Week 7: Body Fat 36%, Two pounds down!



McCullough Ranch Road - Where I rode 22 miles on Sunday.



The fat ratio is back on the way down, I'm wearing form-fitting clothes again (including my "skinny" jeans from last summer) and I'm feeling really, really good!

I've started intensive training for the bicycle tour in April.  This past Sunday I rode my bike for 22.58 miles over some really hilly terrain.  I fell once due to the new clipless pedals, but overall I was really happy with the ride.

The extra activity caused some balancing issues with the diet.  I'm exercising more than the base protocol calls for and my lean mass was decreasing as a result.  I was also eating a lot of off-program foods (on top of the dinner I talked about in an earlier post) to make up for the calories my body was craving.  All this slowed down my progress.

The diet has been tweaked - I am eating a protein before and after the big rides - and I'm dropping weight again!  My goal is to have my fat ratio down below 30% when I leave for the bike tour.

Tonight I plan to go on a 30 minute bike ride, on top of my regular commute to work.  I need to do these little rides in the evening to get my hiney "saddle ready" and build up my endurance so I am able to cycle every mile of the coming tour.  I don't want to be that girl who didn't plan properly that ends up spending most of the tour in the support vehicle!  I've been dreaming of doing a tour like this since I was 12 and I don't want to miss out on a thing!

A woman pulled me aside this week and told me she tried Ideal Protein but had to give up.  She said she's a compulsive over eater, attends Overeaters Anonymous and just couldn't make the diet work.  My heart went out to her and I surprised her with my answer.

I told her that I have a history of eating disorders, including bulemia and compulsive eating.  I told her that I had also been involved with OA in the past.  Her eyes got wide and she asked me how I was able to stay on the diet.

I told her that I changed my mind about myself and my abilities.  I decided my soul was more powerful than my compulsive eating and that I was worth the hard work to overcome my overeating.

I told her that the biggest, most important thing I did was decide to love and accept myself, just as I was in my 300+ lb. frame, and the rest fell into place.  Her eyes grew wide, as if she never considered that kind of thinking before.

As Wayne Dyer often says, "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

I changed who I thought I was, how I saw myself and the changes started happening, almost by themselves.

My experience with eating issues is that I was using eating to anesthetize myself to the pain I was feeling about things that happened in my past.  I could not allow past hurts, a low self esteem and the eating habits that manifested as a result to control my life.

I am more capable, more powerful - STRONGER - than my past.  It is vital that the past remains in the past and that I live in the moment as much as possible. I put the unnecessary mental baggage I was carrying around in the closet, like a box full of forgotten photographs, and moved on  with my life.

It is my firm belief that anyone can do this, including you!  If a sedentary, 40-something woman who weighed over 300 lbs. can transform herself into an active, trim, vibrant cyclist, NOBODY is a lost cause.