Plague of Strength

I have tried many, many diets over the years. In college, as a wrestler, I stuck with an ultra-low fat, fairly high carb diet for nearly two years, eating almost nothing but turkey lunch meat, lettuce, and bagels (obviously, I was eating a lot of bagel sandwiches). After waking one night starving to death and craving sausage biscuits like a lunatic, I made a drastic switch to the Atkins diet. Due to the fact that I didn’t research it all that well, it didn’t quite have the effect I would have liked. I did enjoy my couple of months of eating nothing but sausage patties and hamburgers, at least until I awoke in a massive amount of pain, constipated as all hell, feeling the cumulative effects of two months of eating processed meat with no fiber whatsoever.

Neither of those diets worked particularly well, and in spite of 5 or 6 days a week of lifting and running, and wrestling hard 6 months out of the year, I was not “ripped”. Sure, I was muscular (for a guy who wrestled 134 lbs), and fairly lean, I was not the stack of brutally lean and vascular muscle that I am now.

From there, I moved to Tucson, where I started eating steamed chicken and broccoli for three meals a day, doused in the manna of the gods, Sriracha sauce. This meal was accompanied by at least a full cup of white rice, which I usually faced after drowning it in Sriracha, and then followed it up with a couple of protein shakes a day (at the time, I made my own chocolate shakes using unflavored bulk whey concentrate from Supplementdirect.com). Using this diet, I pushed my weight up to around 170, and was pretty lean, but the white rice kept me from getting much leaner. I mixed in the occasional hoagie as well, in addition to chicken soft tacos from Del Taco.

Much like Waffle House, Del Taco fucking rules, although every single one of their restaurants is a absolute shithole.

After trying the Chipotle diet (we’ve been doing that shit for twenty years, people- it is absolutely nothing new) for a few years, which put a few more pounds of muscle on me, and the chicken soup diet (which I’ll outline in another post), I discovered Metabolic Typing, found that I’m a meat type, and started doing occasional keto runs (a period of time in which you keep your daily carbs below 5% of your daily intake) in conjunction with carb cycling. The carb cycling, another thing I’ll outline in a later post, basically boils down to a couple a days of keto dieting, a couple of days of medium carbs, and a couple of days of high carbing it (typically on the days I have a cheat window).

So, for the secret: drum roll please…

CHICKEN WINGS. This is not a joke. I can attribute the veins on my abs DIRECTLY to my massive consumption of unbreaded chicken wings. Allow me to tell you why.

Wings have the perfect macronutrient ratio for low carbing it.  60% of the calories in wings come from fat, and almost all of the remainder come from protein.  Thus, when you combine a couple (or few) pounds of wings a day with a couple of protein shakes, you end up with a macronutrient breakdown that’s split almost exactly down the middle between protein and fat.

Thus, wings pretty much the ideal macronutrient ratio for low-carbing. Most diet gurus suggest a ratio along the lines of 55-70% fat, 5% carbs, and the remainder of your caloric  intake to come from protein, and that’s the breakdown with which you’ll end up if you allow wings to become the (awesome) cornerstone to your diet.

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