I needed breakfast before the Gitman Holland CC ride this morning, so I figured I’d load up on over 1000 calories from this cinnamon bun, and be done with it. Turns out it was enough food for the ride, although I drank 2x 350ml of Coke, and another 750ml of a Sprite+Powerade cocktail.

Strava says I burned 2600 calories on the ride, but I’m not sure the cinnamon bun was a good idea. On the one hand, it’s pretty concentrated energy, and I wouldn’t want to eat my normal low calorie density food (like 1.5 burritos) before the ride. But then again, eggs, toast, and hash browns might have been a better breakfast. I’ll try that next time.

The ride was fun, and I kept up with everyone on my fixie for the first 45km of the ride. But after 30 total minutes of climbing, and with my 48×16 gearing, I couldn’t keep up with the 38 km/hr pace on the flats. So I continued the ride on my own, stopped a few times for drinks, and averaged around 31 km/hr.

I didn’t eat any bread yesterday for Day 23 of the Bread Challenge. Today, I had the 250g cinnamon bun, and about 200g of 9-Grain Honey Oat in my 12″ Subway turkey and veggie sandwich. So that’s a total of 450g of bread for Day 24. (I didn’t have my scale, but I swear that cinnamon bun weighed almost 300g. And with all the butter and sugar, it probably had a caloric density > 4 cal/g. Oh well, I’ll try to forget about it.)

I joined Bojac, George, and the guys from Nothing Sacred Tattoo on their Thursday night shop ride tonight. The ride is a smaller version of Bojac’s K.I.S.S ride, but sometimes just as fast. That’s Bojac in front, and me behind, riding up Garnet Ave in Pacific Beach. Thursday is a fun night for the ride, when people are out, and the weekend nightlife begins.

I make sure I’m fueled up before I head out on these fast fixie group rides. There are a lot of little challenges and sprints, and you want that glycogen available when your legs need it. I ate some Shot Bloks for the sugar and caffeine before the ride for good measure.

For day 22 of the 30 Day Bread Challenge, I ate 490g of pretzel buns. They’re made by the Sadie Rose Baking Company, and I got them from the grocery store. I ate two of the buns with butter, and used the other two for bison burgers with onions, tomato, and spinach & kale.

I also picked up my usual order from Gabriel’s Tortilleria, and ate about 600g of corn tortillas today. I ate some with butter, and the rest with an avocado.

I weighed-in at a new low of 79.2 kg this morning, which is about a 1.0 kg loss after eating a pound of bread a day for three weeks. So I’ve lost about 50g of body fat a day, which is all I can ask for without restricting my calories.

I bought another 610g of bread this morning, including a walnut raisin petit loaf, which I’ll eat with butter. I’ll use a sourdough baguette to make lamb burgers, and to snack on with butter. I had a pretzel roll with butter and scrambled eggs for breakfast. Otherwise, I’ll fill out my meals with veggies, which provide the key fiber, micronutrients, antioxidants, etc. that really make us healthy.

It’s kind of fun to tell people that I’m eating a pound of bread a day. It sounds particularly crazy since I’m trying to lose weight. And I didn’t know how the experiment would turn out. We’re all so terrified of bread, that I wouldn’t have been surprised by a weight gain. But after the fact, it’s “obvious” that bread is only calories, you can still lose weight if you burn them off.

The bottom line is that there’s not that many calories in a pound of bread. Breads usually have around 2.75 calories/g, so a 454g loaf has about 1250 calories. That’s not even half of what an active male burns every day.

Instead, we should ask ourselves why we’re so terrified of bread. I remember back in the early 2000’s, when the Atkins craze was in full swing, and people were sure that potatoes and rice made us fat. Well, at least they were convinced that excluding all carbs from your diet would result in fast and rapid weight loss. Of course, no one could really comply with a low-carb (< 50g/day) diet, but everyone ended up believing that "carbs make you fat". Which is where we are now, except that you can eat some tubers in a Paleo diet.

In my day, no one had a gluten sensitivity. Back then, everyone was lactose intolerant. Now, sadly, no one is. And what happened to oat bran?