Woah!

It’s been over two weeks since my last entry?  Oops!

Well, not a whole lot has been going on in the cycling world.  It’s been a wee bit warm here, so I haven’t been out.  I also took full advantage of my week of at the lab too.

In the weight loss world, as of this morning I was down to 233.  A little less than 30 pounds lighter than I was just 2 short months ago.  Woo!  My weight loss has also not stopped or even really slowed since my exercise has stopped too, so that’s encouraging for me at least.

Now onto the raw arena.  Unfortunately, 2 days ago I had to come off being raw.  It wasn’t quite my choice.  I completely ran out of money until my next paycheck.  That means that I can’t afford to buy food.  And all my fruits and veggies ran out.  So really the only option I have is to eat all the rice and pasta I have lying around the house.  Once I get paid again though I will jump right back on the raw wagon.  This one paycheck a month thing is killer though.

Well, that’s it for now.  Hopefully it won’t be as long until the next entry.

Weight loss pictures

So I made a .gif file that blinks back and forth between my starting picture, and my picture a couple days ago. Please note that these pictures contain a shirtless Joe; enter at your own risk. Here’s the link.

I personally think that’s pretty drastic.

It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to

My intention for this blog was to chronicle my progress with cycling and weight loss.  I planned on having only articles related to these two topics.  Well, I think I may have changed my mind.  I figure in order to help explain where I’m coming from, it helps to explain things that are important to me.  So I’ve decided that I will regularly feature content on veganism and raw foodism.  I don’t plan on doing stuff in a preachy way, but just basic things like what I made, how I’m feeling, and food related things.  I hope everyone from BikeForums is ok with this.  I also hope that you VeganFreaks don’t mind a cycling post every once in a while either.  Oh, what the hell am I saying?  Who is going to read this anyways. :p

I don’t have any real stories for now, but check back real soon and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to ramble on about.

I accidentally did my longest ride today

The last few days have been pretty fun.  Two days ago I learned that I can pedal and slowly turn no handed.  That made me feel like a kid.  I used to be able to ride no handed, but never pedal at the same time.  I made the little kid in me proud.

Yesterday I did an overhaul of my diet.  For the past couple weeks I’ve been reading stuff about raw veganism.  The main idea is that cooking kills most of the enzymes in food and if you eat things “raw” then you are reaping the maximum benefit from the food.  About a week ago I started having fruit smoothies for breakfast that included just strawberries/blueberries/raspberries and water.  I’d also add a little ground up flax seed since it’s good for you and doesn’t add any taste.  I’ve felt much more energetic this week after having these for breakfast so yesterday I decided to take the plunge.  I went to grocery store and got a cart full from the produce section only.  It came to $28.  Not too bad for a cart full of food.  Now my fridge and freezer are absolutely packed.  This morning I had a green smoothie.  It had about two cups of spinach, two bananas, a tablespoon of flax seed, some ground up goji berries, and a teaspoon of spirulina.  Let me tell you this thing was amazing.  I was told to keep the veggie/fruit ratio to 3/2.  With that rough ratio you really couldn’t even taste the spinach.  I honestly can’t wait to have another one tomorrow.  Tonight’s dinner isn’t completely raw, but it will be nothing that I’ve cooked here.  I’m going to rehydrate some TVP and add paprika, ground cumin, chili powder, garlic, and salt and make tacos!  I’m just going to add a little water the mixture and let it sit for a couple hours.  That’ll let all the spices get soaked up by the TVP.  Then I plan on putting the filling in cabbage leaves.  This meal really is great, you should all try it.

So since I haven’t had any cooked food since yesterday, I consider today my first “raw ride”.  And what a ride it was.  The plan was to go 17 miles starting around 2:30 and then do another 17 starting at 7.  If I do more than 33 miles today, I’ll be above 100 miles for the week, which is pretty impressive since I took Sunday off(except for a 4 mile ride) and Tuesday I only did my commute.  To me, taking a day off on the weekend is a big deal, since that means about 25 miles I’m missing out on for the week.

Well, after my green smoothie at 1, I headed out.  As soon as I left the door, I noticed I forgot my helmet!  So I circled around the neighborhood and got it.  +1 mile.  Then I head out again.  I notice that I don’t have my cell phone with me.  Then I remember I haven’t had it since I got home yesterday.  Must be at the lab.  So I swing by the lab to pick it up. +another 2 miles.  After setting out again, I head towards the new route I had planned.  On the road near Griffy Lake, there’s spraypaint that says “Hill Climb Loop”.  I looked up stuff of mapmyride after I had passed that a few times and learned that a lot of people take what is called the “Boltinghouse Loop”, which follows a road called Boltinghouse Road.  I decided to do a slight modification of this loop today.  I’m prepared for some hills.  Before leaving I had left one water bottle at home, since it was my last thing of Accelerade, and I didn’t feel like I needed it for just a 17 mile ride. (I find it hard to believe that I’m at the point where I can call something “just a 17 mile ride”.  Anyways…)  So I only had one bottle of water.  I didn’t think that would be much of a problem.  And it wouldn’t have been if I had planned my route a little better.  My modification of the Boltinghouse Loop took me on Tunnel Road.  As I came up to Tunnel Road, I forgot which way I was supposed to go.  Oops.  So I take a left.  I’m pedaling along and the road is descending like I expected it to.  But then it goes down REAL fast, which surprised me, but didn’t worry me.  What did worry me was when the road ended in a lake!!  I was at Lake Lemon.  Lake Lemon is very far out of the way.  +another 5.5 miles.  I was pretty annoyed.  I was running low on water and just wanted to be home.  I then find my original route and keep heading home.

Then on the way back, one of the most frustrating things that has ever happened to me while riding occured.  As I was riding along, an older man was bringing in his trash cans and his two dogs were at his side.  As I ride by, the bolt after me.  The catch up, since it’s uphill, and I wasn’t really scared or anything, and there is one dog on each side of me.  Then the one on the right BITES MY LEG!  So I unclip my right foot, and connect with the side of the dog’s head to get it away.  I didn’t do it hard, just enough to get the dog to stop.  Thankfully the dog never broke the skin.  Then (here’s the frustrating part), the owner starts screaming at me because I kicked his dog.  He saw the whole thing, so 1) he knew the dog bit me, and 2) he knew I didn’t kick the dog hard.  In fact, the dog didn’t even make a noise, just stopped chasing me and ran back to his owner.  The other dog followed suit, thankfully.  I didn’t stick around to confront the owner about his dogs.  I figured nothing positive could come out of such a meeting, so I continued down the road.  I was pretty pissed though, and I plan on never taking that road again.

As if that whole ordeal wasn’t enough, about 5 miles down the same road I had just come to the top of a big hill.  Then as I’m pedaling along at a fair pace, I look at the sides of one the houses in front of me and I see a little brown thing come running towards the road.  It was another dog!  This time I didn’t want to deal with it, so I shifted up a couple gears, got out of the saddle, and basically sprinted away.  The dog met me in the road right as I passed, but I was going too fast and the dog couldn’t keep up.  And of course, as I go by, I hear the owner yelling at the dog to stop.  What if there were cars coming?  If this were a busy road, I could have witnessed the death of three dogs today.  Something is certainly wrong with dog owners on that road.  So now I am definitely not taking that road home.

After all that fun, I was almost home; I had about 4 miles to go.  The rest of the ride home was pretty uneventful, although a train cross the road about a  minute after I crossed the tracks, and I thought that was pretty neat.  I like trains.

I walked in the door around 5:45 and promptly sat down to record my ride.  All told, my ride today was just a hair over 26 miles.  A new record!  I still have to do 8 miles to break 100 for the week though.  I’ll probably do that around 8, after dinner and after I’m rested.  Who knows what’s in store for tomorrow!

Back in the saddle

Well, I’ve started back up in earnest again.  For the past three days I’ve done the Griffy Lake loop home from the lab.  I imagine I will be trying to lengthen the route shortly though because I would really like to beat July’s mileage total.  For the first entire month of me riding, I logged 359 miles.  Not too shabby, but I would like to try to push towards 500 this month.  This goal might be a little hard to reach.  If I keep up with my 13 miles a day with the long ride home on weekdays, I will still need to do ~25 miles a day on weekends.  It’s not impossible, since I’ve done back to back 25 mile days, but to keep it up all month might be difficult.  Of course, if I could get my longest ride increased, this goal will become much easier.

So in order for me to really be motivated to meet this goal, I had to get some new equipement. :p  For some reason, IU finds it acceptable to only pay me once a month.  So what I’ve done for the last two months is get paid, buy something I’ve wanted all month, pay bills, and spend nothing else until the end of the month.  Last month I brought home the Trek 7.2FX.  This month I spent a little less, but still got cool stuff.  I got a headlight and taillight, so now I don’t have to make sure I leave the lab before it’s dark;  I ordered a few things from nashbar, panniers, a jersey, and a camelbak.  Panniers will be great for going to campus and running errands.  The rack I have on the bike now is nice, but just slapping a bag on top of it really isn’t working.  The jersey will be great so I can stay cool while I’m riding, and it has pockets in the back, so I can carry small things with me easier.  The camelbak I’m looking the most forward to getting.  As I go on longer and longer rides, my water/Accelerade gets warmer and warmer.  That is pretty frustrating as you get towards the end of your ride, and you really need something to cool you down, and you don’t have anything below 100 degrees.  And the camelbak has storage, so I can carry even more stuff.  I swear, I’ll be able to fit my whole wardrobe on my bike. :p

The final purchase I made was clipless pedals and shoes to go with them.  Let me tell you, these things are pretty cool.  I’ve always had the problem where as I get tired, my feet will slip forward and I’ll end up using the arches of my feet when I’m pedaling.  That’s not exactly optimal.  These things keep your feet right in place.  And they also allow you to pull up on the upstroke.  That brings along new challenges as well.  I’ve only done the long ride home once since I got them, and I was exhausted when I got home.  The strange part was that a different part of my legs were tired.  Now I’m really going to have sexy thighs.

So other than the new purchases, there’s not a whole lot of new things going on in my cycling world.  I seem to have stagnated on the weight loss too.  I’ve weighed 244 for the past five days.  That in itself is pretty amazing because usually my weight goes all over the place from day to day.  It’s still an achievement though, because about a month before I started getting into riding, I weighed 265.  21 pounds isn’t too shabby, but I think I’m going to like it a lot more when its ~60 pounds of weight loss.

Getting Started

Originally this was intended to chronicle my life as it pertained to physics and astronomy. Things have changed a bit. I’m still in pursuit of a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and I’m doing that at Indiana University. I feel that this “blog” would be better geared toward my new passion: Being healthy.

A little more than a year before now, I had weighed 272 pounds and decided to do something about it. I dieted (i.e. ate less) and after a few months made it all the way down to 226 pounds. I felt great. Then over the past year, I slowly ballooned back up to around 250. Then I moved from Geneseo, NY to Bloomington, IN for grad school. I now lived alone and that kind of got to me. Instead of trying to get my weight down, like I had done the previous summer, I just gave up and ate whatever I felt like. That’s how in the span of a month and a half I gained around 10 pounds.

On June 27th, I came across the Clydesdale subforum at Bike Forums. The people there are an inspiration for all. Reading all of those posts and also getting involved in some of the discussion made me want to get more serious into biking. At that point, I would only commute to work, which is only 2.5 miles away. Sometimes if I was real ambitious I would even ride to Taco Bell, instead of drive, since it’s a little less than a mile away. My weight on that day was 260.5 pounds. Through the Clydesdale forum, I found hope that biking and diet could really work for me like it had for so many others. It was around payday, so I shopped around and bought a good new bike from a local bike shop. The one that I had bought only three weeks before wasn’t really going to cut it for those longer rides, since it was basically a mountain bike. I sold the bad bike, and brought the new one home. It was a Trek 7.2FX. What a beautiful bike it was too. Riding a nice bike really made me feel good and like I could really do this.

I knew that riding alone wasn’t going to get the weight down, especially since at the time a 5 mile ride was killer for me. I had read a few things and heard a few more things about eating smaller portions throughout the day and just eating more times. I started on a 5-meal a day kick. I would have oatmeal for breakfast around 10, and only one packet unlike the two or more I would have before. Then, as soon as I got to the lab around 11-11:30 I would have a granola bar just to get enough sugars into my body for it to recover for my (at the time) long ride to work. I would have a small lunch (usually a hummus sandwich or some small portion of a Thai dish that I had made at home) around 2. Then, I would have another granola bar or maybe a yogurt at 5-6 when I got home from the lab. Dinner was around 9, and it consisted of much smaller portions that I was used to.

I have been vegetarian for a little over two years now, so my problem wasn’t eating healthy enough (although Taco Bell sometimes killed the whole healthy food thing); my problem was portion size. That Thai dish that I would make used to last me about a day. I would eat half of it right after I cooked it and the other half would disappear within the day, if not after I went back for seconds. Each of these portions would completely cover a big plate too. After working on my portions, I decided to first measure out enough to fill a 16 oz can that I would use in making the dish, and then transfer that to ziploc bags. After all was said and done, I was now getting SIX meals out of the same thing that used to give me two, or only one. I’ve also portioned off my cereal that I sometimes have for breakfast too. As soon as the box of Raisin Bran comes home (which is really the only cereal I’ve liked since I was a little kid), I’ll open the box up and put 1 cup of cereal in ziploc bags until the box is empty. Marsh had a sale on Raisin Bran (and other cereals) last week, so right now I have about 15-20 ziploc baggies with Raisin Bran in my cupboard.

Actually, just this diet would have probably been enough to see significant weight loss. I didn’t just want weight loss though, I wanted to be healthy for the first time that I can remember. I knew that I had to exercise as well. So I started pushing myself on my bike. That first day I rode four times. Two commute rides, and then a 5 and 3 mile ride. I was absolutely exhausted. I started to feel that burning muscle pain though, and I loved it. It means that I was working very hard and gaining muscle and losing fat.

Let’s jump to this Sunday, 18 days later: on my single Sunday ride I went 19 miles and felt great afterwords. I was tired (which was to be expected) but I could still function. I could have probably done a few more miles even. I was hardly dragging at the end. The scale that day also clocked in at 247.5.

That’s my story for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with this and tell lots more good weight loss stories like this.