Continued Photography

Much less blogging on this side lately as I've started a training blog/thread on the mtbnj site which you can see here. Anyone who might be interested has already seen it I imagine. Jake wants team stuff on the site so I said I would give it a shot for 6 weeks as the season wound down to see if people read it.

Well 6 weeks turned into 7 as the season changed a bit. The 50k was canceled which pretty much puts a wet rag on the season as a whole. I no longer have a target event to shoot for. Instead I'm looking to do any number of H2H races and then call it a year, where "any number" is 0-4.

I don't know what that makes this blog. Probably more readable since I won't be going on about training details and rides so much. It also makes it less frequent which is fine since it was getting mundane and verbose anyway. That gives me more time to read, something I've been lax with since I got this BB.

Back up to 187 today but I hit 186 over the weekend, which was my lowest weight since June 10. This "slow and steady" eating is working out well so far. As of today I am 7 pounds less than last Tuesday. At first it was a little tough but since then it's gotten really easy. I'm quite frankly shocked at the small amount of food I need to eat to be full. I also decided to stop counting calories on the weekend because it's just a royal PITA especially with all the goofy Asian food we eat. Since I went the weekend without my normal 3 pound weight gain that's a good start. I'd like to get to the point where I don't feel the need to count calories at all. I've been doing it for over a year now and it's become tedious. Plus it doesn't do me much good if I'm not able to turn that daily calorie count into weight loss. This approach is more realistic because I would say it represents a long-term sustainable change. I'm going to bean count during the weekday for now with the hope that I can scrap it entirely by the end of the year.

ChrisG

"Excellent stuff, Norm. Thich Nhat Hanh has written quite a bit about the idea of "eating mindfully." I totally buy into it. Shinto Bug Ingestion, I'll have to look into after dinner.. -ChrisG (Google is being a pain in my ass and not accepting my password)"

Awesome, I'll need to check it out. A quick search reveals 2628 books written which reference Thich Nhat Hanh. Any chance you could pinpoint which book you're referring to?

The funny thing is that I'm able to integrate my eating now into my life. For instance I can take an hour to eat a bowl of pasta and still be a dad (feed child, clean kitchen, shave head, etc). Sometimes I get to sit down and just relax but other times it doesn't work that way. So the trap most people fall into (gorging while sucked into the rat race of life) is totally the opposite with me. I used to stop the rat race to gorge, then go back to the rat race, then gorge later.

Two things I note in the last week that are of interest. First, food tastes differently. Some things taste better, some worse. I now see that a bagel with cream cheese really doesn't taste that great. It's the sensation of being full that I liked most in regard to eating bagels. Toast it and put butter on it and then you're talking! I also find chocolate about 12 times more satisfying than before. Just letting a piece of chocolate melt in your mouth is fantastic.

The second has entirely escaped my mind already. The train is pulling into Hoboken now so hopefully it comes to me before I publish this post.

Oh I remember. This slow, steady, and mindful approach seems to be spilling over into my daily life. Things seem less tragically important and I seem to be slowing down in all aspects of life. Paradoxically, this does not spill over to my bike riding, where I seem to be letting it go and riding like a madman more than ever. It's a really good combination, fast and slow, yin and yang, spaghetti and meatballs.

Maybe I've found my "thing", the magic bullet which gets me from shrinking fat guy to bona fide medium build. I'd like to see the mid-170s and right now I think that's a reality. As of yesterday I had dropped 8 pounds in 6 days which we all know is bullshit waste and water. Regardless, I look and feel better already, plus I have 8 fewer pounds to lug up those hills. Even at my weight that's over a 4% loss in body weight in 1 week. I have an orange Nautica shirt which is a test of how large or small I am. In the past it's been a slightly snug shirt that fits fairly in the slimmest of times. Yesterday I put it on and it fit better than ever. So even though my weight is 4 pounds above my lowest ever, I've probably put on some muscle weight through the year and I'm as small as I've ever been right now.

That's pretty exciting for this fat guy.