Mid-winter update

Photo by Playingwithbrushes

There’s been a break in the cold here in northeast Kansas, but I haven’t had time to get out on the bike yet.  That might change this afternoon–my wife has asked me to get her bike out and air up the tires today, because we’re supposed to see an afternoon high in the upper 60’s (Fahrenheit), and we may try to get a short ride in this afternoon.  The nice weather won’t last long–it’s supposed to start raining tomorrow night, and I suspect we’ll be back to the typical Kansas cold winter within a couple of days, but my legs definitely need a work-out.

I want to thank those of you who have been so encouraging to me as I’ve reported on my weight-loss journey.  It means a lot to me.  Although the holidays were rough on my eating habits, and I did see my weight bump up a bit by the first of the year, it was only a few pounds, and I managed to recover and take off all that I gained, and then some.  This week I weighed in at 225 pounds, the lightest I’ve been in at least 20 years.

Over the holidays I had to buy some new clothes–and I was literally thrilled to buy a pair of Levi’s 501’s with a size 38 waist–I’ve been wearing 560’s (loose-fitting jeans with extra room in the legs and seat) for years, with a 42 waist, so getting back into the 501 button-ups was way cool.  I haven’t been able to wear those for many, many years, and I’d forgotten how comfortable they can be.

Photo by Terry Jacobsen

I also bought a few new shirts–I had been wearing the 3XL size for about 10 years, but I still had a couple of 2XL’s around, so a few months ago I started wearing those.  Now, even those are too big for me, so I bought a couple of XLT’s, and they fit great.  One of my daughters got married this past December, and I when I was fitted for my tuxedo, I was able to wear a shirt with a 17-1/2-inch neck size–the last time I bought a nice dress shirt, it was a 19 or 19-1/2.  I also bought a sport coat recently that was a 48-long…the last sport coat I bought was a 54.  (And just for the record, that’s my lovely wife with me in the photo at left, not my daughter!)

For someone who has had to shop at the big-and-tall stores (or in the limited big-and-tall sections of regular clothing stores) for the last 15 or 20 years, it’s kind of a big deal to be able to buy clothes anywhere I choose.

Believe me, I’m still a long way from fitting comfortably into a pair of real biking shorts–but by summer, who knows?  It’s not unthinkable any more–and it really was unthinkable when I began this journey.  (But I won’t post a picture until I’m sure it won’t gross anyone out!)

Anyway, thanks again to my friends and family and readers for your kind and encouraging comments.

Merry Christmas, everyone

Another “before & after”

My lovely wife and I went on a ride in early October, and before we left, she snapped a photo of me that was similar to a photo she took back in May.  On days when I’m feeling discouraged, these pictures really help.

The shot on the left is from May 19, 2008; the one on the right was on October 10, 2008.

Gorgeous November ride

It was a bright, sunny, warm day yesterday (70 degrees or warmer), with very little wind, and it was November 1.  This is crazy.  So my lovely wife and I decided to get out and go for a ride in the afternoon.  We took the 14-miles “scenic river route” that we ride sometimes, and it was a very enjoyable afternoon.  My left calf kept feeling like it was on the verge of cramping, but I kept stretching it out, and it never did actually knot up.

Found out later in the afternoon that my brother and sister-in-law have recently bought bikes–cool!  He bought a bike rack, too, so maybe someday they can come out for a ride.

A “before & after”

This has little or nothing to do with biking, for which I apologize profusely in advance, but it does have to do with my weight loss, which is partly due to my biking, so I’m going to toss this in here anyway.  I am now down to about 235 pounds (give or take the two- or three-pound margin of error on my cheap bathroom scale), and this weekend I played a gig at a local fall festival, which reminded me that I had pictures from when I played the same gig a year ago, when I weighed 300+.  So I decided to do a little “before & after” image comparison, just for grins:

Yep, definitely a smaller person

This makes me happy.

Eating to live

Photo by j_bary

My wife took the day off today, so in a few minutes we’re heading out for a longer ride—maybe 20+ miles, depending on how much time we have.  I’m looking forward to it, because it’s a beautiful day, sunny and warm, but not too warm.  There’ll be a fairly stiff breeze, but I think we’ll have a great time.

I weighed in this morning at somewhere between 236 and 237 (our scale’s margin of error is probably about 2 or 3 pounds, so who knows?).  But that’s the least I’ve weighed in perhaps as much as 20 years.  I’m still not entirely sure how I’ve managed to lose 66 pounds in the last five months—it’s definitely “a God thing”—but I believe I may also be seeing the evidence of a fairly radical change in my attitudes toward food.

The other evening I was a bit hungry by around 9:00pm, and my first thought was to go get a bowl of cereal or something.  My very next thought was, “an apple would be better for me.”  That’s when it struck me that something was changing.  You have to understand that I was a person whose idea of a great lunch for many years was two double cheeseburgers, fries, and two apple pies at MacDonald’s. I didn’t always eat that way, but I did it often enough to blow up to over 300 pounds over the years.

I loved to eat stuff that tasted good to me, and most of it involved fried stuff and bread.  I loved a fried, glazed donut (or three, or four).  I loved pizza, and I ate whole pizzas in one sitting.  I loved the occasional big breakfast of eggs, sausage or bacon (or both), pancakes slathered with butter and drenched in syrup.  Fast food was my staple.  It would not be unfair to say that at times I lived to eat, or that eating was meeting some kind of psychological or emotional need that I had.

One of our pastors, who is also dieting and losing weight, happened to casually mention in a sermon one day recently that he was learning how to eat to live, rather than living to eat.  I had heard that phrase before, but this time I understood what that meant.  When I elected to have the apple because it was better for me than the bowl of cereal, I was eating to live.  I was hungry, and my body wanted food, but I made the decision to give my body what it needed–a healthy piece of fruit—rather than what I craved (a bowl of sweetened cereal).

More and more since that little “epiphany” I have found myself making decisions about what to eat based on what would be good for my body, not what would taste good in the moment.  I’m eating because my body needs certain nourishment, not because I want to taste something good.  (If it tastes good AND is good for me, that’s all the better!)

This attitude, I think, will be the factor that helps me continue losing weight until I reach my goal (and I’m still a long way from it, but I’m 66 pounds closer than I was in May).

What a difference 65 pounds makes

I took a short (6 miles) ride with my lovely wife this afternoon—it was a beautiful day, even with a stiff wind from the south, and she wanted to get outside, so off we went.  I wanted to get back in time to get a little fishing in, so we rode north about three miles, then turned around.  At the turn-around point, I noted (on my nifty little bike computer that we had averaged nearly 12 miles an hour so far.  Granted, a good chunk of the first leg of the journey was a fairly long downhill stretch, and we had the wind at our backs, but still, given that I usually average a lot slower speed (less than 9 mph isn’t unusual for me on flat roads), I was feeling pretty good about it.

The trip back, though, was a lot tougher—into a strong headwind, at times I was only able to manage 6 or 7 mph.  (To say that I’m not very aerodynamically-shaped is a pretty comical understatement.)  But even with the long uphill stretch, we ended the trip after 6 miles with an average speed of over 9 mph.

When I first got back on a bike back in May, a six-mile trip was a big accomplishment.  Of course, I weighed over 300 pounds at the time, and I hadn’t done much physical exercise beyond a 30-minute walk for quite some time.  Now, 65 pounds lighter, I’m really able to tell the difference in the amount of weight that I’m carrying on the bike.  Riding is much easier and much more enjoyable.

Well, duh.  Who wouldn’t have an easier time riding if they could shed 65 pounds of excess weight?

Photo by crankydragon

Over the weekend I had to buy some cat litter (infernal poo machines, that’s what they are, those evil little feline devils), and I was lugging a 27-pound box of the stuff to my car when I realized that not too many months ago, I was carrying the equivalent of almost two and a half 27-pound boxes of cat litter in my body ALL THE TIME.  I can’t even imagine it now.

Life is good.

22 cans of Crisco missing…

Crisco comes in 3 lb. cans (photo by VirtualErn)

I’ve lost 65 pounds, as of today.  After I’ve lost one more pound, I will have lost an amount of weight equal to twenty-two 3 lb. cans of Crisco.  When I visualize what that stack of cans of pure vegetable shortening looks like, I’m frankly stunned that I was carrying that much extra weight around on my body.

It’s about the weight of eight gallons of water.  It’s the weight of a small child.  It’s the weight of a female Chinese gymnast.  It’s a bit over four and a half stone, for our friends in the U.K.

It has slowed me down, hurt my back, hurt my feet and knees, and made me uncomfortable for years.  It has probably shortened my life.  It has made me huff and puff to get up a single flight of stairs.  It has made me miserable, self-conscious, and has kept me from doing many things I would have loved to do.  It has made me avoid even gentle hills on my bike.

With that weight gone, bike riding has been more enjoyable—I can deal with hills that I would have avoided a few months ago, and I can ride faster and farther.  By next summer, I fully expect to be able to squeeze my butt into a pair of biking shorts without getting big laughs.

I’m not there yet; by my reckoning, I’ve got about 17 more cans of lard to lose before I am at what I would consider a pretty normal weight for someone my height. But the fact that I’ve lost 22 of those rascals so far makes me believe it just might be possible.

Two more milestones reached

There’s this big hill on a nearby street that I’ve attempted few times on my bike, but prior to today I had always had to get off the bike and walk up the hill–it was too long and too steep.  Today I did it.  It’s been a month or more since I last tried it, but today I owned it.  Which is to say that I was still alive and breathing when I reached the top–I broke no speed records.  Nonetheless, it is another sign that I’m making real progress in this whole biking thing, that my legs are getting stronger, and that I’m actually becoming more physically fit.  I like that.

The other milestone I reached today is the 250-pound mark.  I have now lost 53 pounds since I began this journey, and I feel very good about that, too.

Beautiful ride

This evening my lovely wife and I went on a long (for me) ride of 21.3 miles.  The weather was perfect—sunny, around 85 degrees when we left around 5:15pm, with a light breeze from the north.  We chose a nice route north of town that wanders past a private fishing lake, and on out through corn and bean fields.  The route turned toward the west, and the pavement gave way to gravel road at around the seven- or eight-mile mark, but there were reasonably hard-packed and smooth lanes for us to ride in, so we decided to keep going.

As the road wound to the west, it followed railroad tracks that followed the river a little farther to the north.  There was a bit of up and down riding, but it went through shady woods, mostly, and made for a very pleasant ride.  After the woods we ran into a fairly steep hill, and the gravel road became more rough, so we decided to walk the bikes up the hill, hoping that the next little town was just on the other side.  When we crested the hill, we saw that there was another, even steeper hill, so even though we may have been less than a mile from the town, we decided to turn back, after riding a little over 10 miles.

It was so much cooler than our previous ride earlier in the week, and I paid more attention to the amount of water I was drinking.  We also took a little food with us, and that helped me keep my energy level up.  This was the longest ride I’ve done since I got my bike, and it was truly a pleasure.

Given the fact that a few months ago a couple of flights of stairs would have worn me out completely, I find it remarkable that for more than two hours my legs were pumping almost non-stop, and it didn’t kill me.