After fueling my 100 mile bike ride with Coke and cookies all day yesterday, I’m back to eating my usual starch and vegetables. I ate some pretty bad stuff last week (lamb kebob plate, 1/2 stick of butter and 1 lb loaf of bread, non-stop popcorn, extra bags of Top Ramen), and I was sure I’d see +2kg on the scale this morning. I was surprised to see a loss of 0,6 kg instead. Whew!

Just finished the Ride4Water 100 with the Awarewolfs. I rode 106 miles from Long Beach back home to San Diego on my Cinelli fixie (proof). Thanks so much to Charlie Sears, the founder of the awarewolfs, who organizes just about everything. The awarewolfs is an amazing club, home to some very cool fixed gear riders downtown, and some unbelievable events. This is the group leaving the City Grounds bike shop in Long Beach. Half of the guys already rode 100 miles, and were starting the second leg of the Ride4Water 200. One gear, no brakes, 200 miles.

Rode the final Dawn Patrol with the awarewolfs this morning, a fast 60 mile ride with hills out to Otay Lakes, then back through Coronado. I was pretty tired from the SDBC ride the day before, but we all got moving pretty fast on the streets and climbs out to the dam. I drank 3 x 600 ml of Coke, or about 750 calories from high fructose corn syrup. So far, I’ve eaten a total of about 2500 calories. I better slow down at dinner, if I want to maintain a calorie deficit for the day.

For the second week in a row, I joined the San Diego Bike Club Saturday morning ride. It starts at UC Cyclery, and is a 40 mile, reasonably fast-paced ride through the hills of the north coast. There’s a wide range of abilities in the group, and while I didn’t get dropped going up the early hills, I couldn’t keep up on the big descents with my fixie (can’t coast, so your legs get in the way of gravity).

So I grouped up with a few “B” riders about my speed, and we worked together for the rest of the ride. This is my first group ride where I took a some pulls in front, and did a lot of work. I was pretty tired going up the last big climb on Torrey Pines hill, with one gear, in my jeans and t-shirt. (Everyone else wore cycling kits and had gears. Yes, I’m trying to be different.)

I haven’t been this tired in a long time. I ate about 1400 calories before and during the ride, but I was really hungry for some fat at lunch. I ate two fish tacos from Taco Rey on 4th, and just slumped in the chair for 10 minutes afterwards.

I bought some fresh whole wheat linguini from Assenti’s this week, and I ate about 300g of it last night. I made some fresh pomodoro sauce from some nice, ripe roma tomatoes, basil and olive oil. So picture two full plates of this stuff, a scone from the corner cafe, a piece of bread, and 50g of almonds, and that’s what I had after 8pm last night.

Yes, we have a global obesity epidemic. Yes, I’ll watch any food-obsessed documentary. Sure, too much refined sugar is bad for you. But hold on about “everything we know about diet and exercise is wrong”, and “what if the solutions were the problem?”.

Katie Couric’s (producer and narrator) Fed Up is supposed to be an Inconvenient Truth about the food industry. The conspiracy she reveals is that people crave sugar (and salt and fat, but not mentioned in the movie), and they’ll act like addicts to get it. Plus, corporations will try to sell it to you to make money. (Shhh! Don’t tell anyone, it’s supposed to be a conspiracy!) But seriously, the one good point in the movie is that “personal responsibility doesn’t work in the face of addiction”.

There’s lots of footage of obese parents and their kids telling you why they want to change, and how they’re going to get clean, and get their lives together. But like all addicts, they’re just manipulating us, and soon, they’re looking for their next fix. (One kid in the movie is eating an entire huge bag of chips while he’s saying this.)

So the movie gets the food addiction point right. But that’s about it. There’s a bunch of scary statistics that don’t matter, and they want to blame a lot of scapegoats.

What Fed Up wants to do is to impose federal regulation on sugary junk food. They think things are bad enough (save the children) to warrant this. So, you have to believe that 1) people can’t break their addiction to foods with added sugar, 2) some type of tax or labeling regulation will be easy to implement, 3) it’ll be effective in decreasing obesity, and 4) they’re won’t be any unintended consequences of this law. Good luck with any of those requirements.

Please stop demonizing scapegoats like Ancel Keys, George McGovern, potatoes, rice, and “calories in / calories out” for our problems. The positive message has already been clearly, wonderfully delivered in movies like Forks Over Knives, and you can get personal instruction from anyone who’s learned to eat correctly (hint: we eat a lot).

Eating right and exercising work, but we never get a chance because of the Pleasure Trap of food addiction. Once people (re-)learn how to cook whole foods, and experience the real tastes of delicious fresh foods, they break the addiction to the processed junk that’s killing the nation. No regulation needed. It’s a simple, all-natural solution.

Felt like some fun carbs today after breakfast, so we walked a few blocks to the Donut Bar for a treat. I picked up a Butterfinger cake donut (yes, it has crumbled candy bar sprinkles in the frosting), and (half of) an old fashioned. The best thing about a high-carb diet is this kind of treat is never out of the question. They’re just calories. It’s not like I’m trying to stay in a state of ketosis or anything. I’m not saying you should eat tons of this stuff, but you can still lose weight having the occasional treat. BTW, you appreciate this stuff a lot more when you rarely taste it.

Pasta is a really light meal when you don’t add a bunch of oil, cream sauce, or meat to it. I’m guessing the pasta has about 500 calories, and won’t bother counting the vegetables and small amount of oil. I’m still hungry, so I’ll probably make a salad next.

This is Hollie again, leading the full Sunday morning spin class of 11 girls and me. But I don’t show up just for the view, we all work our a**es off for the highest, fastest calorie burn you’ll get anywhere. Every workout, I’m racing like it’s the Tour de France, and end up completely soaked. Plenty of other people in the class take it all very seriously, and this studio is our dojo.

There is no way I could ever get close to keeping up with fixie racers downtown (especially at my age), without these workouts. I can ride a lot harder here than on the road, because I don’t have to worry about saving enough energy to get back home, or to even control the bike. Sprints here are all out power exertions, then collapsing on the handlebars for air. (Forget what I might look like. Just watch Hollie.)