The Perfect Movie Drinking Game

I have a deep love of drinking games. Really, what’s not to love? Drinking is great, games are fun, and combining those things results in hilarity. My family shares my appreciation, and as such many family events (including weddings) have been known to spontaneously erupt into Kings or 9-or-Not-9 parties. Even better though are movie drinking games. Those are my favorite by far.

In fact, I think movie drinking games are highly underappreciated. Disagree? Well, here are just a few reasons for why they’re the best kind of drinking game:

• They’re simple. You normally have a few rules and someone reminding the room when to drink. Games with far more complicated rule sets (like Kings) can be intimidating to drinking game newbies.
• They make up for crappy movies. Not everyone has the same movie taste. You may love The Departed but I hate cop movies and am overly fond of funny horror such as Cursed. It’s much easier to sit through a movie that you find otherwise uninteresting if there are drinking consequences on the table.
• They don’t require a lot of people. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played The Lord of the Rings drinking game with a bunch of friends and that was a blast, but at the end of the day you can get away with only two people playing. Hell, if you’re comfortable with drinking solo, you can play drinking game movies by yourself (although I still say if you’re live-tweeting Sharknado with your friend and brilliant writer Erin at the time, it doesn’t count as being by yourself)

A good drinking game can make a movie. A bad movie drinking game doesn’t ruin it exactly, but they’re annoying nonetheless. While movie drinking games seem simple, I have come to the opinion that there is an art to crafting the perfect movie drinking game (MDG as we will call it from here on out). Since I’m generally a nice person I thought I would share my revelations with you, dear readers, so you can better suss out the best MDGs on your own.

It really all boils down to four principles. The ideal MDG is simple, virgin, consistent, and understood. That seems pretty easy, right? You’d be surprised. To further illustrate each principle, I will describe a MDG that failed at it. Bonus, I’ll even include links to the specific movie drinking game I played!

Simple – Speed Racer

I actually really, really liked this drinking game. We played it on a Thanksgiving morning and everyone had a blast. Of course, that’s because we modified it. The game actually has 13, yes, ***13*** rules. That’s far too many to keep track of! Especially once you’ve been drinking!

And actually, I think if you played with all 13 rules you might die. There is a ridiculous amount of drinking. The reason we enjoyed it so much was because we split the rules. So each person only had 3 individual rules they had to follow, and we all drank for the 13^th. A game doesn’t need to be limited to 3 rules, but I think anything with more than 7 is too much. 13 is excessive beyond all reason.

Virgin – The Room

Again, I had fun playing this one, but that’s because with The Room I didn’t really care about spoilers. Oh FYI, there’s about to be spoilers.

An ideal MDG should be okay for a virgin audience - not actual virgins, but people who haven’t watched the movie before. I had two large problems with this game. A lot of the rules state specific character names, such as “whenever Lisa and Claudette have a heart-to-heart.” Claudette is Lisa’s mother, but I don’t think she’s ever actually introduced with her name. At least not at first. To be fair, they might have said it later and I was too drunk to notice. The only reason I knew to drink was because my boyfriend had watched it already.

The other problem is that one of the rules is to take two shots when Johnny dies. Oh okay, we all now know that Johnny dies. Oops.

Consistent & Understood – American Pie 2

Occasionally you have rules that are tied to a certain scene, and that’s fine when they call it out. What doesn’t work is to have a rule that only shows up maybe 3 times in the entire movie, and you’re left trying to figure out if you missed instances, were playing it wrong, or if it was a stupid rule.

With the American Pie 2 game they either made a stupid rule, or didn’t explain it well. The rule is to take a drink when someone “mentions Tantra.” They literally only say Tantra 3 times in the entire movie. There are scenes that show things related to Finch’s Tantra obsession, but they don’t actually say it. Were you supposed to drink when anything related to Tantra happens? Because the rule says mention. Either they done messed up or it’s the worst rule ever. 3 drinks throughout an entire movie? Please, what is this a drinking game for your mom or something (note I said your mom, because my mom can crush any kind of drinking game)?

For the record, I fully support creating your own MDGs as well. I do it frequently. If you find yourself in a place where you need to make up your own rules, keep the simple, virgin, consistent, and understood requirements in mind and you are sure to succeed*! Success being measured by having fun and getting drunk, obviously. And while it goes without saying, you may want to make responsible decisions both on your drink of choice, and the number of movie drinking games you play in a row. Take it from someone who tried to do Jurassic Park right after The Room. Poor life decision right there. 

Have the perfect movie drinking game that meets all this criteria? Share it in the comments!

To Count or Not To Count

You can normally break weight-loss down into a pretty damn simple equation. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. Seems easy enough, right?

Well, yes and no.

It can be incredibly hard to accurately track your caloric intake versus outtake. Yay for apps and #science and all that, but human beings are not robots that always have a standardized caloric burn rate set at the factory. There are averages, and they can be generally calculated by your height & weight, but those are still estimations. Think about those friends you know that can eat WTFever they want and still are skinny as a rail. Unless they have a stomach worm (ew) they probably have a higher metabolism, meaning they are naturally burning calories faster than you. Lucky bitches.

Before we start yelling at all the skinny people though, the point is actually that not only does caloric burn vary by person; it also varies for the same individual over the course of their life. Basically, it’s inconsistent.

Even if you can narrow down your daily caloric burn to a fairly accurate estimate, there are still external factors. What food you eat can rev or slow your metabolism. You can also burn additional calories through exercise or really any sort of activity that gets your heart rate up.

But let’s pretend that you figure that shit out pretty well too, and you start counting calories to make sure you’re falling under that caloric burn each day. You can eat whatever you want, right? A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

If your only goal is to lose weight this actually isn’t false logic. That’s why people can do ridiculous things like only eat Chipotle for a year or go on the Twinkie diet and not gain all the weight in the world. I really think it should go without saying that this doesn’t mean it’s actually doing your body good. Most apps that offer caloric tracking also show you the macro calculations, so that you can make sure your calories aren’t all falling under the FAT portion of the chart. Different diets suggest different combinations of fat, protein, and carbs, but it’s pretty easy to edit your goals to stick to the diet you’re following.

So having said all that, assuming you have the knowledge and approach your caloric tracking the right way, I should be in favor of it. And hell, if it works for you, woot! Congrats! You do the thing!

But I don’t think it works for me.

What’s weird about this is again, if your only goal is weight-loss, I have to say tracking my food works in the sense that I LOSE WEIGHT LIKE A SONNABITCH! I first noticed then when I added food tracking to my jazzercise routine, and the pounds FLEW off. It was miraculous! It was justification! I looked great!

I felt awful. My perfectionist crazy went, well, crazy.

Here’s why I find calorie tracking problematic:

•  It’s a fun sucker. There is nothing better at killing the joy in life than to realize that your favorite macaroni and cheese is LITERALLY MORE CALORIES THAN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO EAT IN A DAY. #TearsForYears
• It’s hard to be accurate, which makes it frustrating. Especially when you’re eating out. While restaurants are generally getting better at including calorie counts, you need to read the fine print. They rarely include the calories for additional parts of the meal. If you prefer to eat at local restaurants, good luck! And figuring out the calorie count for home-made meals is enough to ruin* the fun of cooking (I assume, I don’t actually find it fun in the first place so it’s really a shitty situation all around). In desperation you may turn to pre-prepared meals that gleefully announce their calories and nutrients on the package.  Your heart dies a little each day from the excess sodium. 
• It’s addictive. If you like lists (which clearly I do), tracking things, or are a little competitive, please do me a favor and don’t start counting calories. Staying under that daily goal becomes the new purpose of your life. Every time someone offers you food, all you think about is what it’s going to do to your count. In a few weeks of tracking I got to the point where the app I was using would give me alerts for eating too FEW calories in a day (oops).  

It’s all well and good to want to lose weight, and I think the best way to do so is an effective lifestyle change, but you should still be having a LIFE. Eat the delicious goodies occasionally. Have some wine. Enjoy your friend’s birthday without being *that* person asking to switch restaurants so you can get a certain salad with lean protein.

If you can do that while counting calories, as I said, more power to you! For me though, it’s a little too all-consuming. Really, this post is mainly a reminder to myself of why it would be a bad idea to bust out my app again and knock off those 10 pounds I want gone for the summer. General healthy eating and exercise when possible is the way to go!

Probably. I mean at the end of the day I’m not a nutritionist, just a gal that really likes to read fitness articles and post diet memes.