Big Bikes

Photo cred: C.J. Vincent, Wow Arizona

Fat Tuesday Part V

Height - 5' 10"
Weight - 167 Lbs.
BMR - 2723.9
BMI - 24
Weight Goal - 157 Lbs. (I am re-thinking this, seriously)


Damn, I can't believe I'm four weeks into this thing, I also can't believe I've only lost 3.5 pounds. OK, I can believe it. I haven't been riding as much as I usually would be at this time of year, the time of year where the pounds usually just kinda "melt off." I've also cheated a lot. My day to day diet has improved in quality as Matt Fitzgerald suggests in Racing Weight, and I suppose the weight is coming off at a reasonable, if not spectacular rate. I like spectacular, but according to Matt, achieving rapid weight loss goes with a rapid decrease in the speed of your metabolism. All this "Biggest Loser" I lost 4% of my total body weight weight in a week stuff is a recipe for disaster.

(If you don't know what I'm yammering about, check out the other posts about my fascinating weight loss saga. )

Matt talks about "Nuval Scores" for food. Telling us that the glycemic index is, in his words (as I remember them), not mine: "a steaming pile of horse shit." I won't bore you with the details (which I don't understand anyway) but basically the Nuval business takes into account all factors relating to a particular food, putting it in context. For instance, the most awesome foods on the planet are green beans and spinach (I didn't see that coming) and the worst foods on the planet are soda and Double Stuff Oreos (again...not shocking). Serendipitously enough, I have recently taken to eating steel cut oats for breakfast (see photo below). According to The Nuval rating, they are pretty high up on the awesome food scale. Sweet! They are pretty damn good I have to say...a little brown sugar, dried cranberries, raisins, and a splash of very, very manly soy milk, and you got some good eating.



Matt also talks about eating small amounts throughout the day to (paraphrasing here) avoid getting so hungry you want to eat your own butt. This is actually something I realized a while back, after I did my first couple hundred milers. I was all like "dude, I eat more during the day at work than I do while riding my bike for eight-frickin'-hours at some crazy Chris Scott race." I started eating less, more often, never getting to the point where I wanted to jam Doritos in my maw fistfuls at a time. So adapting back to that kind of diet schedule hasn't been too hard. I think of eating throughout the day as I would eating during a 100 mile ride.



Yes, dinner these days is generally something like THE BIG SALAD. I make these things huge, with lots and lots of veggies. They take a while to get through. Like I said to M the other night, "Eating salad is exhausting!" I wasn't whining about having to eat salad (it was a great salad), I was talking more about the duration and intensity of the eating process involved in putting it all away. You feel like you've done some work, you feel satisfied, satiated even.




With my school schedule I've begun cooking again. This is one of my favorite healthy dishes, it's Zeytinyagli Fasulye, a Turkish (Hi Memet...hi) green bean dish. And you know green beans are awesome according to that Nuval stuff.

Oh yes, the photo at the top. No shirtless, belly distending photo today. That's me kinda looking skinny (and like a creepy pedophile) at SSUSA as I check out Nat's pink panty's. When I came up on Nat, I thought he was riding a 36er, I was hallucinating-lightly. I was also confused by the fact that he had stopped to change into women's underwear (perhaps a bit too soon, seems his netherlands experienced some wear and tear). I looked at him going: "I know a guy that looks just like you...only not wearing pink panties."

Anyway, I fully expect next Tuesday's weigh in, after M and I get back from Mexico, to be really, really bad.

Ice Cream Donuts on a stick are not on the Nuval chart.

They have to be more awesomer than spinach.