Lee

216.2lbs. OMG WTF BBQ! Hmmm what the hell happened here? I blame Lee.

Well I can't really blame Lee because this was a conscious decision, for many reasons, on my part. In all actuality, I don't blame Lee one bit. Like Lee said last night, "I am interested in seeing the results tomorrow." I was too. So what did we do that was so perfectly awful and fantastic at the same time? We ate. We ate well.

Lee and I went to the Suns game last night and since the Suns were doing so well (for once this year) we decided to have one of those nights where we see what kind of freebies or cool stuff we can get inside the arena. We don't do this very often, we are die hard Suns fans. I am very thankful, over so many years, that Lee would share his season tickets with me. Now that's a friend folks. He has done this for almost as long as I have known him and, boys and girls, that's a mighty long time. One of my secret lottery wishes is that I immediately buy Lee floor seats for a season.

Speaking of the lottery, there was a promotion at the arena where if you bought $20 worth of lottery tickets, right then and there, you received two free Suns tickets. Suns tickets, even in the nosebleeds, aren't cheap. Well that was the first thing we did around halftime. So we scored 4 tickets and decided we would take our wives and make a night of it. Cool. They then allowed us to spin this wheel and whatever number it landed on - we got an item from the table of lottery swag. Now there are items you want and items you don't want. Seriously, who wants a tote bag that says "Arizona Lottery" on it? Compulsively gambling grandmothers, that's who. What did we get? Suns hats - both of us! Cha-ching. I also won $10 on one of the scratch tickets I bought (sorry Lee). Cha-ching.

Before all of the lottery mayhem, we were actually looking for some elusive booth where they upgraded season ticket holders to lower level seats just by asking. Crikey! We were on the hunt. Lower level seats for the price of...nothing? Could it be true? Your intrepid explorers were hard at work trying to find this Shangri-La of ticketdom. Could it be the Sixth Man booth on the lower level? Yes, yes it was. Perhaps there was some magic code? We didn't know but we dove in anyway. We quietly approached the woman dressed in a short skirt and long jacket behind the long stylish counter.

Lee, bracing himself with nerves of steel said, "I heard that you could get an upgrade to lower level seats on certain nights if you were a season ticket holder." We held our breath. She replied, "Do you have your voucher?" Panic set in. No, no we didn't. Oh God, oh God. I imagined she could smell our palpable fear. We had come to see the wizard and were now woefully unprepared. Was there some kind of dungeon run by the Suns Gorilla? Is that where they get the Dial Dancing Dads from, men imprisoned for actually asking for more from an already exciting sports entertainment experience?

Moments stretched into days until the smartly dressed woman (was she wearing a military uniform? Oh God why did you talk me into this Lee?) reached under the counter. I felt the need to find shelter, was she pulling a gun? I quickly stepped slightly behind Lee. He's taller than me and will slow the bullet. I only stepped slightly behind him because, you know, he's my friend and if she had a bad aim, I would surely have taken a bullet for him - albeit accidentally. Of course, that would also never show up on a surveillance camera if I angled my body right, saving both my pride and possibly my life. Win-win.

The woman then produced two tickets (I swore I heard angels singing) and said, "Okay, no problem, here you go." We became babbling idiots at that point. Lee in his nervousness asked, "These aren't in the corner are they?" Really, Lee? We just got great tickets downstairs and you just asked if they were in the corner? I, for one, am glad that I didn't have to go to the Gorilla dungeon and become a Dial Dancing Dad. By the way, that Dial for Men shower gel smells like ass. So thank goodness, I didn't wind up in a dungeon that smelled like ass. Lee and I have 12 large bottles of the stuff from another giveaway at another game. I wouldn't wash my car with it, it might eat through the paint job.

So we went and basked in our downstairs seats of unimaginable glory and watched the biggest blowout of the year. We also kept sneaking down to see how close we could get to the court. Yes, we are in our 40's and yes we are still teenagers. Perhaps the 2.5 beers had some effect.

Soon after, we left the arena and decided it would be best to walk around until all the traffic cleared. Also Lee was hungry and I should have remembered to bring something along with me because he is in such a rush on game nights he forgets to eat. This always happens. Where to go? Where to go? Hard Rock Cafe'? Eh, no. The food is good sometimes but the beer prices are ridiculous. So we decided that we would walk over to this Irish pub on Heritage Square called The Rose and Crown; a quick beer and some quick food for Lee and we would be headed home.

As we approached the pub, we noticed that it was a bit crowded but right across the square was the mecca of gourmands everywhere - Pizzeria Bianco. Now people will say this pizza or that pizza is the best in the country - they are wrong. Pizzeria Bianco is the best pizza place in the country, certifiably. There is no other. You can spout endlessly about Chicago deep dish this and Ray's New York that (we have both here in the Valley - thank you expatriates!) but nothing compares to Pizzeria Bianco, nothing. So now you are thinking, how could I resist eating all that cheese and white flour on an off night? I didn't. In fact, we honestly wanted to see what would happen on the morning weigh in.

As we sat down for the best pizza in the universe (yes I am scaling up) and talked about the health regimen, we looked over the menu. I tried getting all cutesy by ordering a salad. I have to admit it was only slightly cutesy because of the two huge skewers of prosciutto wrapped hunks of fontina cheese that were laying on the arugula. Here is what we ate:

• Spiedini - Italian Fontina wrapped in Prosciutto di Parma, served warm
• Biancoverde Pizza - Fresh Mozzarella, Parmigiano Reggiano, Ricotta, Arugula
• Bread with warm olive oil
• Side of balsamic vinegar

I had two slices of pizza and devoured almost all of the spiedini. Here is a picture of the wood fired brick oven:




Well? Was it scrumptious? Yes it was, very much so. Was it worth it to take a tiny break from the diet? Why yes, yes it was. Put yourself in my shoes: imagine you get a golden ticket to go whole hog inside of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, would you say, "I just can't, I am on a diet boo-hoo"? Hell to the no. You would go wallow in the chocolate river and fill yourself with chocolate bars. It's Willy freakin' Wonka's! Now imagine me, on a night out with my best friend, in front of a place that is usually impossible to get into and wherein lies the best pizza in the known universe (every major food critic agrees), if not the multiverse; hell yeah I am going to eat me some pizza. So the end result of eating great food was a .8lb increase over the previous day. Also, I know what Christy and I are doing for binge day (yeah, it's still on like Donkey Kong).

This got me to thinking, did I really eat .8lbs of food than I normally would? No. I ate very little before the game. Where is the difference? It's how my body stored and used the food. As soon as my body saw cheese and bread product, it went, "Yum, let's put this in the good old fat storage!" I probably ate about the same, calorically, as I normally would. I did have more beer than I normally would though, which means that my body was processing the alcohol before the food. Alcohol, if it is over a certain limit, has a way of backing up the food processing line. With such fatty food and my liver having to wait before it could work through the food, my body stored it. There is a point where your body just sends the food off to fat land because it has went too far past the time it has on the clock to process it properly. Your internal organs only have so much capacity. I exceeded mine so it stored almost everything I ate after a certain point. It also didn't help things that it was relatively late.

If beer was the last thing I ingested, I have a strong suspicion that I would have lost weight. Why? I had a huge spike in my physical activity from all the running around for 4 hours last night. Beer is mostly water and is excreted, my liver would have taken care of the sugar alcohols quite handily. Now if I would have eaten earlier (even though there were some foods not normally allowed) and waited to drink, I would have been okay. Interesting little (tasty) experiment - don't you think? I will also make an educated guess that my weight will drop somewhat more on tomorrow's weigh in. The alcohol has already metabolized and my body is eating what I stored last night as the day goes on. I also spiked my metabolism during last night's escapade. I was hyperactive after eating carbs, it was crazy how much energy I had. I am seeing 214lbs as an accurate guess for the end of the week now, though 210 would have been fantastic. But remember I will be 214lbs (loss of 1.4lbs for the week) having eaten the best pizza in the world.


LEE, LEE, LEE, LEE