2021 in Review - the Quiz

Introduction

As I close out 2021, I thought I’d give my readers a little quiz. You can consider this open-book (because after all, how could I police this anyway)? Or, for an extra challenge, try it without peeking. 

(Don’t worry, you don’t have to wait until next week for the answers … they’re right down at the bottom of the post.)

2021 in Review – the Quiz

1. The movie Wonder Woman 1984 sucked because:

a) Diana (Gal Godot) got all soft and mushy as soon the love interest, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) arrived; she stopped being badass and was mainly clingy and needy, pining for him (I know, bad pun, I couldn’t resist), which was distracting and annoying

b) Diana stubbornly refused to give up Steve, though this was necessary in order to save the world (according to the absurd logic of the so-called plot) and wasn’t until Steve sternly mansplained the whole thing to her that she fell in line, as if it takes a man to save the world, even when he’s not a superhero

c) It’s totally unrealistic that a woman as gorgeous as Diana would wait for forty years for her sweetheart to reappear rather than moving on, and it’d have been so much cooler if Steve had shown up suddenly in 1984 only for Diana to say, “Uh, sorry Steve … I’m actually in a relationship”

d) The female villain in the movie was meek, nice, and nerdy until she gained her powers, which consisted of being charming, beautiful, and strong, at which point she instantly became evil as well, as if the natural consequence of empowering women is that they become total bitches

2. Why is a low-sodium diet not necessarily for everyone?

a) Modern life has people working too much, exercising too little, eating a lot of crap, and then trying to undo the damage by eating less salt … nice try
b) When I surveyed my bike team, 17 of 23 responded that they don’t worry about limiting their salt intake, and yet we’re all very healthy
c) Added salt is not a major contributor to hypertension; the salt in processed foods is more often the culprit, and these are the foods we should all be avoiding anyway due to their trans fats, nitrates, refined flour, etc.
d) Sometimes a little salt goes a long way, like regular peanut butter that has only 6% of the recommended daily value, whereas low-sodium peanut butter is so disgusting I’d rather eat my scabs … and in fact I’d almost rather eat your scabs

3. Knowing what we now know about football, and looking back at the NFL’s lawsuit against M.I.A. for flipping off the camera during the halftime show, their lawsuit is absurd because…

a) These halftime shows are so lame, the scandals (like this one or Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction”) are really the only even slightly dramatic or exciting things fans ever get to see
b) Innocuous gestures like the flipping the bird are nothing compared to the domestic violence committed by football players, which the NFL happily tolerates as detailed here
c) The NFL has a long history of turning a blind eye to the rampant concussions suffered by their players and took great pains to block research into the problem, so they cannot claim any moral high ground
d) Football fans, being remarkably tolerant of all this, should totally be able to handle being flipped off

4. Primoz Roglic’s come-from-behind victory in Stage 7 of the Paris-Nice cycling stage race was actually kind of lame because…

a) Despite having already totally stomped all over his rivals for the GC, Roglic needlessly passed up Gino Mäder, a young pro who had launched a very brave breakaway and would have achieved his first-ever WorldTour victory if Roglic hadn’t cruelly nipped him at the line, thus crushing his dream
b) Roglic did this great big alpha-male victory salute as if this were the most impressive victory of his career when really it didn’t matter much, this being such a minor stage race for a rider like him
c) The way he punched the sky, it was just so tone-deaf, bringing to mind the smarty-pants kid in the classroom who’s constantly putting his hand up and, when the teacher ignores him, raises it higher, higher, higher, so his shoulder is raised, half his butt is lifting off the chair, and he’s going “Ooh, ooh, ooh” and can’t figure out why the teacher won’t call at him yet again

d) We’re all kind of tired of Roglic anyway

5. As of April, 2021 (i.e., pre-Delta) variant) what generally had to be true for COVID-19 to be transmitted from one person to another?

a) The two people had to be in fairly close proximity to each other (within about six feet)
b) There had to be a lack of good air flow (e.g., the two had to be indoors without much ventilation)
c) The exposure had to be fairly prolonged (e.g., more than just a few minutes)
d) The people had to not be wearing masks

6. Which of the following is a totally legit Tom Swifty?

a) “Nice boobs!” Tom tittered
b) “Lousy dog doesn’t even have a pedigree,” Tom muttered
c) “Denmark is full of assholes,” Tom said disdainfully
d) “Oh dear, I can’t get it up,” Tom said softly

7. What was interesting about the post-race interviews at Stage 9 of the 2021 Giro d’Italia?

a) The ever-stoic stage winner Egan Bernal said, “It may look like I’m crying right now but those are just raindrops, or maybe snot”
b) Geoffrey Bouchard, who had gotten passed with only 400 meters to go after a daring solo breakaway, said, “I hear Bernal has been sleeping with my girl as well”
c) Bouchard said, “My dad just texted me, ‘You’ve always been a loser, son,’ so my disappointment is absolute and my pride irrevocably shattered”
d) Both interviews were embellished if not outright fabricated by a playful blogger

8. What was interesting about the post-race interview at Stage 9 of the 2021 Tour de France?

a) The interviewer said to winner Ben O’Connor, “You’re a little glassy-eyed … are you gonna start crying now, like a QuickStep guy?” and O’Connor replied, “I think I can avoid that … I’m able to control myself better [than when I crossed the line] and I’m not yelling ‘yay’ anymore”
b) When the interviewer said, “Walk us through that victory salute, where you clapped your hands like a little girl at a birthday party,” O’Connor replied, “I went into that victory salute completely unprepared—I wasn’t meant to be in the break, I screwed up, I didn’t know what to do, then I heard we had three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, one fish two fish red fish blue fish, it was a mad stage, conditions were atrocious”
c) O’Connor said, “At the end there, I had to not panic, and when you think you’re gonna win a stage you can freeze up, and … look at me, dammit, I am starting to cry”
d) It’s possible the entire transcript of the interview was fabricated out of thin air

9. It can be argued that the metric system is not actually superior to the imperial, aka US customary, system of measurement. How?

a) Celsius is inferior because the units are too large, and because its scale goes beyond the temperatures generally experienced by humans, such that part of the scale (38 to 100) is wasted, and to express very cold temperatures you have to go into negative numbers, which is awkward
b) There’s no arguing that 60 mph—that is, a mile a minute—is a really handy mnemonic, since it’s roughly the speed we drive on the highway, so a destination 300 miles away will take 300 minutes to reach; no such mnemonic exists in the metric system
c) The metric units of weight, kilograms, are too large to be precise, and since a majority of Americans would like to lose weight, the units are demoralizing because who wants to forgo snacks for a whole week and only get to say, “I boy, I lost a whole half-kilo!”?
d) Base-10 is overrated because it lacks sub-multiples, so it’s poorly suited to calculating quickly in your head via fractions, which is why we don’t have a base-10 system for measuring time

10. What is the key to making good guacamole?

a) Don’t put sour cream in it
b) Don’t mix it in a blender—just roughly hack it up so it’s nice and chunky
c) Don’t use inferior ingredients—the whole idea is that Mother Nature makes the guac great so long as you don’t screw it up
d) Don’t add peyote, even if the characters in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo spiked their guacamole with it (and note that Acosta himself just said no)

11. This year’s Paris-Roubaix bike race was particularly fun to watch because…

a) It was raining so with all the wet cobblestones and the dirt turning to mud, it was slicker than snot and there were tons of crashes
b) Gianni Moscon, who is a total scumbag who’d been in the news a number of times for misbehavior ranging from racial slurs to deliberately crashing a rider to getting a tow from the team car to punching a rival to throwing a bike at another rider, was off the front solo for a good while before falling on his ass, which made the race feel like a morality play
c) Sonny Cobrelli celebrated his victory with the most over-the-top hysterics in the history of the sport, shaking his bike at the sky as if daring the gods to defy him, throwing himself on the ground and howling like an animal, “BAAAAAA-HOO-HOO-HOO! BAAAAAA-HA-HA-HA!” and generally carrying on like he’d completely lost his mind
d) Cobrelli, when chided by the post-race interviewer for having mud on his face, replied, “No, you’re mistaken, this is an oatmeal facial mask; you see, it’s important to rehydrate your skin after a tough race like that, and oatmeal is a humectant, which means it helps the skin retain any moisture added to it, and meanwhile, oatmeal has naturally occurring glycolic acid, which effectively exfoliates dead skin cells and speeds up cell turnover, so you’re left with softer skin, less visible pores, and a more glowing and dewy appearance”

12. Which of the below products, promoted as a gift during the 2021 holiday season, is mind-bogglingly lame?

a) The aromatherapy candle, “poured [by] skilled artisans in the USA using only premium and cleanest soy wax available,” and “ideal as an aromatherapy candle or relaxing candle for yoga, meditation, and stress relief” and, best of all, “decorated with a cute, fun, adorable, and always heart-warming message of assurance,” which says in giant bold letters on the label, “I’D SHANK A BITCH FOR YOU RIGHT IN THE KIDNEY”
b) The smartphone-controlled coffee mug that enables you to set the temperature of your coffee remotely and even to set up alerts in case your coffee is in another room, since it’s simply not practical to just throw your coffee in the microwave for 20 seconds if it cools off too much
c) The clock that shows the hours and minutes as math problems you have to solve, so that you have to stop, shift gears, waste valuable time calculating the hour and minute, and then spend more time trying to calm back down because you’re pissed off now about having had to do all this
d) The $995 Gucci shoe/slipper that is a leather dress shoe in the front and a fur-lined slipper in the back, like what Chewbacca would wear if he went to prom

The answers

Great job, you made it to the end! Let’s see how you did.

Guess what: all answers are correct, thus I congratulate you on a perfect quiz! You are clearly a very astute reader of albertnet, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog for the last twelve months. Come back next year and pay close attention, because some of my upcoming posts are gonna be on the test!

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Should You Eat Less Salt?

Vlog

I would love to have an albertnet podcast, but the fact is, I don’t know how. I would have to learn some new platform, and figure out how to make it available to the 4.3 billion users of the Internet, and I simply don’t have the time. Knowing that many people would rather passively listen to podcasts than scroll through large bodies of text, I’m providing the next best thing: a vlog version of the following post. If you aren't enthralled by the sight of me pretending not to read, just close your eyes. Or open another tab and look at pictures of Gal Gadot while you listen. Or bite the bullet and scroll down for the text. Your call.

Introduction

I am not a doctor or nutritionist, nor a scientist of any kind. I’m not in the business of making specific health recommendations to anybody. That said, I think blanket advice from nutrition experts to the population at large can be imprecise. This post examines the question of whether you, dear reader, need to worry about your salt intake. I don’t know who you are, of course, but I aim to slice and dice the question of “who” more finely than other sources you might encounter. I also review here the results of a simple survey I sent out to my cycling friends. You won’t (and shouldn’t) come away with a new approach to your diet, but perhaps with a few good questions and some (low-fat, all-natural, free-range) food for thought.

Why do I care?

Humans need salt. And so does food. As a dumb kid I thought salt just made food salty, but that’s wrong. Salt makes food yummy. As I learned to cook I was astonished at how you can have a dish 99% done and it won’t taste right until you salt it, and then suddenly it can go from edible to delicious. The end result doesn’t necessarily taste salty; it just tastes right.

Now, if salt were utterly, incontrovertibly bad for you, I might consider it a necessary evil. I’m not willing to go without it, despite being sufficiently health conscious that I’ve essentially given up bacon and other cured meats. But the amount of added salt needed for a complete gastronomic apotheosis doesn’t need to be large. Have you ever tried to eat unsalted peanut butter? It’s revolting. I’d rather eat my scabs. Hell, I’d almost rather eat your scabs. If salted peanut butter had twice the FDA’s recommended daily allowance of sodium in it, and cost twice as much as unsalted, I’d still choose it.

But you know how much sodium regular peanut butter actually has? A mere 140 mg, just 6% of the recommended daily value. (Note that trying to go lower than this wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial: humans actually need about 500 mg of sodium a day to conduct vital functions, as described here.)

So why does unsalted peanut butter exist, other than as a specialty product for sufferers of hypertension? I’ll tell you my hunch: many people who buy it are reacting to the vague sense that less sodium is always better for you. And peanut butter is just one example of this phenomenon. It breaks my heart that well-meaning people are eating inferior meals based on rule of thumb that may or may not apply to them.

[Above: this PBJ was such a work of art, my daughter asked for a bite and then made off with half of it. This never would have happened in my household growing up. More on this later.]

Does sodium actually increase blood pressure?

I won’t bother to provide a wide survey of the science on this, but here are the high points of an article from the Harvard Medical School, based on an interview with Dr. Nancy Cook, a professor of medicine there:

• On average, Americans eat too much salt
• Whether or not sodium is bad for everybody, vs. only those with certain risk factors, has been a matter of some debate
• There is a fairly undisputed effect of sodium on blood pressure, and it’s stronger in people with hypertension
• People respond differently to salt, one to the next

Regarding the mechanism of sodium’s effect on blood pressure, Cook explains, “When you eat too much salt, your body holds on to water in an effort to dilute it. This extra water increases your blood volume, which means your heart works harder because it’s pushing more liquid through your blood vessels. More strenuous pumping by the heart puts more force on the blood vessels. Over time, this increased force can raise blood pressure and damage blood vessels, making them stiffer, which increases the risk of stroke, heart attack, and heart failure.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I read that, I didn’t immediately have an “Oh, shit!” reaction. Perhaps my salt intake does cause water retention, but not for long because every time I exercise, which is generally around four times a week, I sweat a lot, and in fact after a particularly hard ride I’ll get these head rushes every time I stand up—a classic symptom of low blood pressure—until I rehydrate. Not that I expect Dr. Cook to base her guidelines on my particular case. Given that a fairly recent CDC study concluded that only 22.9% of Americans get enough exercise, it’s not hard to see why Dr. Cook would advocate for reducing sodium intake when addressing the general public.

Meanwhile, the CDC reckons that “Americans consume an average of more than 3,400 mg of sodium each day,” which is far more than the 2,300 that the U.S. Department of Health recommends. Clearly, overconsumption of sodium is a public health problem in this country.

But does this mean you and I and everyone should all cut down? I think that would be a problematic conclusion. If Americans by and large use too much petroleum and create too much pollution by driving giant SUVs, then yeah, I can try to mitigate the damage by driving a Prius. But if someone eats too much salt and doesn’t exercise enough, I can’t help him by lowering my salt intake. In other words, I may or may not be implicated in this public health crisis. (Again, I can’t fault the article; the safe bet when advising a wide audience is to advocate caution and restraint.)

As is so often the case, there’s a bit of a conundrum here: the people who are concerned about their health and go looking for dietary advice are often not the ones recklessly eating a lot of processed food, fast food, and salty snacks, and thereby creating frightening statistics around widespread hypertension. A good many conscientious folks may heed these general warnings about salt and reduce their consumption, thus depriving themselves of its goodness for no legitimate reason.

My own experience

In brief, I’ve been seeing borderline high systolic blood pressure readings since high school, while my diastolic numbers are always nice and low. Meanwhile, my blood fats (cholesterol etc.) are remarkably good, my body mass index is spang in the middle of normal, and my resting heart rate is in the low 40s. I’ve never had a doctor recommend a change in diet, and over time my systolic reading has come down a bit. I chalk this up to being less of a hothead than I used to be. In general I suspect the benefits of life balance, of stress release achieved through exercise or yoga, and of emotional hygiene such as self-compassion are underrated. Modern life has people working too much, exercising too little, over-consuming news and social media, and then trying to undo all the damage by eating less salt. Nice try.

My survey

I surveyed a bunch of my cycling pals, because they’ve always been an insightful and amusing bunch. Being cyclists, most of them seem to eat basically whatever they want, and they’re all pretty much fit as a fiddle. That said, they take their health seriously, which statement I base on a couple of decades of riding and eating together, and also on their reactions to a couple of articles that have come out about too much exercise possibly damaging your heart. I was curious about my cycling team’s approach to salt so I emailed them this simple question: Do you make any effort to limit your salt intake for health reasons?

Of the 23 responses I got back, 17 were some version of no (i.e., they eat all the salt they want) and 6 were yes (they limit their salt). Of course I got some interesting comments, too:

• No, but I’m also pretty naturally salt-averse. One of my most frequent complaints about restaurant food is that it’s too salty, and one of my family’s most common complaints about my cooking is that there’s not enough salt in it.
• No. But then again, I don’t really make any effort to limit my intake of anything. I’m a gluttonous hedonist. What could possibly go wrong with that philosophy???
• I double down on salt - I’ve got low blood pressure and find getting light headed when I stand up a bit irritating.
• How can a person cook without salt? It’s my understanding (possibly inaccurate) that salt is only a problem if you have high blood pressure, so not really an issue for healthy people with normal blood pressure.
• Switched to dry brining with kosher salt. Definitely healthier and tastes better but I cannot speak to any metaphysical benefit.
• I’m casually aware of salt intake but never limit myself vs. what tastes appropriate. I don’t buy potato chips very often but when I do I want ‘em salty.
• No. But I know when I’ve had too much and I don’t necessarily enjoy that feeling.
• No. Well, maybe. I salt liberally from the shaker/cellar, but I do try to be aware of how much sodium certain prepared foods contain, and err on the side of less is better there…
• Well, occasionally I think about limiting my salt intake but it doesn’t really happen.
• Yes and yes - Simply put, Salt= Hypertension, Sugar= diabetes. Controlling these substances through diet can extended the life of several organs. It’s no secret that food companies fill processed food with these as a preservative and as a sales angle. We don’t even realize how much is added … I haven’t added salt to anything in years.
• Several years ago, I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was slightly higher than it used to be, almost 140/70. (Getting older sucks...) Since then I’ve generally cut back on the Mexican and Korean foods, and now it’s back to 120/60. However, if I ride 4+ hours in the heat, then I’ll always reward myself with some Mexican food.

My favorite comments were from the two MDs in my survey:

• I maximize salt intake!
• Salt is not a major contributor to hypertension. The processed food that contains a lot of salt probably is. (I spent a 1/3rd of a course in college studying sodium.) However, from a public health perspective, telling the public to limit salt probably has beneficial effects.

Now, there are (at least) two conclusions I could draw from these results. One, I could assume that by not worrying about salt whatsoever, we are consuming huge amounts of sodium and yet somehow getting away with it. On the other hand, we could be well within the recommended range of sodium consumption quite by accident. Granted, we cyclists love us some big, rich meals, but we tend to cook them ourselves. I’ve never known any of these pals to eat fast food, and as health-conscious types we avoid processed food like frozen entrees, “lunch meat,” and snack foods, because of all the other crap in them (trans fats, nitrates, refined flour, artificial flavors, etc.) and because we’re frankly too epicurean. (I get frozen pizza for my kids a couple times a year as a guilty pleasure, and indeed, only the scarcity of it makes it a treat.)

Honestly, the Recommended Daily Value of sodium, 2,300 mg, seems pretty generous. I tallied up the amount of sodium I get from my typical lunch, and found no cause for alarm. Lunch is often my biggest meal of the day, and it’s invariably a big burrito (basically homemade but with canned refried or whole beans and store-bought tortillas). Look, here’s one now.

I just read some labels and have calculated that one of my big-ass burritos contains about 1,400 mg of sodium. Of the US Recommended DV of not more than 2,300 mg, that leaves just 900 mg free for dinner (since I don’t eat breakfast). This is probably okay because my wife does most of the cooking and seldom resorts to things like canned beans. Besides, even if I’m a bit over the guideline, I’m a big guy and my daily caloric intake is very high—some would say legendary. But I guarantee I’m far from the 3,400 mg of sodium that the average American takes in, without even trying … that is, without compromising the tastiness of my food.

According to the CDC, “Most of the sodium Americans eat comes from packaged, processed, store-bought, and restaurant foods. Only a small amount comes from salt added during cooking or at the table.” A Harvard medical school article concurs: “At least 75% of the sodium in the average American diet comes from processed foods, such as cold cuts and cured meats, pizza, burgers, and sandwiches.”

This makes perfect sense, of course. Food is big business, and if sacrificing the health of consumers is what it takes to ensure shareholder value, so be it. Take the case of Campbell’s soup: they were famously required by the FDA to desist using their old slogan “Soup is good food” because their soup had too much sodium to be called “good.” More recently, Campbell’s experimented with lowering sodium, but then reversed course when sales dropped. As described here, their new CEO announced at an investors’ meeting, “For me it’s about stabilizing [sales] first.” Campbell’s contends that “the proposed nutritional principles ‘describe products that manufacturers will not produce because children and teens will not eat them.’”

Obviously we can’t stake our health on the companies that pander to philistine tastes. But that doesn’t mean when we cook at home we should gild the lily and err on the side of blandness. If anything, that will just tempt us to eat out more. And with restaurants, of course, all bets are off.

Conclusion

Again, I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, but I think I can you give this bit of advice: before you automatically seek to lower your sodium intake based on the general messaging we get from the FDA, CDC, etc., find out what your own blood pressure is and ask your doctor if you’re at any risk. And if you do have a need to keep an eye on your sodium intake, do so with precision, by reading labels and knowing what goes into your food. It could well be, for example, that a person with mild hypertension could still afford the amount of sodium in regular peanut butter, and doesn’t need to be shaking Mr. Dash on his or her dinner.

Appendix A – salt in peanut butter

I grew up eating a lot of PBJs. My mom was a great cook, but these sandwiches were atrocious. The bread was fine, and the jam (generally homemade) was great, but the peanut butter was awful. It was a brand called Deaf Smith, and as detailed here, it was the first organic peanut butter on the market. It came in a giant plastic bucket—it had to be at least a few gallons—and it looked like a cross between diarrhea and that old-fashioned Dijon mustard with all the seeds in it. It was a roiling, gritty, grainy, wet mess and we called it quicksand because if you lost your grip on the knife (which happened a lot because it’d get oily), the knife would quickly sink and you wouldn’t see it again until you eventually got to the bottom of the tub and there’d be like five knives there.

But you have to understand, my brothers and I were not picky eaters, and all this would have been completely forgivable if Deaf Smith didn’t taste so damn bad. It was just awful. We suffered through those PBJs because we had to—we were growing boys, after all—but it was just so gross. As soon as I moved away from home I switched to Skippy and discovered that peanut butter could be delicious.

A few decades later, though I’d moved on to natural, non-hydrogenated peanut butter, usually Adams or the Trader Joe’s brand, I was still totally digging it. And then one day my wife bought unsalted by mistake. The horror! It tasted exactly like Deaf Smith! Completely disgusting—I was right back in my miserable elementary school lunchroom! This was an epiphany. I realized that there had never actually been anything really wrong with Deaf Smith except the lack of salt. This omission was totally unnecessary and surely not why my mom chose that brand. She has always maintained that salt won’t hurt you if you don’t already have high blood pressure—it can only exacerbate it. She probably chose Deaf Smith simply because it was organic and available in bulk. So why did Deaf Smith eschew salt? Probably because they were a bunch of hippies and salt seemed evil to them somehow.

Postscript to this sad tale: a year or so later I mixed up a fresh batch of Trader Joe’s peanut butter (yes, this mixing is a pain in the ass and I do miss the hydrogenation of Skippy at times), and then made a PBJ. Yuck! Foiled again! Staring, enraged, at the label, wondering why my wife would poison the family again by buying more unsalted peanut butter, I realized this jar wasn’t actually labeled as unsalted. It was their organic variety, which had just 40 mg of sodium per serving, vs. 140 mg in the normal version. I guess they decided those who like organic food automatically want less sodium. I wrote an angry email to Trader Joes, which I’ve just found and reread. It ends, “When this jar is empty I will probably remove the label and burn it in effigy.” (In fairness, Trader Joe’s did apologize and gave me a refund.)

Appendix B – fact-checking the Deaf Smith tale

I fact-checked the bit about Deaf Smith peanut butter with my mom, to confirm that lowering our sodium intake wasn’t her goal in choosing it. This she corroborated, but she denied that we ate it that much. “I got it from the co-op, and hadn’t tried it before,” she said. “I think I only bought it once, and had no idea it wouldn’t be salted. It probably just seemed like we got it a lot, because it took so long to get through that giant drum.”

I thought this might have been wishful thinking … after all, no mother wants to admit she tortured her offspring for a protracted period. So I asked my brother Bryan. He responded, “It was just for a time as I recall, we didn’t really like it because it was so natural, and it separated so badly that the last few gallons of it were like concrete.”

My brother Max had a host of other memories around the Deaf Smith. “As I recall, the Deaf Smith was from ‘the co-op,’” he told me (via text). “That’s where those ginormous cylindrical loafs of Colby and Colby-Jack cheeses came from as well. I think there was more than just one five-gallon tub of Deaf Smith that came through [our household]. The Deaf Smith was really good in rice crispy squares. I remember that! When we complained about the Deaf Smith mom would laugh … for some reason she just didn’t believe that we really hated it.

“Remember the story of how Deaf Smith became deaf? He was a San Francisco kid and he had to take the trolley to school. One day he was a little running behind, as they say, and the trolley was already taking off. He ran up to the trolley and a man, who was just trying to be helpful, used the young Smith’s ears as handles to haul him up onto the trolley and he was deafened.”

At this point I replied, “I do not remember that story. Is that from the archives or did you just make that up?” Max’s answer: “True story as I remember it. I recall feeling that we had to eat this peanut butter because mom felt sorry for Deaf Smith. It may have been that the man ‘boxed’ his ears to punish him for his tardiness. I remember asking Mom what that meant, boxing the ears. I guess it was common back then for men to box the ears of wayward youths. As she described it, boxing the ears involves essentially punching a kid in both ears at the same time with the fists turned inward so the contact with the ears is made with the fleshy part of the hand between the wrist and bottom knuckle of the pinky finger.

“I recall that she may have been unsure whether the man dragged him up by his ears or dragged him up and then boxed his ears, but either way it resulted in two sure things: Smith became deaf and there was nothing more for him but to make peanut butter.

“Everyone who buys this product feels a bit guilty and a bit absolved simultaneously. I always tried to like the Deaf Smith out of guilt for the human condition. I’d think about the trauma that that kid endured, having his life ruined by some a-hole on the trolley, and how he had to crush peanuts for the rest of his miserable existence.

“It had to have been a miserable existence. If he had made any sort of meaningful recovery, he might have put some sugar or at least some salt in the peanut butter. It was almost as though he accepted being boxed in the ears. As though he deserved it for being late. That peanut butter was practically a punishment. Austerity in a five gallon tub.”

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[Quasi-] South Beach Diet for Morons

Introduction

This isn’t actually a post for morons. I thought the title would be funny, and “[Learnable Skill] for Dummies” is copyrighted. This is a shortcut to reading The South Beach Diet, and also a memoir of my weight loss efforts, but mainly a humor piece (because struggling with one’s weight is always funny, right?). Do not come here for an accurate, responsible distillation of the actual South Beach approach (which would be plagiarism and copyright infringement anyway). Call it Sloth Bleach Pseudo-Dieting(-ish). Okay?

Eight years ago in these pages, I wrote about “secondhand dieting”—whereby you end up on your spouse’s diet because he or she is doing the cooking. My goal when I wrote that was to get off the South Beach diet because I was actually perfectly happy with my weight. Well, fast-forward to last July and you’ll see, here, that as middle age has descended upon me, I am no longer happy with my weight—or, more specifically, with my belly. Toward the end of my “Ode on a Belly – Mine” post I declared my intention to do South Beach(-ish) for real, and to blog about the results. Well, here you go.

The good

The good news is, Sloth Bleach really works! When I started it, after my nephew’s wedding (and associated festivities) in late June, I weighed a whopping 193 pounds. I began recording everything I ate, and began eating very carefully, and a month later—just in time for an epic bike ride with my friends —I had lost 12 pounds and was down to 181. Success! I got down to 175 by the beginning of September and held this until the second week of October.

So, yeah … that’s the good news.

The bad

The bad news is, South Beach isn’t really a diet. If it were, it wouldn’t work, because diets never do. Why not? Because they can’t. It’s absurd to think that you could temporarily change your behavior and enjoy permanent benefits.

Let’s look at the logic, or lack thereof, that the dieting concept implies: 

• Premise: I weigh x because for years I have eaten y calories a day, which is z more calories than I need (hence the weight gain that has motivated me to diet).
• Premise: If I eat, say, 0.7y instead of y, I will turn z into a negative number—that is, I will be consuming fewer calories than I need—thus my body will burn a bunch of fat and I will lose weight.
• Premise: Once I have achieved the lower weight that I desired, I can go back to eating y calories a day, which will still be z calories more than I need, and yet I somehow won’t gain back any weight.
• Conclusion: I am a moron.

Look, if you’re eating the way you always have, and yet you’re gaining weight, something has changed. Perhaps you’re not as active. Perhaps this is just part of getting old. Perhaps it only seems like you’re eating the way you always have, but you’re actually fighting the tribulations of middle age, parenting, and/or the working grind by self-medicating with extra booze, extra butter, or extra sloth. Whatever the case, it is impossible to implement a short-term fix to lose the weight (i.e., go on a diet and expect lasting success).

South Beach is not a diet, it’s an approach. It’s a permanent change in the style of eating that you do, that will yield permanent weight loss results if and only if you stick with it for the rest of your life—which notion is, I’ll admit, depressing as hell. But then, so is ongoing weight gain.

In case you’re hoping these caveats are theoretical, they’re not. I fell off the South Beach wagon because I started taking trips to my hometown to take care of my ailing father, then to help with his hospice, and then to spread his ashes. In order to cope, I ate breathtaking amounts of food, Beck’sted copiously, and allowed myself to eschew exercise entirely. The result is that I gained back half the weight I’d lost through South Beach.

(What do I mean by breathtaking amounts of food? Well, for one thing, my brothers and I would eat indulgent meals out such as all-u-can-eat pasta, and for another, we tended—almost without fail—to eat a pint of ice cream apiece, every night. Or to be precise, four quarter-pints.)

So, yeah—my South Beach effort had yielded weight loss results only while I stuck with it. Recently I found myself back up to the mid-180s. Something had to be done, so I resolved recently to sign up for the San Bruno Mountain Hill Climb bike race on January 1, to force me to adopt South Beach again. (Fear of disgrace is a great motivator.)

By the way, you may be aware that for years I’ve professed that the real key to staying skinny is to be a long-distance cyclist. I still hold this to be true, but with two caveats: 1) I can’t exactly advocate that for the lay reader because it takes a lot of time and it’s best to start young, and 2) I myself, despite gobs of muscle memory, don’t have the time and/or opportunity for that anymore.

The ugly

I’ll bet you’re expecting me to say being overweight is ugly. Well, I won’t. It’s being old that’s ugly. No it’s not—I’m just playing with you. This whole thing isn’t about looks. It’s about health. Being healthy and fit happens to look better than being unhealthy and overweight, but that’s incidental. I used the heading “The ugly” above simply because The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I mean, duh!

The buddy system

It’s easier to change your behavior—especially in a way that involves reducing creature comforts—when you have a buddy along. Here’s how the logic of that works. 

• Premise: Misery loves company.
• Premise: I love misery (obviously).
• Conclusion: I love company. (This is according to the Transitive Law, I believe.)

The argument isn’t perfect, because eating the South Beach way isn’t a miserable experience, exactly, but I doubt anybody would deny that having friends involved in your effort will help.

My wife, supportive as ever, agreed to do South Beach(-ish) with me. So did my brother Bryan, who isn’t doing an all-uphill bike race on January 1 but wants to lose weight anyway. This is only partly because I made fun of his belly when we were in Boulder together. “OMG,” you’re thinking, “you actually made fun of somebody because of his weight? What kind of monster are you?” The answer is, a sibling. Bryan made fun of my weight too, decades ago (when, at age 6 or 8, I had an oddly big belly). The chickens have come home to roost! But again, that’s only part of it. Bryan wants to be heathier, and we’re talking about doing a grueling 108-mile bike race, over giant Alpine passes, in a summer or two, so he appreciates my encouragement (even when it takes the form of taunts and jeers).

Where South Beach is concerned, the buddy system consists of sharing snippets of your daily journal, where you record not only what you eat but what you weigh each morning. So it’s not just a matter of providing encouragement, but also holding one another (and yourself) accountable. If a little bit of rivalry finds its way in there, well so be it. After all, that can be motivational, too.

In the case of my brother, the buddy system also means explaining how South Beach works—i.e., what you can and cannot eat. In case you’re intrigued by this miracle weight loss plan (which phrase I use here quite deliberately, to help Google direct people to this blog), I’m going to share my quickie, just-the-gist South Beach(-ish) wisdom with you as well.

How this thing works

South Beach is divided into phases. During Phase 1, you can’t have any fun at all—no bread, no pasta, and in fact no starches at all really, just lots of veggies and maybe some really unappealing whole grains like quinoa or something. The point is to get some immediate results, so as to motivate yourself. (Full disclosure: I don’t have the chutzpah to do Phase 1. If you think you do, maybe you should get the actual South Beach book.)

After a couple weeks on Phase 1, the plan goes, you move to Phase 2, which lets you have a few indulgences, but is still fairly austere. You do that for—what, a couple more weeks?—and then move to the third, final, permanent phase, which is—you guessed it!—phase 3. (Wow, you’re a quick study!) This final phase lasts either forever, or until your resolve flags.

More important than these phases is the emphasis on filling up on veggies instead of starches. The principle, as I understand it, is simple: we didn’t evolve to eat refined stuff like flour and sugar. That stuff is too calorically dense for us, especially since we’re not doing much physical labor anymore. (If this sounds like the Paleo diet, that’s a coincidence, since I know essentially nothing about it except that it’s probably annoying.)

Long story short, you essentially need to serve up all kinds of bulky, low-caloric, simple foods like vegetables, and fill your gaping gut with those instead of the tasty stuff. By “tasty” I mean “foodstuffs that have been manipulated to be more tasty.” (Obviously if we’re talking about all things that taste good, we should include fruit, vegetables, and other naturally tasty things, but the fact is, most people have forever thrown those over for highly manipulated crap like sugary cereal, “chicken” McNuggets, pasta, pizza, fries, etc. and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.)

So South Beach is way to reconcile what our bodies really need with what we feel like we need. We sorry humans have this pathetic need to feel full, because we’re so used to this feeling and because our souls are empty. And it’s actually okay to feel full, but only if it’s because a lot of high-fiber, low-calorie stuff is pushing against the inner wall of our bellies. We leave the table feeling sated, or at least bored of eating, and our overall calorie intake goes down.

In response, our bodies relearn how to burn fat efficiently. Meanwhile, our blood sugar becomes more stable. We snack less, eat better calories, enjoy all the benefits of the vegetables and meats we evolved to draw nourishment from, and become healthier. With our newfound health, we can cheat here and there and enjoy pasta again—because without pasta, life simply isn’t worth living. Obviously.

Some rules of thumb 

• Try to avoid refined starches
• If you have bread, make sure it’s whole grain (my family gets this Alvarado bead that has no flour, just wheat berries), and eat as little as possible of it (i.e., open-faced sandwiches only, and go for that really thin heel)
• Sometimes I just have a big spoon of PB & J instead of a sandwich
• Rule of thumb: if you have to butter it, you should just stop eating it
• No pasta, unfortunately, except as a treat ... it is the hardest thing to eat in moderation
• No pizza except as a treat (it’s a controlled substance in my household)
• No alcohol ... sorry!  (Obviously you can cheat here, but alcohol is truly fattening, in all its forms including low-carb beer.)
• If starchy stuff is served, try to eat a ton of vegetables along with it, like spinach or broccoli
• Try to have brown rice instead of white whenever possible (it’s actually pretty good, not like whole wheat pasta, which is inedible)
• The greener and more cruciferous your veggies, the better
• Chard, broccoli, broccolini, and—yes—kale are all good
• Cabbage is cheap and good and helps you lose your appetite
• Eggplant is cool—slice it and put salt all over it for a while to chase out the bad-tasting liquid
• Squash, zucchini, green beans, asparagus, celery, peppers are all great
• Corn is barely a vegetable—almost more like a starch—so don’t eat it often
• I think peas aren’t actually much better than corn
• Asian veggies like daikon and bok choy are good choices and also make you super sophisticated
• Fruit is okay, especially apples and other fiber-rich stuff
• No juice ever, no soda ever, no freaking vitamin water for crying out loud, just water and tea and coffee
• Record all your snacks, if you must snack
• Watch the condiments! Lots of calories hiding there!
• Salsa is great
• Step up and start drinking your coffee black, with no sugar!
• Black tea has to have milk but that won’t kill you
• I guess milk in your coffee isn’t the end of the world, but half-and-half or cream? Really?
• Hard boiled eggs are great ... very filling and they’re not fried in butter etc.
• Burritos are great if you do them right:
• Make your burritos with beans, brown rice, and either a soft-taco-size tortilla or half a regular tortilla (no, I’m not going to say a whole wheat tortilla because that’s just cruel)
• You can still stuff that bad boy pretty full, so that the tortilla may not even totally wrap it up—more like a covered wagon
• Shove other stuff in your burrito like a few cooked cabbage leaves, or some mushrooms, or grilled peppers, anything to flesh it out without being too caloric
• Dice some onions real fine and throw them in ... it’s yummy and keeps you in the habit of messing about with vegetables at every opportunity
• Throw some avocado slices on there when they’re in season because life is too short not to
• Skip the sour cream ... it’s an indulgence and exactly the kind of empty calorie that fattens you up (that’s right, carbs aren’t the only evil)
• Sometimes we have chips around but then come to our senses
• If people are eating yummy caloric stuff around you, what a perfect time to show off your absurd discipline and imperviousness to temptation
• Write down everything you eat, even if it’s like 1 chip
• “Nobody can eat just one”? I can!
• Maybe if it gets to be too much hassle writing everything down you’ll snack less!
• Smiley faces in the margins of your journal are a nice little zero-calorie reward!

So how’s it working out?

My brother e-mailed me a few days into our SB effort and said, “Thanks for the good tips! I'm inspired, truly. I started a food log of my own, and you’re right, Dana, just writing down what I had for dinner last night filled me with shame.” See? It’s working!

Just like I didn’t want to overwhelm my brother with arcane nutritional lore in our first few days of Sloth Bleach, I think it’s time to let you come up for air. Go watch a really dippy romantic comedy now, or wash your hair, or drink a beer, or whatever it is you do to release the viselike grip my relentless text has surely had on your poor head. And tune in next week for more inspiration; delicious, gossip-like updates on my brother’s and my progress (or frustration); and more useful information, including quick and easy lo-cal recipes like Mexican(-ish) rice and roasted Ewok!

Part II is here.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Ode on a Belly: Mine

Introduction

As I’ve commented before in these pages, I find vanity distasteful in a male.  That being said, shamelessness is probably worse.  In this spirit of shame I must now fall on my sword.  (As you shall learn, it’ll have to be a pretty long sword.)  Can self-loathing actually take the form of an ode?  Decide for yourself.

The Poem

Ode on a Belly:  Mine

So, “Eat to ride and ride to eat” is said

By almost any biker you might meet.                       2

A pile of pasta bigger than your head?

That’s just the kind of thing we like to eat.

But age, in time, makes fools of us all

(Except your oddball masters racing geek).            6

Our training programs finally start to stall;

Our bodies falter when our will is weak.

So now, alas, my belly’s on a roll.

It’s now convex that always was concave.             10

Instead of being thin, I’m Moomintroll.

By gluttony I find myself enslaved.

For years I faked it, sucking in my gut.

The camera and the mirror were deceived!          14

But now my belly’s found a way to jut

Out sideways, all the time—hard to believe!

     I’ve never actually thought about a diet

     But now I think I’ll finally have to try it.           18

Footnotes  & Commentary

Title

As I’ve explained in a previous post, “ode on” sounds a lot more sophisticated than “ode to.”  But I couldn’t title this “Ode on My Belly” because that might summon the image of somebody lying on his stomach (i.e., prone).  And “Ode On a Belly” is misleading.  I have never cared about anybody else’s belly, certainly not enough to write poetry about it.  I want to be very clear that this is my belly we’re talking about.  A belly that never before existed.

Line 2:  biker

You might think I wrote “biker” instead of cyclist because I needed to conform to the iambic pentameter of the sonnet form.  But actually, being a veteran of this sport, I prefer the term “biker,” as it teases the relative newcomers who insist on being called cyclists.  (If you don’t believe me, check out this biking glossary I wrote all the way back in 2008.)

Line 3:  bigger than your head

This is of course an allusion to the excellent book Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head by B. Kliban.

By the way, you might think I’m exaggerating about how much I eat.  And while I can’t say with certainty that I ever ate a pile of pasta bigger than my head, I did once eat a giant hunk of tri-tip that was.  And that’s not all:  I ate it as tacos.  Like thirty of them.  The giant hunk of meat just got smaller and smaller until it was gone.  Years later, wishing I’d somehow verified this past feat of grilled excess, I had the great idea to weigh myself before and after a barbecue, with spectators.  The half dozen people present witnessed that I gained more than ten pounds in one sitting.

Line 5:  Age, in time, makes fools of us

This alludes to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks/ Within his bending sickle’s compass come.”  Literary references like this showcase the kind of highbrow literary aspiration you can expect here at albertnet, even when I’m just grousing.

Line 6:  oddball masters racing geek

In case you’re not a cyclist, this refers to the “Masters” categories (35+, 45+, and even 55+ age groups) in American road racing.  As lamented here, there are some really fast old guys whom I assume made a killing in tech and then retired early, and have all the time and energy in the world to train.  These guys set the bar really high when it comes to physique.  It’s hard to cut myself slack with them strutting around (or more to the point, riding around) being all lean, reminding us what Lycra is supposed to be showcasing.

Line 7:  training programs

This line may be a bit misleading.  Most of the older guys I ride with—accomplished racers in their day—don’t follow a formal training program.  (As detailed here, only 4% keep up such a program year-round.)  Most of us follow the very general program of riding fairly often and jolly hard.  Based on this rather sloppy regimen, we feel entitled to eat whatever we want whenever we want, in whatever quantities we want.  The slop in the program works great until it doesn’t, which in my experience seems to be the second half of my forties—i.e., now.

Line 8:  bodies falter when our will is weak

This flips around the old ditty about “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (originally from the New Testament) that has been celebrated in an anecdote about artificial intelligence:  a computer attempted to translate the line into Russian and then back to English, with the comic result,  “The vodka was good but the meat was rotten.”

Line 9:  belly’s on a roll

Any suggestion of rolls of fat, and/or a jelly roll, is of course entirely intentional.

Line 10:  now convex that always was concave

If you have a hard time keeping straight convex vs. concave, try out this brain teaser.  That’s how I keep these terms straight.

Line 11:  Moomintroll

In case you’ve never heard of Moomintrolls, get thee to a library!  I didn’t want to steal a picture from the Internet because these books are still in print, so I asked my younger daughter to draw me a Moomintroll. 

To be completely honest, Moomintroll wears his belly a lot better than I do.  Not all weight is created equal.  Henry VIII was a huge man, but his size gave him an air of gravitas.  Falstaff was also very large but this just added to his bonhomie.  With wiry slow-twitch endurance athletes, though, the belly is just this isolated bulge attached to narrow limbs, which conveys neither gravitas nor bonhomie ... just a fit body going to seed.  Instead of Moomintroll, I perhaps should have compared myself to E.T., the extraterrestrial ... but I’m trying to be compassionate with myself.

Imagine a big belly on this guy...

Line 12:  gluttony ... enslaved

This line may seem so obvious as to be meaningless, but it’s not.  I think in many if not most cases, overweight people aren’t actually gluttons, but just have bad habits like drinking sodas or juice, resulting from lack of information.  But cyclists tend to know a lot about nutrition; we blather on about complex carbs and glycemic index, and know to drink sugary beverages only during exercise.  We’re just so used to indulging in gluttony without consequence that it’s hard to stop when the intensity of our riding naturally declines.  We know it’s wrong to keep up our gastronomic abandon, but we can’t help it.  See?  Slaves to gluttony.

I say “we” and “our” here because I’m trying to convince myself I’m not alone in my weight gain.  But actually, my biking teammates are holding up really well, and it’s wrong for me to try to drag down this community.  I could fix this, but I’m going to let it stand, as part of my shame.

Line 13:  sucking in my gut

As I alluded to a bit ago, when a cyclist does put on weight, it’s often extremely localized.  Some have theorized that we have oversized livers, to store all that glycogen.  Or maybe it’s the position we ride in that gives gravity a clean shot at our bellies.  Whatever the case, the thick midsection can even be seen in some professional racers, such as the German star Jan Ullrich:

The difference, in Ullrich’s case, is that he was thick through the belly while in top racing form.  So, despite his reputation for gaining more weight in the off-season than other pro racers, he could reasonably shrug and say, “I’ve just got a big liver or something.”  But since my own belly is obviously the result of slacking off at my exercise regimen, I have nowhere to hide.  And it’s not just my new physique that’s on display:  the extra weight slows me down on the bike, to the point where I’m reluctant to ride with my pals for fear of slowing them down inordinately.

Line 14:  the camera and the mirror

I discovered years ago that when a bunch of bikers line up for a group photo, a great way to invoke candid, genuine smiles is to call out, “Everybody suck in your gut!”  This invariably gets a laugh simply because it’s so absurd to think we’d actually need to do this.  In my own case, though, I hereby confess that I have actually been sucking in my gut in photos for at least a couple of years, to compensate for my gradual weight gain.  Case in point:  in this picture (from early 2016) I appear as flat-bellied as the rest!  (In case you’re an albertnet newcomer, I’m the guy third from the left.)

As for the mirror, that’s where things really get ridiculous.  I’ve long taken to being embarrassed by my own reflection unless I suck my belly in.  I’ve even dabbled in the delusion that all that sucking in would develop my stomach muscles and actually fix the problem. 

Line 15:  found a way to jut

Line 15?  WTF??  Since when does a sonnet have more than 14 lines?  Well, first of all, I never said this was a traditional Shakespearean sonnet.  Meanwhile, I decided that, excess being the major theme of my poem, I’d throw in a whole extra stanza, like that side of fries I didn’t really need.

I really do feel as though my belly were its own thing, not just a section of my flesh.  It’s like it’s got a mind of its own, like octopus arms or sea star limbs do.  I wonder if my belly dreams of escaping and heading for the door, dragging a trail behind it like a slug.

Line 16:  out sideways, all the time

When sucking in wasn’t enough, I found that by also raising my arms over my head I could look exactly like the weedy guy I used to be.  Now, even when I try this desperate measure, the fat sticks out sideways like little ears (or “love handles,” as they say).  I suppose I can still fake thinness while wearing Lycra, but not while also breathing (i.e., certainly not while riding).  My dad was visiting recently and while I was shoving stuff in my jersey pockets before a ride he remarked, “You still have a flat stomach.”  Two things instantly crossed my mind:  1) this flat stomach is an illusion caused by the fact that I literally suck, and 2) he might have been saying one thing to imply the opposite, whether consciously or not.  His remark could not have been made if the issue of my having a big tummy were not already on the table.  It’s not like he could reasonably say, for example, “Both of your ears are still intact.”

Line 17:  diet

The astute reader will notice the extra foot at the end of this line and the next (i.e., instead of 5 two-syllable metrical feet, each line in this couplet has 5½).  For extra credit, I challenge you to explain why I chose to do this.  (Answer:  like my extra stanza, this extra foot is symbolic of my tacked-on, interloping appendage.)

While I truly never have considered dieting before, my paranoia about a fat belly (or “aero-belly” as a teammate affectionately calls it) is nothing new.  Click here for an albeit slippery, quasi-fictional account of my past weight issues.

Line 18:  try it

In fact, I am three days into deliberately following the South Beach diet.  This isn’t my first time being on the diet; it’s my first time wanting to be.  As described here, I was involuntarily immersed in this diet years ago, when my wife did it and cooked our family meals accordingly.  This time I won’t be gorging at lunchtime to compensate.  So far, South Beach is working okay:  I’m down eight pounds.  (That may seem like a lot, but remember that ten-pound barbecue I wrote about.  For me, eight pounds is a rounding error.)

Stay tuned, because in the coming weeks I may blog about a) an epic road ride I’m unwisely planning; b) how the diet is going, or c) both.

Epilogue - July 24, 2017

You know how in the comment to Line 11, above, I asked you to imagine a big belly on Chris Froome?  Well, I was just looking at coverage of the final Tour de France stage, and caught a gander of this:

I wouldn’t say Froomie’s belly is huge or anything, but given how skinny the rest of him is, his thickness there is not insignificant.  Maybe a cyclist’s gut really isn’t fat ... maybe it is an oversized liver or just extra guts or something, or maybe the way we’re bent over creates a true illusion (since our bellies do tend to vanish when we stand up straight).

Or maybe, just maybe, all cyclists are extraterrestrials.

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What Shouldn't Cyclists Eat?

I recently blogged about what cyclists eat when training for long races.  What I didn’t get into was whether any food or drink is off-limits to cyclists.  So, here goes.

First of all, the pros eat differently from amateurs.  Pro cyclists really watch their weight, because being anything other than freakishly emaciated disrupts the absurd power/weight ratio that makes them competitive.  That said, their diet isn’t exactly restrictive.  As reported in cyclingnews, world champion Mark Cavendish decided this year to trim down for the Olympics:   “I’ve stopped candy, soft drinks and ready meals.” 

It’s also worth pointing out differences between the Europeans and Americans.  I understand they eat a lot of horse meat over there.  Much of the Euro approach strikes Americans as unscientific, being based on tradition and mythology.  For example, in the 1980s the French castigated Greg LeMond for having the audacity to eat ice cream—which was obviously terribly detrimental to his fitness—during the Tour de France, especially while he was in the lead.  To the French, LeMond’s decadence was an insult to the yellow jersey.  At the time, I figured, “Heck, LeMond is burning a lot of calories, he can get away with it.”  After all, I’d watched plenty of Coors Classic racers in Boulder strolling along the outdoor mall eating ice cream.

As it turns out, LeMond’s ice cream wasn’t just a treat.  I found this out in summer of 2000 when I happened to encounter him at the Nevada City Bicycle Classic, where we were both spectators.  It was either my birthday or his—we’re off by just a day—so he bought me an ice cream.  I reminded him of the flak he’d taken during that Tour for his ice cream indulgence, and he said, very seriously, “That wasn’t an indulgence, that was crucial.  When you’re racing at that level you’ve got to replace the calories.”  It turns out ice cream is an excellent sports recovery food:  plenty of protein and much-needed calcium.

My friend John, who stepped up his training this year in anticipation of the Everest Challenge, told me recently, “These days I eat massive amounts of ice cream.  If I do a good ride, I’ll eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (about 1200 calories), guilt free!  Heck, I eat that much ice cream even on days when I don't ride!  But I weigh less now than I have in decades.” 

So ... is diet really “anything goes” for us freedom-loving American cyclists?  Well, as I was reminded quite recently:  no. 

Last Friday, I did a double-Diablo (digging myself into a deep calorie deficit), and then spent Saturday picnicking at a winery in Sonoma with a bunch of old cycling friends from SoCal.  While training for the Everest Challenge I don’t drink any alcohol—I figure my liver is working hard enough as it is restoring muscle glycogen—but I made an exception and had a teensy bit of wine.  More problematic were the lack of water (they were selling it, bottled, and I’m cheap) and the big bag of chips and other junk I ate all day.  My plan was to meet up with other friends in the area and go out for a giant Italian dinner to true up my stomach.  Instead, my friends served dinner at their house.  It was take-out dim sum.

Now, I don’t want to complain.  I love dim sum and my hosts bought tons of it, being familiar with my oversized appetite.  Meanwhile, I teach my kids to eat whatever they’re served and I have to lead by example.  Plus, it was delicious.  It must be said, however, that dim sum is no way to carbo-load.  By the time you’ve eaten three or four thousand calories of it, you’ve taken on a ton of salt and grease.   By the time we’d driven home from the wine country, my normally invincible stomach was in turmoil.

I looked in the bathroom mirror:  a disturbing, and yet fascinating, sight.  I could see my ribs (being a cyclist, after all) but also this crazy sphere of bloat pushing out over my waistband, like I was a boa constrictor who swallowed a soccer ball.  In all my years of overeating I’ve never seen anything like it.  All night I was up chugging water, tossing, turning, roiling.  At 4 o’clock on Sunday morning I couldn’t be in bed any longer.  I got up and prepared for my ride:  another double-Diablo.

Guess what?  I didn’t feel so hot.  Actually, I was miserable from the first pedal stroke and it got worse from there.  I thought about just going home—but I’d feel lousy there, too, so what was the point?  I met up with my friends and clung desperately to the back of the group all the way to the base of Mount Diablo.  Once the climb started, I got dropped so abruptly I didn’t even have a chance to tell them not to bother waiting at the top.  My stomach—a stalwart ally, the linchpin of my cycling ability—was livid to have been so abused.  As the climb dragged on, my system exorcised most of the evil, but my energy stores were empty, closed, all boarded up.

I ended up doing both Diablo assaults alone.  Many times I thought of cutting the ride short.  After all, each climb was optional.  Heck, the whole ride was optional—in fact, the whole sport is optional!  But I didn’t quit, because here was an opportunity to turn this poor dietary choice into a positive.  If I could stave off despair and continue pedaling under such duress, for no good reason, I’d give my psychological mettle a real test in advance of the big race.  The Everest Challenge is grueling, sure, but at least I won’t be riding it on rice flour and fatty pork alone.

After the ride I spent a good while lying on the living room floor.  I slept really well that night.  Once again, I dreamed of food:  I’m at my daughter’s soccer game coveting the snack somebody’s mom brought, which is a large bowl of cooked lentils.  “Could I have some now?” I beg.  “No!” the soccer mom replies.  “You can’t have any now or later!  It’s for the kids!”