The Quest for a Better Cheeseburger

This post is at least two years in the making.

I love cheeseburgers. They're my Achilles' heel any time I'm trying to cut weight. No matter how good I'm doing on a cutting plan, I eventually give into my craving and go get a burger. I fucking love them. Most of us do, too. How many of us go a week without eating a burger? I'm guessing that absent my vegetarian friends, there's not too many of us that do so. Like Samuel Jackson said, they're the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast.

Was he being sarcastic? I'm not sure.

So I've spent no less than two years trying to find a way to make one that's low in fat and doesn't taste like ass. This has been one major headache after another, with massive fail after massive fail, and I'm going to share all of that with you now before I get to the good version. Consider it a cautionary tale so you don't do all this shit yourself.

1. Just buy the lean stuff (96% fat free) and cook it as you would a normal burger

Why does this fail? Because the stuff is as dry as the Sahara. Until you try this, you don't realize how important fat is in making a juicy, delicious cheeseburger. On its own, this stuff takes like mushy, overcooked steak. I even put this shit in spaghetti sauce once and it didn't do anything to make this nasty stuff any less dry. On its own, it's fucking awful.

2. Buy the lean stuff and put fat in it

I did this when I went to Medical Weight Loss Clinic a few years ago when I made a hard effort to cut weight. Because I was allowed one tablespoon of Land O' Lakes spread and 4.5 ounces of lean ground beef, I put the two together after I read some stuff on the internet suggesting adding fat to the ground beef. This did work to make the burger taste good, albeit with a slight buttery flavor. However, I stopped doing it after I ended my MWLC diet plan because I found that when you add fat to the burger, you're pretty much breaking even with 80/20 traditional ground beef. I could get away with that when my diet was restricted to 1,600 calories a day. Not so much now.

3. Use a substitute for ground beef

I do enjoy a good 85/15 turkey burger. It's not as good as ground beef, but it's good nonetheless. Still, after I checked the calorie content on turkey and ground beef, I found that when you account for an equal percentage of fat, the difference in calories is pretty negligible. The only way to see a severe reduction in calories is by getting the super lean ground turkey, which leads to the same issues as above.

Bison is another substitute for ground beef. Like its turkey counterpart, it's delicious in its own right. Unfortunately, it also has 17 grams of fat per 4 ounce serving, and is also expensive as fuck. You will never find bison on sale. It's always going to be $11-$12 a pound, and the fat content is about the same as your average 80/20 ground beef (18 grams per 4 ounce serving).

Don't even bother with that ground chicken shit. I love chicken and still won't touch that garbage.

4. Grind up your own lean steak into ground beef

This really sounded great on paper when I decided to try it. I bought an inexpensive meat grinder on Amazon, set it up, and tossed in some lean sirloin.

You know what happens when you grind up lean sirloin and try to cook it as a burger? It turns right back into a steak. Steak is delicious, but you don't do this because you want a steak. You want a burger.

5. Find success on accident

Since I watch a lot of healthy recipe videos on YouTube, I stumbled onto a channel from a guy that calls himself Remington James. The first video that I came across showed how to make a mini deep dish pizza made with fat free shredded cheese. Until then, I didn't even know that fat free shredded cheese existed. 

Fat free cheese is very hard to find in Southeast Michigan, which made it pretty infuriating that it was obvious that Remington James was buying his stuff from his local Kroger. It wasn't until a few months ago that my local Kroger started stocking fat free cheese slices and fat free cream cheese (which I've used to make some delicious low calorie protein cheesecake). I downloaded apps from several grocery stores into my phone, only to find out that the closest place that has fat free shredded cheese is at a Walmart two towns away. I'm letting you know this in case you need to know how to get it yourself. Download all the apps of nearby grocery stores into your phone, and search until you find one.

I just realized I turned this into one of those annoying Instagram posts where the writer shares their life story before getting to the recipe. Ugh. My apologies. Recipe is coming up, I promise. I just want to give credit where credit is due.

Anyway, after watching his pizza video, a few others from him popped up in my "recommended" section, and two of them really stood out for me. The first was his "High Protein Bodybuilding Grilled Cheese Sandwich". I'm trying that later this week, as it looks like a tasty way to make breakfast. The second was his video for a "Healthy Bodybuilding Bacon Cheeseburger Recipe". Here's the video for that:

The macros for this is 15 grams of fat, 24 grams of carbohydrates, and 70 grams of protein.

For those of you that can't view videos for some reason, here's the breakdown of that recipe:

Ingredients:

A half pound of 96/4 lean ground beef

garlic paste (no measurement given, use to taste)

diced jalapenos (optional, I did not use)

28 grams fat free shredded cheddar cheese

One slice of fat free American cheese

One sandwich slim hamburger bun (we both used Kroger brand, I don't know if other stores have them)

Two slices of turkey bacon

I had never used fat free cheese or turkey bacon before, so I was worried about the taste. It came out fantastic. Trust me on this one.

Take all the ingredients except your cheese slice, sandwich slim, and turkey bacon and mix together. I recommend using a substantial amount of garlic paste to help add moisture to the burger.

Set your frying pan to medium heat and spray your frying pan with non-stick cooking spray (lean beef WILL stick to your pan) and cook the burger for about five minutes on each side, making sure the burger is cooked all the way through (unless you like a little red in your burger, that's up to you).

After the burger is cooked, put your cheese slice on it and set aside. Fry your turkey bacon and add it to your burger. Place on bun and eat.

This burger tasted great. The garlic paste and shredded cheese helped to add moisture to the burger without adding fat calories. I'm really surprised at how good the fat free cheese tasted. And turkey bacon is a lot better than it has any right to be. I just wish it could get super crispy like pork bacon.

I'll be making this again for sure.

Getting Old is Scary

When I was fifteen years old, I decided on some random Sunday afternoon to go to the park and shoot some hoops. Normally this is something that I would do on my own, but for some reason my dad wanted to play as well. So I went with him, my brother, and my step-sister to the park to play some basketball.

We ended up playing a game of twenty-one. While my dad was dribbling the ball down the half-court, I went in for a steal and swiped at the ball. My hand landed on one side of the ball, while my dad's hand was on the other. To this day he says I drew a foul, but I'll go to my grave saying that my entire hand was on the ball. That move was all it took to dislocate my dad's shoulder.

Ten years later, he was still getting surgeries to repair that shoulder. He was 41 when he got that injury. I'm 37.

Like I said in my last entry, my doctor said that I have calcium deposits in my spine. Right now, they don't hurt unless I'm squatting heavy. My doctor says that in twenty years, it's going to be an issue.

Despite our best intentions to not end up like our parents, sometimes we just can't help but end up that way. I've always had bad knees, like my dad. I've blown each of them out six times. My dad had to quit wrestling in high school because of them.

I also remember that my dad would make various attempts at health and fitness, but being that it was the 1980s and information on health and fitness was sporadic at best, most of his attempts were ham fisted and yielded little results. He bought an old school rowing machine with the metal arms. He used it for a week and then it just sat around. He bought a punching bag, and stopped using it after a week, after which is went away to parts unknown. He took the bag down and I didn't see it again for another twenty years after he had long divorced my mother and moved into a new house. This irritated my brother and I, as we enjoyed punching the bag as well. He even tried Jenny Craig once, which went about as well as anybody who does Jenny Craig.

You can't blame my dad for sucking at fitness. It was the 1980s. It's not like there was a lot of information out there, and even with the information that did exist, the science behind exercise was kind of a shit sandwich compared to now. He did what he could to increase his fitness

I think my dad did all this because he didn't really know how to navigate the world without being strong. Despite working an office job, he liked to intimidate people into getting his way (which is one of many reasons we don't spend much time together nowadays). When his body started falling apart, he started having mental health issues. I don't know much about that, other than family members have said that his medicine cabinet is filled with pills.

My dad has been a giant mess most of his life, and all of mine. I'll spare you the details.

The point is that I'm reaching the age where his body started falling apart, and I'm starting to notice the same happening to mine. I still have calcium deposits on my shoulder that have been there for years, and will probably be there until the day I die. My spine now has issues. My knees have always been pretty fucked.

Getting old is scary.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my gut reminding me that it's time to cut weight, I'm still in great shape. In my MMA classes, I notice that I'm probably the only guy that lifts weights, and isn't intimidated when the instructor "punishes" the class with pushups (why he, the Army, or literally any place on Earth that needs people to be physically strong thinks that threatening people by making them stronger is some sort of punishment is a mystery to me), and I'm hardly winded when class is over. This is despite the fact that many of the students are half my age and sucking lungs at the end.

It still doesn't change the fact that my time is coming. I'm going to be too old for this shit. My body will give out. Sooner rather than later. And that's fucking scary.

The most frightening thing to me throughout my life has been that I would be in a position where I can't defend myself. Where my dad got scared because the loss of his strength meant that he wouldn't be able to intimidate people, I fear being in a position where I'm defenseless.

People are coming to hurt you. No one is going to protect you. You will be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway. That's been the voice in my head since I was a teenager. A hidden mantra, tucked into my subconscious for years until therapy pulled it to the surface. It worked great until I had to face the reality that I don't have too many years left where I'll be able to defend myself.

Normally I'd try to put a positive spin on things in my posts, but I can't do that here. I really can't emphasize enough that getting old is scary. No matter how strong I am, no matter how well trained I am, my body has an expiration date, and that time is coming quick. And there ain't shit I can do about it.

I gotta leave some sort of pic or video for the Facebook crowd, so here it is.

It's Been A While

I know I haven't written in a while. There's a few reasons for that.

The biggest one is work. I've been working a lot of hours and haven't had much time for writing.

The other is that every time I thought I was going to write about something, I ended up on another part of my fitness journey.

Shortly after the last entry I wrote about making my way to the thousand pound club, I stopped working out for a little over a week. When I got back into the gym, I noticed I was squatting a lot less than before. I couldn't squat nearly as heavy as I once could without feeling intense pain in my lower back. When I couldn't squat 225 without feeling pain, I realized that it's not a lack of strength that was keeping me from lifting. I was injured. Off to the doctor!

After an exam and an x-ray, I found out that I don't have an actual spinal injury (thank Christ), but I do a calcium deposit on my spine that, when squatting, touches a nerve in my spinal cord. This causes intense pain.

The doc said that this is just an inconvenience for now, but in about twenty years, I'm kinda fucked. Goddamn, getting old sucks!

So my plan to get to the thousand pound club by the end of the year is put on hold. But I needed to put it on hold for another reason.

I really, really needed to start cutting weight.

I had been scared to start cutting weight because I didn't want to lose muscle, but with the calcium deposits on my spine fucking with my lift, I decided it was time to start dropping some body fat, anyway. I had already planned on doing this immediately after joining the thousand pound club, as I was getting concerned with what all the bulking was doing to me. My weight had gone up to 308 pounds. When I was bulking, I kept telling myself, "Don't worry about your weight. Just increase your lifts. We'll start cutting weight later.", but I was growing concerned with weighing more than 300 pounds. I promised myself I'd never weigh that much again. But after my plans to join the thousand pound club went to shit, I decided it was time to drop some weight.

Fortunately, one of my favorite YouTube channels, Buff Dudes, had started their own cutting plan right around the same time. So I started that one and also started doing MMA again. I've gotten my weight below 300 pounds. I'm still not lifting anywhere near where I want to be, but at least my weight is down.

The Buff Dudes are bodybuilders, not powerlifters, and bodybuilding is hard when you haven't done it in a long time. When you're powerlifting, you work the legs in just about every workout. You do a few sets of squats and maybe some deadlifts, and you're done. When you're bodybuilding, you work the legs once or twice a week, and you're doing several exercises. It really tests your muscular endurance. My workouts are also a lot longer, which makes it a struggle to find time to hit the gym.

The MMA classes are surprisingly easy. All my years in the gym has certainly paid off, as the classes feel like low-impact cardio.

There's a lot of other stuff I want to write about, but don't have the time to do so right now. Hopefully I can get it done during the week.