​ You know that 2,000-calorie diet we're supposed to adhere to? St. Louis-based Hardee's fast-food chain wants you to knock out half of that sum before lunchtime, with its latest, ridiculous breakfast offering:

Just needs bacon.

​So what's in it?

The new Loaded Biscuit 'N' Gravy starts with a classic Hardee's Made From Scratch™ buttermilk biscuit, which is split with a folded egg and a sausage patty topping each half and the whole thing covered with Hardee's famous sausage gravy. That's down-home.

The dish debuted on April 19 at all Hardees' restaurants and boasts 1,000 calories, according to the company website. Here's the full press release from Hardee's.

You may remember back in January when Hardee's rolled out another huge breakfast sandwich -- "'More Meat in the Morning:' Hardee's Rolls Out 830-Calorie Breakfast Sandwich" -- but the restaurant chain seems to have outdone itself here.

Gut Check contacted Hardee's publicity person Jenna Petroff about this slovenly gravy beast, and she had this say:

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Josh Bacott

​While "taste" and "ambiance" are certainly worthy criteria for judging food and restaurants, when you write a column called Stuck to my Ribs, it's no shock that those items often take a back seat to another critical element, "quantity."

Simply put: Quantity is a hell of a selling point.

No more so than when talking about breakfast. Of all meals, breakfast offers the least variety. There are only so many breakfast meats, breads and egg preparations. With such a relatively minimal selection, the sheer volume of food one can offer is of paramount importance.

When a place can check off "tastes good" and "gives you loads of food" on the same scorecard, it's already a step ahead. Add "cheap," and you've hit the trifecta.

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Josh Bacott

​The rule of thumb in the world of restaurant ownership -- of any retail outlet -- is that location is the single most important factor. No matter how good your grub may be, if it's a struggle for people to find you, you probably won't be in business long. Seems reasonable, right?

Tell that to Grassi's West.

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Josh Bacott

​Suppose it's a weekend afternoon, and you have a hankering for a nice 13-inch chili dog for lunch. You'd like to go to Foxy's Red Hots or Woofie's to indulge, but you're stuck with a stout to-do list that requires a trip to the local hardware. As much as a hot-dog palace such as Foxy's might be calling your name, you'd have to make two separate stops, and that's just not efficient.

Not when there's a delightful alternative sitting right inside your neighborhood Home Depot. Dirty Dogz calls the primo real estate at the exits of three area Home Depots home. Now, as you're walking out of the home-improvement store, you can have the latest addition to the tool arsenal in one hand and a giant 'kraut- and onion-covered beef dog in the other.

I challenge you to find a scenario that wreaks of manliness more than that one.

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Josh Bacott

​One of the detriments to living in a city that claims its own "style" of pizza? A significant chunk of the locally-owned establishments ignore the alternatives.

Seemingly every neighborhood joint that offers delivery specializes in thin-crust St. Louis-style pizza. As a lifelong resident of the Gateway City, I'm an unabashed lover of St. Louis-style pizza. I typically live by the credo the more provel, the better.

But one problem with our city's trademark pizza is that when a guy has a nice appetite worked up, he can mow through a twelve-inch thin-crust pie in roughly ten minutes and still find himself rifling through the cabinets for a snack within the hour. Simply put: The name of this blog and St.Louis-style pizza are not synonymous.

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I don't like coffee. Nor do I consider myself a fan of any of its more elaborately named siblings. I've always found that there are much more appealing vehicles for pumping caffeine into your bloodstream every morning.

So it probably doesn't come as a surprise that I don't spend much time in coffee shops. There are approximately 10,000 Starbucks in this country, and I have never knowingly turned over a single dollar of my money to any of them.

Which makes my appreciation for Murdoch Perk all the more vexing.

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All guys have those days when, rather than spend the daylight hours doing yardwork or attempting to finish another longstanding house project, all we want to do is wrap our paws around a large, meat-packed sub and eat our way into a nap.

In my house, these are called Saturdays.

On these afternoons, the lone entry on the to-do list reads, "Choose which meat to pile onto hoagie roll." Popular options include ham, turkey, roast beef, maybe even braunschweiger. And while those are all fine alternatives -- except maybe braunschweiger, which frankly frightens me a bit -- there are times when your grumbling stomach lobbies for something with a little more heft, something like...a handmade Italian salsiccia.

Some stomachs are really specific like that.

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​Introducing Stuck To My Ribs, one (slightly overweight) man's journey through one of the unhealthiest cities in the good ol' USA. Because who says calories have to count all the time?

It's taken several rounds of intense negotiations through the years, but my body and I have hammered out a little pact.

I put in a solid 35- to 40-hour work week, eat reasonably healthy the majority of the time and stumble into some exercise on occasion. In return, my body sees to it that certain meals just won't count toward my general health. Call it a gentlemen's agreement. The internal accountant who crunches caloric intake with every bite discreetly looks the other way when I find myself face-to-face with one of the many worthy blue-collar meals that St. Louis has to offer.

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