Grazing, Binging and Super Powers

A few weeks ago, my parents were in town. My mother had "minor" surgery and they were here for a little over a week. I won’t go into my thoughts of "minor" surgery. To say the least, my idea of "minor" surgery only includes dental work. I am sure most of you have experienced the hospital drill. You wait, wait and wait. Your sleeping arrangements are less than desirable and the hospital food selection is just as appetizing.

My mom had some complications and ended up staying in the hospital for almost a week. Since we live close, my dad stayed with us at night and returned to hospital each day. During the difficult days, he stayed at the hospital. He stayed in the room for forty-eight hours straight at one point. He went without a shower and ate hospital food. Throw all of those factors in to one basket and you have a very tired and stressed out individual.

The complications cleared and mom improved dramatically in a short time. Dad had decided to come to our house for a shower and some sleep. He was very tired, so he decided to grab some food at the hospital café on his way out. The café had a nice looking salad bar. This sounded good to his taste buds so he grabbed a plate and headed for the bar. He loaded the plate to the point it started to fold. He grabbed a soda and approached the check out counter. The lady started ringing up his items and continued to press buttons on the register. My dad looked around as if she was ringing up the next persons items by mistake. This was a café that charged you by the items you added to the salad. By the time she stopped, the total for the salad was almost sixteen dollars. The truly hilarious part of this is that my dad is a bit "tight" with money. He didn’t know if should eat the salad or preserve it as an ornament.

The past couple of weeks have brought a lull in my weight loss efforts. I have weighed in at the exact same weight as the week before or just a few ounces below. I have been stuck at just below thirty pounds of weight loss for three weeks. At first, I just dismissed it as the expected lull the nutritionist was telling me to expect. As the weeks passed, I became concerned and a bit discouraged.

Being of the technical type, I have learned to break things down to their basic level to find the issue at hand. I broke out a spreadsheet and started analyzing the basics. I am not going to tell you that losing weight is easy. If it was easy I would have done it a long time ago. However, I will tell you the basic premise of weight loss is actually very simple. You need to burn more calories than you eat.

I have a daily habit that is crucial to my weight loss and will be crucial to maintaining my weight once I reach my goal. I log every single calorie ingested and every single calorie burned. I run weekly reports and use charts and graphs to track everything. I am not saying everyone should be as anal retentive at this as I am, but I do recommend that you use some sort of system to track these values.

It did not take me long to figure out what was causing my problem. I don’t know if it was my increase in training or my increased load at work, but I had all but stopped logging my calorie intake and exercise. I was shocked and very upset to see that few entries in my logs. I was even more upset when I started trying to catch up on my logging. I discovered I had a couple of days with a calorie deficit and several days with excess calories consumed. I ran the report for the week, and you guessed it, my totals for the last couple of weeks were at a break even point.

If the first step is finding the problem the second step is finding a way to fix the problem. The first thing I need to do is get back to my logging. That part is easy so I started that right away. The second issue I discovered was a bit more surprising. As I started logging my calories, I discovered I had been grazing and binging the last two weeks.

I have binged before, but I have never been a grazer. In the past, if I was hungry I ate a full meal. Lately, I have been grazing on all sorts of foods. What is even stranger are the foods I am craving. I have been craving sugar. This may not seem strange to everyone else, but I am not much on sugar. Sure I will occasionally indulge, but I rarely seek out sugar. My wife found these low sugar one hundred calorie ice cream sandwiches. They are great as long as you don’t eat five of them in a span of two hours. I always wondered how people who didn’t eat much gained weight. Grazing is a bad habit.

This weekend was the Multiple Sclerosis cycling benefit ride at Petit Jean State Park. This is by far the best benefit event I have had to pleasure to attend. We have been doing this ride for several years. Not only is it a fun time with great people for a great cause, it is one of the best rides on the planet. The scenery around Petit Jean is awesome.

Our cycling club has kind of adopted this event as our main benefit to support. We do a lot of benefit rides across the state. If you want to raise money for something, put together a cycling event with interesting terrain and you will draw a crowd. This event is rather special. Since it is a two day event, they have a great dinner on Saturday night. They invite someone with MS to be the guest speaker. The person always tells their story of when they discovered they had MS. It is always an emotional story that will have you reaching for the nearest napkin to wipe your eyes. If you haven’t had time to join a benefit event near you, you should make the time. It doesn’t matter what benefit you support as long as you support at least one.

In the past, the MS 150 has been a fun ride for me. I was never fast enough to hang with the front groups or even the middle groups. My weight made it hard for me to complete the ride without cramping or taking an hour or two longer than everyone one else. I had different plans for this year’s event. Since we have a half-ironman in four weeks, this was the perfect opportunity for me to test my nutrition and body. I planned to use my Triathlon bike and ride without drafting the entire seventy-five miles. To further test my fitness I planned to run five miles after the ride.

I rolled in the middle of pack to start the ride. We are always bunched up the first few miles until we descend down the mountain. About a half a mile from the start of the descent, a good friend of mine comes around me. I quickly follow his lead so we can be the first ones down the mountain. As we reach the bottom of the mountain, I move into the lead spot. Before the ride started, I told all of my friends that I would be out front all day. If I wasn’t moving to slow for you, feel free to set on my wheel and enjoy the draft.

I had three goals for the day. I have a sprint triathlon next weekend, so I needed to test my efforts for fifteen miles. I plan to put in a hard effort for the first fifteen miles, and then maintain a steady effort for fifty-six miles. My third goal was to have a good five miles run after the seventy-five mile ride. These goals would allow me to test my cardio, legs and my nutrition.
I moved to front and settled into a fast pace that I thought I could maintain for fifteen and not jeopardize my other goals. I looked down at my speed several times in disbelief and decided to slow a bit. I was moving fast and felt great. The fifteen mile point ended at the base of a hard climb. My actual race strategy is to spin up the climbs at a pace that will not kill my legs. I pulled of to the left of the paceline to let the next person take over. To my surprise, there were a ton of people riding my wheel. As I pulled off from the front, the next guy in line complimented my pace and found it astounding that I could pull for that long at that pace. I tried to hide my smile and thanked him for the compliment.

Most of the group shot up the hill and continued the pace. It was hard to let them go, but they weren’t going to be by themselves the next sixty miles and then go for a run. I settled into my pace and stuck to my game plan. I was moving very fast, but still had time to enjoy the scenery. The miles would pass by and I would continue to feel great. Actually, I was getting stronger with each mile. I caught several people along the way. They would jump on my wheel and hang for a bit before they had to drop off due to the high pace. At one point I thought I had super powers. There is nothing that makes you feel better on a bike than being able to drop other riders.

Most of the riders stopped at the lunch stop. I brought all of my nutrition with me, so I only made two quick stops to refill my water bottle. This allowed me to get in front of most of the people that left me on the hill earlier. I ended up being the seventh person to finish the ride. That is far cry from the heavy guy who was one of the last people in last year.

I loaded my bike and put on my running shoes. Needless to say, everyone who saw me get ready for the run thought I was crazy. I took off at a good pace and felt great. I had plenty of speed and power left in my legs. I don’t know if I did this on purpose, I ran in the direction the riders would be coming in. I guess I wanted everyone to see that I was in good enough shape to go for a run. You should have seen the look on peoples faces as I met them on the hill. They would be suffering up the last climb of the day and look up to see me running at them looking fresh. I couldn’t hide the smile any longer.

I was successful in meeting all of my goals. In fact, I exceeded those goals. This was a great weekend. I love having super powers!!!!