?”

He answered slowly and cautiously:

“Nah mate”

...then looked at me as if I had just told him I own a bar in Darlinghurst called Beef.

I’ve never used the phrase “ok I’ll just have water” so many times in my life. Short compilation (my secret camera work needs work):

 

I get more grief from my intransigent 7 year old son. When I explained the "vegan for a month" bet to him, his first question was

“But what are you going to put in the smoker?”

(he helped me build a meat smoker last year, for bacon and ribs and smoked turkey beef jerky and... joy really, pure unadulterated carnivorous joy.)

“Well I guess I will smoke vegetables in there”

and he laughed in my face.

(He wanted Captain America, I preferred more traditional red-neck iconology, the General Lee) 

When my little sisters boyfriend bought me a vegan cookbook for Christmas, he sat on the couch in silence while he went over it page by page, then announced loudly:

“Dad there's not a single thing in that whole book that I would eat.”

To prove him wrong, the other night I slipped a vegan hamburger patty into his hamburger, made of beans or lentils or tofu or whatever (it was great), and then I snuck off while he tucked in. About ten minutes later he came into the office, two thirds of the burger in his belly, and held the rest up to my face and, angrily:

“Dad… WHAT is in this burger???”

“Just burger stuff…”

“It’s VEGAN isn’t it?!??! You’re not cooking for me EVER AGAIN” 

He was uppercase mad.

It seems society in general is a lot more tolerant than I expected. My son however, still dirty about that vegeburger.

I am yet to feel any side effects. I am never hungry, I am not losing weight, and am not tired or weak. I thought there would be a mild depression associated with the meat withdrawals (not wonder-if-in-that-chair-I-could-still-get-my-toe-to-reach-the-shotgun-trigger sad) but just a general low feeling.

I got so much pleasure from preparing meat and cooking with meat, that I thought it's absence would get me down. But coming up with new ways to make edible the previously inedible, is probably filling that void. Migrating my meat prep techniques and flavours over to vegetables, is probably more accurate. The last smoker project was bourbon and molasses apple-smoked almonds. Yes they were awesome. Yes I would prefer that sentence ended with "ribs". I have been feeding the flavoured almonds through my meat grinder to use them to spice other foods. But mainly because I feel better about feeding something through my meat grinder.

Todays disappointing discoveries: honey and Worcestshire sauce are both non-vegan.

I have been getting sucked in to the marketing of a lot of this crap:

 

Which is fine, as long as you are not expecting pepperoni. You really need to lower your expectations when eating fake meat vegan food. Even the names annoy me. It's not turkey, it sure as hell isn't pepperoni, it’s just tofu, so stop combining your crap vegan word with a cool meat word to make a new word. Stupidiots.

Benchmarking & Passing out at Bondi gym

Benchmarking

 Passing out at Bondi gym

 

Matty O’Neill set the benchmarking tasks for the bet at Bondi Gym.

1. Push-ups in 1 minute
2. Stationary bike at full resistance – distance in 2 minutes
3. Dips till fail
4. Chin ups till fail
5. Plank till fail
6. Bench press
7. Leg presses in one minute

No need to publish results now - I think we can all agree they were pretty ordinary. Not sure about everyone else but it has been several years between gym visits for me. Duges is off to a bad start, having not shown up to the benchmarking. This may be related to Chuck forgetting to call him. Still – he has a specific goal and high base fitness which shouldn’t change much by simply peeling flesh from his abdomen.

 

Here is  a clip of Matty smashing out an outstanding 80+ (we lost count) push-ups in one minute, needless to say he was the far and away winner in this category. And all other categories.

 

For comparison, here is Tone:

Unfortunately I was not quick enough to capture any actual push ups.

The Man-Faint

(distant but equally life-threatening relative of the Man-Flu)

Full disclosure would require at this point that I mention the fainting. After the stationary bike, plank and the push-ups, I felt a little light headed. Had to go outside and sit in the rain for a while gathering my thoughts, sipping baby sips of water. Eventually I gathered my self and went over to the other competitors, to act normal. When four men are standing in a gym talking, it is fairly normal for one of them to fall violently to a seated position, right? The miasma of the gym didn't help things. I was so confused by my body that I went looking for the mens changerooms, thinking maybe a poo would help (!?). I got to the womens changerooms, and realised that the mens was all the way up on the first floor, the thought of having climb a flight of stairs was all too much and I passed out cold. Oddly, when I smashed the back of my head on the floor, and bit my tongue, it immediately made me feel better.

Matty found me wandering around bumping into walls and made a quick diagnosis – he guessed correctly that I had skipped breakfast that morning, so he bought me a Gatorade. After drinking half of that, I felt normal again and could continue the benchmarking. 
I had no idea that blood sugar or salt levels or whatever could hammer home so fast and hard if you exert yourself to failure. A little point to note down and never fuck with again - don't skip breakfast.

This of course ruins the benchmark for my hypothesis. I expect my health to deteriorate over the month - I expect to look and feel like most vegans I know - like a sigh in human form. So at the end of the month, unless the second I walk into the gym I have a heart attack and die, then it will be difficult to show veganism has deteriorated my health. We’ll see.

As part of the benchmarking, I also took a shirtless “selfie” this week. I thought that would be an easy thing to do, but it was extremely difficult. Not because I look like a lump of goats cheese rolled in pubes, more that I look like an idiot who took a photo of himself in the mirror without a shirt on. So it wont form part of the benchmarking.

The Bet: Vegan for a Month

after nearly forty years of being an obligate carnivore

Meat may not produce better spellers

All my life I have hated vegetables. My earliest memories are peppered with adults trying to force-feed me greens. I have vomited cabbage onto a babysitter, fed peas under a table to a friend’s mum’s dog, squashed bubble and squeak into my pocket to earn dessert. Like some kind of bizarre nightmare, I felt I spent most of my youth fleeing from angry vegetables.

I never made a conscious decision to be a carnivore, it was just always there. My early years would have certainly been easier if I were an omnivore, but I could not change it. Although I did dedicate several years to forcing myself to like beer, and that eventually took. So maybe I gave up too easily.

As an adult, I reconcile this as a biological matter: I believe that my body tells me what it wants, and it wants meat. No matter what the greater public believe, meat is always going to be my optimum fuel. Once I came to that conclusion, I stopped trying to force plants into my body, and am now pretty much an obligate carnivore. Every meal has meat as the main ingredient. Almost forty years on meat alone, with virtually zero health problems. I have been told a million times that I am a heart attack waiting to happen, yet always have better than average figures for all the key indicators (cholesterol, blood pressure etc) whenever I'm tested, and rarely get sick. My only hospital visit ever was about a year ago to tear out my appendix in the middle of the night before it exploded.

Recently a few high school mates (class of 90) wanted to wager a February Challenge. Tone is going beefcake - a month dedicated to muscle gain, Chuck is going to crash diet to try and hit his 1990 body weight of 72kg, and Duges' wife Jen intercepted the email chain and got in before him to nominate his goal - Duges is getting a six pack.


This is what is commonly known as a Kestell bet- $10,000 but the loser does not have to pay.

So no meat and no dairy, no eggs and no fish. And no supplements no pills no capsules – if I can’t get it from plants then I can’t get it. My predictions are that I will drop weight, be permanently hungry, my health will deteriorate, I will generally function physically and emotionally at less than 100%. Listless, cranky, unhappy and unhealthy.

This blog will be mainly concerned with my whingeing and complaining, but I will drag the others into it whenever I can.

There are rumours that the finale will be celebrated with a boozy Gaulish feast that would put Obelisk into a food coma. My friends are dubious, my wife is annoyed, my plants are terrified. Bring on March.