Fat Tuesday (Sort of)

Height - 5' 10"
Weight - 169 Lbs. (This is going well))
Weight Goal - 157 Lbs. (Effectively...on the moon, or if I cut off an appendage)

OK, I give up. I actually had a really good day on the scale earlier this week (166 Lbs.) then I ballooned back up just before Fat Tuesday weigh in. Damn! I'm never gonna make weight for the frickin' bike race at this rate. I did read one thing in Matt Fitzgerald's book Racing Weight that I took to heart. He says that your body doesn't tell you that it's full until 20 minutes after it has reached capacity. The way I interpret this is that you should jam as much food in your mouth as you can within a period of twenty minutes, before your body can shut the party down! This goes along with grandfather's saying about car accidents:

"Studies show that most car accidents occur within a mile of your house...so when I leave the house, I just DRIVE LIKE HELL to get away from it!"

Another thing I took to heart was Fitzgerald's suggestion to take fish oil, in some form. I am old, I have joint pain, I think I may even "the Arthur-itis," I try to get my Omega-3s wherever I can. Now, I eat sardines a couple times a week (generally), but it's tough. I'm often not in the mood for them and you definitely don't want to eat them any time close to when you're going to be exercising. I was at Trader Joe's the other day and I saw they had Salmon Oil on the shelf and it was cheap, so I grabbed some, figuring this would be the solution to my intermittent desire for sardines. It was...sort of.

I took the first pill the other day before a ride. About fifteen minutes in it started backing up on me. The instructions on the pills do say to take with food and I had not heeded this advice. I don't eat in the morning if I'm riding for less than an hour. That fish pill was in my gut, washing around in a puddle of orange juice, next to my multi-vitamin. Ah, I can taste it now....

You know it was like? It was like opening a can of sardines, dumping out the sardines, and then tilting your head back, opening your mouth, tipping the can sideways, and letting all that thick, sardine-chunk-filled oil just cascade into your mouth.

Each reeking-of-dead-aquatic-things-breath cut through my minty fresh toothpaste mouth; making my eyes water as I let out an audible: "Oogh."

Maybe when they say: "Take with food," they mean: "Take this wretched, disgusting little capsule of pureed fish guts, place it carefully in a ground beef patty, top it with sharp cheddar cheese, wrap it in a bacon weave shell with hot dog head, legs and tail, forming an edible turtle-sculpture.

That ought to mask the taste. And even if it doesn't do the trick, it'll be a tasty way to try.

(stolen from This is Why You're Fat).

"It's cool. It's an all purpose shape--a box."

Could be anything inside.

Fat Tuesday
Part VI in a Series

Height - 5' 10"
Weight - 168.5 Lbs. (Oops. Guess that's what a week of all you can eat buffets can do to ya)
(My fingers are too fat to use a calculator to figure out my BMI and BMR today)
Weight Goal - 157 Lbs. (I AM LAUGHING OUT LOUD!)

As someone who sort of plays a bike mechanic in real life, I should know better than to begin a project before I've read the instructions through to the end. Last week I was babbling about the NuVal system, assuming that Matt Fitzgerald was talking about it in his book Racing Weight because it's the latest-greatest thing. Wrong! I should have finished the chapter before I wandered off to buy huge amounts of spinach and green beans (and throw away my massive stash soda and double stuff Oreos). The latest-greatest is actually Fitzgerald's own system the "Diet Quality Score, " or DQS for acronym-iness. By utilizing this system you will come up with an overall score for your daily food intake. It does make sense (more so than the NuVal, which if you take literally, will lead you to eat just spinach and green beans all the time). Let me see if I can make some sense here...

The first time you eat a food item, it scores higher. Each time you eat it after that it scores lower and lower. This way, if you want to get a high score so you can win the "making racing weight game" you need to eat a variety of high quality foods.

Although I kind of went into a light coma when Fitzgerald started talking about scores (scores involve numbers, numbers make me sleepy...and nauseous) my ears lit up when he started talking about how "a can of soda can save your life in the right conditions." He doesn't elaborate, although I'm guessing he's talking about that scene in the movie "Bad Boys," (the one with Sean Penn not the one with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence) where Sean Penn knows some bad dudes are totally about to f— with him, so he goes down to the RC Cola machine and starts buying soda after soda, then he puts the cans in a pillowcase, and then when the bad dudes descend upon him, he's ready — WHAM! He smashes the Kurgan from Highlander right in the nose with a pillowcase full of RC Colas. (Talk about product placement. Back in '83 Sears couldn't keep "Pillowcases Full of RC Cola Cans" on the shelf.)


Only it's not really The Kurgan, it's "Viking Lofgren," played by Clancy Brown who played The Kurgan. I'm not sure why in both Highlander and Bad Boys, he didn't go by his real name: Clancy. Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of reform school boys and Scottish warriors like a guy named CLANCY.

Fitzgerald also talks about portions as relating to the size of your outstretched hands. I have disproportionately large hands for my height and weight. You know what they say about short guys with really big hands right? They have big...

Guts (because they measured out portions that are too large using this system).

Speaking of guts, Matt keeps coming back to the basic, obvious, you-don't-need-a-fancy-diet-score-to-figure-it-out principle of CALORIES in CALORIES OUT. Though this is the last thing the "obesity is a disease" club wants to hear. Is obesity a new disease? When was it discovered? Has it always been a disease? Is it just that more people get it now? Do you catch it from leading an indolent life full of energy saving technology and eating calorically dense, nutrient poor foods?

Or maybe it's a newer virus, like AIDS. Did humans initially contract fatness from having sex with or eating obese monkeys?

I've read that a malfunctioning hypothalamus can cause the satiation (stop cramming chili cheese fries down your gullet) message to fire, so that people think they're hungry when they're not. A little naturalistic observation down at The Old Country Buffet would disprove this theory. There is no way that Mr. 300-pound behemoth is going back up for his his third 1500 calorie plate of food because his hypothalamus is telling him "Hey...hey big guy...I think you're still hungry, go get some more food OK?"

Looks like we ran out of time just a little bit late at The Big Bikes today.

P.S. - the photos at the top...
on the left I'm wearing my normal-person-swimsuit. On the right I'm wearing my I'm-a-freakin'-weirdo-Speedo that I go "proper-swimming" in. When we were down in Mexico last week, on vacation, I would wear the weirdo-suit under the normal-suit down to the beach. When it was time to proper-swim, I would tear off the normal-suit, revealing the Speedo. I said "it was like on Knight Rider when Kit would come out of the back of that semi!" Miriam's sister was totally freaked out.

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.

Fat Tuesday Part III

Height - 5' 10" (I'm not getting any shorter, I don't know if this is working)
Weight - 168 (down 1.5 Lbs.)
BMR - 2733.642 (Down from 2757.78325...wait, is that a good thing, less calories?)
BMI - 24.1 (down from 24.5, but still high-average)
Weight Goal - 157 Lbs. (We may have to re-think that)

Is Matt Fitzgerald's book Racing Weight working? Yes, I think so. At least in the sense that it's making me think more about what I'm doing. I'm the guy who's idea of a diet is cutting out pizza and beer, I'm not that high-tech. Thinking about nutrition and diet at all is a big deal for me. Now I haven't gone out and bought a scale that reads my body fat content via...doing things to my body with electric impulses or something. I might buy it if it delivered a severe electric shock anytime I didn't meet my weight goal. That would be effective.

I also have not paid a visit to my doctor to get an accurate body fat reading. The only time I go to the doctor is when something falls off.

But I am losing weight at what Fitzgerald would consider a healthy and sustainable rate. This is not because I'm counting every damn calorie I put in my body, it's more because I eat like a marmoset some days and then eat like a manatee on others. It all averages out I guess. Thanks to Matty Fitz-G (as he has insisted I call him) I hesitate before ordering nachos for dinner at Redbones and opt for the smarter, relatively healthy choice of pulled chicken and broccoli (which doesn't suck). I do think about every food choice I make all day. I'm making less insanely stupid decisions and it seems to be paying off...slowly.

I was going to go off on my "I was a fat kid" rant now, but I realized that I've already kind of done that.

And you guys know that I just put on fourteen pounds this off season so that I could buy this book and run this vastly entertaining human experiment don't you? I'm a method blogger. When Sly Stallone gained a lot of weight for Copland, people confused weight gain with good acting. Hopefully people will do the same in this case and confuse weight gain with good blogging.

Roll Call!

"Blubba Sparxxx!"
"Here!"
"Fat Stevens!"
"Here!"
Blob Roll!"
Here!"

There's suddenly added motivation to get fit and slim. It's now inside the eight week start of the season window. If I continue to lose roughly one pound per week until then, I'll be pretty good to go. My season opener will be the EFTA King of Burlingame Time Trial March 28th in Rhode Island. It's way too far to go merely for a 30 minute race, but if it can be coupled with a Rob Stine guided tour like last year, it'll be worth it. That and a trip to the nearby Tim Horton's, and it'll be a good deal.

Why are there Tim Horton's in Rhode Island and not in Massachusetts? I have no idea, but it's just plain wrong.

Back to Racing Weight...
Fitzy-G throws out some examples of people who have no problem with maintaining competition weight, people like Michael Phelps. Apparently between his two Olympic trips he added 5 hours of weight training per week and put on 14 pounds of muscle (that's what my 14 pounds was too — muscle). He also changed his nutrition regime, taking in most of his calories during late-night munchies-driven missions to 7-Eleven for Doritos and Doublestuff Oreos. Don't get me wrong, I ain't judgin' Phelps, in fact, I think he's awesome. When will the governing bodies of sport make a distinction between performance enhancing and performance inhibiting drugs? The only way pot could possibly be classified as a performance enhancing drug is if "Thinking Robot Chicken is Really, Really Funny" became a sport.

Speaking of Potts, Andy Potts that is. He's a triathlete who says that "In heavy training it's all I can do to keep my weight at 171 or 172 pounds, which is a pound or two below my racing weight." Andy worries about getting too lean, so he ingests a lot of "cheap calories" like gourmet pretzels. It sounds like Andy has big problems. Cry me a river Andy. Oh wait, don't do that your tears may contain precious calories. OK go ahead and cry, although you might have to switch to chocolate covered "gourmet pretzels." Hey Andy, screw you, I'm going to go have seconds of broccoli and tofu now, so suck it!

Can't you see I'm serious?

Fat Tuesday

Height - 5' 10"
Weight - 170.5 Lbs.
BMR - 1779.215
BMI - 24.5
Weight Goal - 157 Lbs.


This is the beginning of a human experiment. Over the next two months or so I will be applying principles gathered from the new book by Matt Fitzgerald: "Racing Weight - How to Get Lean for Peak Performance" in a desperate attempt to...get lean for peak performance. I'll be dedicating Tuesdays from now until race season starts in April to documenting my progress.

While my family and some friends (besides Jon Bruno) tell me that I'm already too thin, I know that amongst the ranks of wanna-be-professional cyclists I am pretty overweight. I'm sure Jay Leno's family tells him that he doesn't have an incredibly over-sized head. This is nice but it's not true. We're cyclists, we have a different idea of what ideal weight is. It has nothing to do with "looking good" or "being sexy." It has everything to do feeling good and going fast. If we wanted to look good and be sexy, we'd hit the gym, go tanning, then do laundry. Um...bro.

Part One of "Racing Weight" outlines why an endurance athlete will benefit from losing weight. Fitzgerald discusses Lance Armstrong's huge transformation from powerhouse sprinter to Tour De France winner: "Do you need to get cancer and lose a lot of weight to become a better endurance athlete? Absolutely not!"

Phew! I'm relieved that I don't have to go out and get cancer. I have no idea how to do that, and I don't live anywhere near a DuPont plant.

The first step is finding your optimum racing weight. According to Fitzgerald: "If you're close to your ultimate performance level, you're close to your optimal performance weight." This blog may seem to serve no purpose whatsoever but it does serve some purpose...to me...sometimes. I don't keep a training log but, thanks to the blog, I can go back and really see what was going on at a given time. To determine what my "ultimate performance level" is, I just had to look at the best race of my best season: Root 66, Hodges Village Dam 2008. At the time I weighed about 157 Lbs. That is not what I weighed at any point last season and it is far from what I weigh now.

Next step was to calculate my Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR. This tells me how many calories someone of my height, weight, and age should ingest in a day. The calculator defaults to the "female" setting so my first calculation gave me a start — 1561.175 calories, AAH! I take in that many calories before breakfast. Recalibrate for male and calculate...1779.215. That's better. Still a little intimidating, probably no more Bacon, Egg, and Cheese on Boston Cream Donuts anytime soon. Apparently counting calories-in is key to successful weight loss, so this is a start.

I'm going to begin calorie counting today, I'm only three chapters into the book at this point, I'll apply any other awesome weight loss tricks I learn over the next week and report back Tuesday.

A guy named Michael Pollan is on NPR right now. He may have s simpler plan: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Maybe I'm over-thinning this. Over-thinking...thinking.

1.19.10 Morning weigh-in 170.5 Lbs.
See, I don't look all that skinny, do I?
Body Dysmorphia my fat ass (and man-boobs).