[Quasi-] South Beach Diet - Part II

Introduction

In this follow-up to my last South Beach[-ish] post, I offer reports from the trenches (my brother’s and mine); some arcana about glycemic index and glycemic load; the good news about the cool food you can still eat with this approach; some responses to a commenter on my last post; and the truth about alcohol. (I know that last bit implies that somebody has been lying about alcohol, and really nobody has, but I had to throw that in to bait you. Along those lines I will now include this phrase—what your doctor doesn’t want you to know about losing weight—because that seems a popular way to draw people in as well. Also, this weird little trick that helps you lose half your body weight in 48 hours!)

The trenches

Gosh, what a totally irresponsible metaphor “the trenches” is. Of course this is nothing like battle or real hardship of any kind. Feeling like you ought to lose weight is a real luxury, when almost 800 million people on this planet are malnourished. “I’m just not as svelte as I was in college!” Oh, boo-hoo!

Do you hate me yet? Good, good. Anybody who is doing well on a diet (or better yet, a new eating approach that is realistic for long-term benefit) ought to be hated at least a little. I love this New Yorker cartoon where two women are at the café at their tennis club and one announces, “I’ve only been gluten-free for a week, but I’m already really annoying.” (No, I’m not going to talk about gluten in this post. That’s a whole topic of its own. Suffice to say I myself never met a glutenous mass I didn’t like.)

So far, in the eighteen days I’ve been on this diet, I’ve lost nine pounds. That’s not so bad, especially because I’ve been cheating a bit. If I did Phase 1 (see my previous post if you haven’t already), I’m sure I’d see more results. My brother, in the same time span, has lost about six pounds. He’s not doing Phase 1 either … and in fact, he’s cheating regularly because one of his kids has discovered baking and is thrusting lemon bars, cream puffs, banana bread, and cobbler at him. Believe me, I had a great time ribbing him about that. At least he’s honest with his food log, and is trying to be good (“1.5 small blueberry cobbler pieces … two small cookies … very thin slice fudge…”). Of course this is the time of year when everybody becomes a glutton, but that’s no excuse for eating whatever junk you’re offered. I e-mailed Bryan, “Do we need to get you a sign that says, ‘Please do not feed the human ... when he is given people food, his nutrition is impaired and he loses interest in hunting’?”

It is almost impossible to have dessert and be on a South Beach(-esque) program at the same time. Not entirely impossible, though:

A plum can be nice and sweet, but still good for you.  I think that’s mascarpone and mint leaves below it.

My wife is doing well on quasi-South-Beach, especially in her main goal of keeping me honest. Here is a sample of our joint food journal, from the first day back on the plan:

The first thing you’ll notice is how messy this journal is. My brother’s journal is neatly typed and available online for me to peek at whenever I want, but I’ll bet it’s not quite as complete. A paper journal that lives in the kitchen doesn’t miss a thing. The second thing you’ll notice in the above snapshot is that my wife is using the “smiley face” technique of reinforcing dietary (and exercise) principles. This is probably healthier than my shame-and-fear-based system.

Another quick note: it can be helpful to monitor body fat if your scale supports it, but such measurements are probably not very accurate. That looks a bit like 16.8% above but it actually says 11.8%. Whatever my body fat percentage really is, I expect that number to go down as I continue my South Beach(-esque) effort.

You’ll find a recipe lurking in my entry, for Mexican(-ish) rice. Here’s what you do: glug some olive oil in a pan, dice a whole onion and simmer it a while, then add some cooked, cut-up meat. I used leftover turkey white-meat from Thanksgiving because a) white meat, aka breast meat, is really good for you, and b) I hate it. (My favorite part of the bird is the skin.) Frying up the meat makes it way tastier—it’s worth the oil, I think. I shake a bunch of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic on there and a bunch of ground cumin, which is like magic. I sear that mixture on high heat, then throw in a can of stewed tomatoes. I simmer that a bit, then throw in cooked rice. I use brown rice because it’s better for you—it has almost six times the fiber of white rice. (White rice is useless. Don’t eat it. I used it with this batch because it was all I could find.)

I have a burrito practically every day made with beans, this rice, cheese (I don’t skimp on this, actually), and really good salsa. Pound for pound I think the salsa I get is more expensive than heroin, but it’s much better for you. These burritos rock. The deal is, when you put rice and beans together, you get a complete protein. (Click here for details.) Also, the fiber in beans, helped out by the cheese and by the bran in the brown rice, help that burrito burn slowly. That’s good because it means you won’t snack.

Also, because a burrito is a modular food, you can control the size and thus your intake. I either use a soft-taco size tortilla or half a regular tortilla. That’s a big enough burrito even for a big guy like me who works out a lot. Of course, the flour tortilla is complete crap, nutritionally. But what good is a diet that makes you want to kill yourself? Whole wheat tortillas should be banned.

Note, in the journal snapshot, my wife’s apple, raisins, and blueberries, and the zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes we both had with dinner. Of course we should have had more vegetables (we were just easing into this South Beach thing). Note also the peanut butter. Sure, it’s pretty caloric (as a commenter on my last post pointed out) but it greatly helps with a feeling of satiety. This is crucial. If you try to cut down on calories without addressing satiety you’re going to be miserable. The point here is to reduce calories while still feeling satisfied. Hard boiled eggs are also good for satiety. I eat one of them then and I’m basically in no mood to eat for many hours.

How can we tell what foods will burn slowly?

Foods burn slowly according to how hard they are to digest. Obviously. Fiber slows down digestion, so it’s great. Meat also burns more slowly. I think cheese does too (and I’m not going to fact-check that because if there’s anything bad about cheese, I don’t want to know). What’s really cool is that slow-burning foods can actually slow down digestion of fast-burning foods consumed in the same meal. So the meat and beans in your burrito make the tortilla burn more slowly. That’s why when you eat a big burrito at a taqueria you don’t need to eat again for like four days. (Damn, I just drooled on my laptop.)

Here is one of my typical burritos. You can see a bit of cilantro creeping out the front. This will keep me going all the way until dinner, even on days that I work out.

There’s a numeric scale that describes how slowly a carbohydrate source will burn. It’s called the glycemic index (click here for details). It goes from 1 to 100. Anything over 50 is bad. Anything over 70 is really bad. You can download charts from the Internet. The digestive process, it turns out, is actually pretty mechanical. Chewy stuff takes longer and delivers its energy more gradually. (This is why I allow myself to eat gristle even when I’m trying to lose weight.)

Interestingly, the glycemic index (GI) of spaghetti is 46 (not very good), but the GI of al dente fettuccine is only 32. This isn’t too bad except that it’s impossible not to overeat with pasta ... a bite or two in, your eyes roll up into the back of your head and you abandon all pretense of self-control. You tell yourself things like “They’re just love handles!” and “Fat people are funnier, like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill!” and “I would look great in a double-breasted suit!” and “I can do this, I’m an athlete!” And that’s just your average joe. Pasta is especially dangerous if you have “baggage” like I do, such as my teenage tradition of eating all-you-can-eat pasta—usually 5 or 6 plates at a sitting—once a week for years.

But consistency isn’t everything. What makes food choices a bit more complicated is that it can be hard to predict how caloric a food is. Soba noodles, for example, are made of buckwheat flour, which is somehow relatively lo-cal. Buckwheat is not really wheat ... it’s a grass. No, wait, I just fact-checked and it’s not a grass. It’s a “pseudocereal,” related to quinoa, sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb. (What is knotweed? I don’t know, but it’s probably like knothead, and you are what you eat, so be careful!) One great thing about buckwheat soba noodles is that  they have one calorie per gram, which makes it easy to measure your intake, plus that’s 32% fewer calories than semolina noodles.

The other good news is that the Huffington Post calls buckwheat “one of the healthiest foods you’re not eating.” This statement is arch and snotty, and Hufffpost is hip and modern, so you can see buckwheat has all kinds of cred. The bad news is that buckwheat soba noodles have a glycemic index of 59, which is on the not-so-good end of the spectrum. (Still way better than a baked potato at 111.) You know those so-called “glass” noodles? They’re made of sweet potatoes and have a GI of 39-45. And they confer the same groovy Asian-ness that soba do. So they’re a better choice.

So if glycemic index isn’t everything—due to variances in how caloric one substance is over another—what else do we need to consider? Well, for what it’s worth, there’s a separate scale called glycemic load. This scale, based on some formula the food people have devised, factors in the number of calories. These numbers don’t fall in such a nice range as GI, but suffice to say anything over 20 is bad, and single-digit numbers are the best. (Again, you can download charts online.)

For example, watermelon (as you might guess) has a high GI: 72, to be precise. This would be a good food for somebody with no teeth left. But we can have all we want, because it’s practically bereft of calories. Its glycemic load is just 4. Have at it!

Prunes have a nice low GI (29) but they’re also pretty sweet, so their load is 10 (which is still rather good). Carrots have a load of 3.5, which makes them a great “closer”—that food that is still sitting in a bowl on the table after you’ve eaten your little portion of indulgent goodness and are fantasizing about having seconds. After you munch down a few carrot sticks you might decide you’re not actually that hungry, per se ... maybe you were going to eat out of boredom but now you’re bored of the food itself. Congratulations! You’re going to dream about food all night and wake up ready to go toe-to-toe with that bathroom scale!

Glycemic load isn’t everything, but it does help us put certain foods in perspective. For example, the person who commented on my last post needs to be corrected. She said to avoid nuts because “they’re ‘healthy fat’ but a handful of nuts has, like 800 calories.” I think she was exaggerating for comic effect; it’s actually more like 170 calories. Still a lot, but the glycemic load of peanuts is a mere 1. That’s fricking amazing. No wonder they’re so satisfying. Last Saturday I rode my bike 70 miles, with 6,000 feet of climbing, but (after my modest glycogen window snack, a cup of honey-sweetened yogurt and a weird persimmon cookie), I just wasn’t that hungry so my lunch was just two handfuls of peanuts and 4 or 5 prunes. (When your body isn’t all fouled up by lots of sugary calories, it can burn fat like a motherfrockle. This is why distance athletes—whose bodies get especially good at this—are so freaking thin.)

So, if we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the foods we love, we just need to work on portion control, which is doable if for every part starchy, yummy goodness you make yourself plow through two parts bulky, low-glycemic-load vegetables. Cabbage is great for that. Yeah, it’s not the tastiest stuff, but that’s kind of the point. After eating a bunch of it you’re asking, “Could I be full?” rather than “Could I push past the pain and eat even more?” (Raw cabbage, I’ll concede, is almost inedible, except perhaps on a fish taco. Cabbage is better cooked, and the smell of cooking cabbage helps you lose your appetite—a win/win!)

If we’re going to be realistic here, napa cabbage is more charismatic than regular. It doesn’t have much flavor, but bulks foods out nicely (instead of bulking us out not-nicely). A cup of nappa cabbage has just 13 calories. It’s like the perfect thing to stuff yourself with. Best of all, you can spell it with either one “p” or two ... your choice! (I mixed and matched here, just to be more Google-query-friendly.) I have actually put nappa cabbage in a burrito, just to give it that realistic heft you get at taquerias. You wanna know the glycemic load of cabbage? It’s an infinitesimal 0.58! Amazing!

So ... what can I still eat while South-Beaching it?

The good news is, you can still eat anything with this approach, once you’re in phase 3 ... at least, the way I do it (and it’s working pretty well). But you can’t eat everything. That is, you need to figure out a few indulgent, non-South-Beach foods you just can’t live without, and keep eating them—but only occasionally, as a treat, and in small quantities with gobs of vegetables on the side. Other starchy or sweet foods will just have to go—you gotta choose your battles. So as much as I go on about pasta being too irresistible to mess with, I know I can never totally give it up. But if I’m going to occasionally submit to it, I better be pretty strict about desserts, white bread (like sourdough and baguettes, which I adore), and pretty much all baked goods. Oh, and I barely get to have pizza. Maybe this summer I’ll start riding Mount Diablo every weekend like I used to, and can cheat more.

But drinking ... that’s another matter.

What can I drink?

I’ll make this simple: don’t drink anything that isn’t a) water, or b) a drug delivery mechanism. Juice is all the sugar from fruit and none of the fiber so unless you’re actually trying to get fat, just skip it. If you have a reasonably balanced diet (such as South Beach) you’re getting plenty of vitamins without needing any juice. (“Vitamin water,” meanwhile, is sugar-water for morons.) Soda should be banned, but with a special dispensation for endurance athletes.

A commenter on my last post advised that you can “add splenda to all sorts of liquids and you can guzzle diet sodas.” I totally disagree. Diet soda confuses your body and triggers an insulin response, meanwhile dulling our senses to naturally sweet food, leading to the abuse of other sweets, according to this article and others. Splenda (sucralose) has long been thought safe, but recent studies (click here) link it to changes in intestinal microbes, altered glucose and insulin levels, and possibly cancer. Sure, we could debate the veracity of these studies, but why bother? Why defend chemicals designed to fool Mother Nature, just for the sake of justifying unsophisticated pleasures? If you have a constant craving for sweet drinks, you should try to figure out why. Shouldn’t you have cast off that childish fixation long ago?

Coffee (without cream or sugar) is completely fine. Drink up. Caffeine can even be an appetite suppressant, but be careful ... don’t be tempted to skip meals (which confuses your body, fouls up your energy levels, and creates diet-jeopardizing cravings). I don’t consider coffee a food, because it’s practically calorie-free. I think of it as a drug (and a very safe, useful one).

Alcohol is also, to my mind, also more of a drug than a food. But it’s a whole different deal from coffee because alcoholic beverages are highly caloric, in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol they contain (so don’t bother trying to count the carbs in this or that beer). And calories are only part of the problem. Because alcohol is a toxin, when you drink your body shuts down its normal metabolic processes (like burning fat) until it’s dealt with the alcohol. Meanwhile, mixed drinks often involve sugary mixers or Coke, and drinking lowers your inhibitions so you might lose some of the discipline you’ve been trying to have about your eating. (Click here and here for details.)

(You think it was possible to resist that fourth helping of fries after drinking Belgian beer? It was not, nor was it possible to resist dipping the fries in mayo, Euro-style. But that was a special occasion.)

It kills me that there’s a whole website, Get Drunk Not Fat, dedicated to worrying about the number of carbs or other fillers in alcoholic beverages, when moderation alone is the way forward.

Does all this mean you shouldn’t drink at all when trying to lose weight? I don’t think so. Statistically, moderate drinkers are less likely to be overweight than teetotalers. Meanwhile, alcohol can be a great way to hide from your problems. (That was a joke.) The question of whether or not to drink should certainly involve not gaining weight, but weight is only one component of this bigger lifestyle choice. I think that where this South Beach[-esque] dietary approach is concerned, drinking should be treated like one of those carefully selected indulgences you might decide to allow yourself from time to time. But you better not allow too many of these indulgences, and you better indulge sparingly, if you’re serious about losing weight.

The result so far

Today my wife said to me, “You’re starting to get gaunt. You’re starting to look like a bike racer again.” This isn’t really a compliment. In fact, it’s almost a warning. I think the subtext was something like, “Watch yourself ... don’t do too good a job with this South Beach thing.” I’m happy to report that if things continue on this trend, I’ll be around or below 170 pounds for the hill climb bike race I have planned for January 1. Following that, I might just take my eating habits back in a more northerly direction, secure in the knowledge that I’m not at risk of becoming the next Humpty Dumpty.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Ride Report - 2014 Tour of California Mount Diablo Stage

Introduction

This tale, written for my bike club pals but also for you and your closest confidants, concerns a very special journey up Mount Diablo to watch real professional cyclists tackle the “queen stage” of the Tour of California.

Due to the soporific effect of hackneyed phrases like “chess game on wheels,” “burned too many of their/my matches,” “a picture of pain,” “riding like a man possessed,” and “turning himself/myself inside out,” I will not describe the riding (mine or the racers’) in much detail, but—in keeping with my club’s fine literary tradition—will focus mainly on the food.

Short version 

• Breakfast #1:  Rigatoni alla Bolognese with zested Parmesan
• Breakfast #2:  Blueberry pancakes, real maple syrup, sausage, and bacon (chez Ian)
• Lunch:  Three bottles Cytomax, fruit punch flavor/color; two Powerbar gels, 1X caffeine
• Glycogen-window Treats:  organic strawberries, berry yogurt, vanilla Greek yogurt, dried apricots, chocolate chips, fruit popsicle, half a Dos Equis Special Lager, one Heineken
• Dinner:  Homemade spinach-and-meat lasagne, Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera, bottomless glass of water
• Ride report:  Epic pass
• Race report (witnessed):  Professional racers are really fast, and sometimes funny

Long version

Two words into the short version of this tale, I may have already ruffled some feathers:  Ian, who hosted a glorious breakfast for our group, must be wondering why anybody, even a glutton like me, would have a pre-breakfast.  After all, in an e-mail to the group he’d written, “I will of course be making a separate batch just for Dana.”  So it’s not like I had to worry about the food running out.  Besides, as I mentioned in my 2012 Tour of California Mount Diablo report, I don’t normally eat breakfast at all.  So:  why two breakfasts?  Well, it’s complicated.

First, there was the matter of the Bolognese left over from Mother’s Day, when I spent four hours making a triple-batch as a peace offering after a) having neglected to make any restaurant reservations, and b) having suggested to my wife a restaurant that wouldn’t be packed on Mother’s Day (i.e., Hooters).  Now, if you’ve ever had a proper Bolognese (i.e., one that is a solid once refrigerated), you know that this sauce is almost impossible to resist under any circumstances, even with the knowledge of an imminent pancake breakfast.  Even when bacon is involved.

Second, there was the personal challenge of seeing if I could heat up some leftovers for my daughter’s thermos, to make her the most stoked kid at her entire school, without eating any of it myself.  You know those well-trained dogs that can balance a dog biscuit on their snout without eating it until given the go-ahead from their owner?  I aspired to match that level of pointless discipline.  Alas, I ended up nuking more than would fit in the thermos, so I had no choice but to eat the rest, which—though being only perhaps a cup of food—was the equivalent of a good-sized meal, because my non-heart-healthy Bolognese is the second most caloric food on Earth.  (First place is eggnog.)

What is “zested Parmesan,” you might ask?  It’s Parmesan grated with a zester (see above photo) so it melts like snowflakes on your pasta.

The plan was for me to meet Sean and Ryan at the coffee shop, and then we’d ride to Lafayette to meet Craig, who knew the way to Ian’s.  Well, I was so late getting to the coffee shop, I got angry voice-mails on both my mobile and home phones.  I didn’t want to add insult to injury so I didn’t even explain myself at the time.  So I will now.

Dana’s Top Ten Reasons for Quasi-Flakage on Tuesday 

1. Spent too much time photographing rigatoni alla Bolognese
2. Could only find Water Babies sunscreen from 2002 and didn’t want to end up with Moroccan-leather-red skin
3. Having eventually found Sport Performance SPF 50 sunscreen, took too long applying it to hairy legs
4. Took forever finding SPF 50 lip balm but refused to endure burnt lips yet again
5. Decided at last minute to find darker sunglasses
6. “Shut up, bowels!”
7. Being frazzled by already running late, struggled with recently-replaced Boa dials on my cycling shoes, because both shoes now (oddly) have right-hand dials so left-shoe dials are backwards
8. Had to charge camera battery and phone to hold my own against any Millennials I might encounter en route
9. Took too long indulging my daughter in a long goodbye (her cuteness = entrapment)
10. Didn’t allow for so much traffic, especially when riding past junior high school right when all the able-bodied students were being dropped off by their overprotective parent/chauffeurs

I was actually only six minutes late to the coffee shop, but Sean and Ryan seemed pretty stressed.  I guess that’s because I alone knew how to get to the trefpunt, and I alone knew what “trefpunt” meant.  (In English it’s “rendezvous.”  Wait.  French.  Whatever.)  So after I assured them we had plenty of time, we moseyed socially along until we actually were running late, so then we got to do some real hammering.  Man, I love real hammering, especially on the flats, because I never do anything but climb and seldom have anybody to draft.  We ended up reaching the trefpunt six minutes late, which was fine because Craig was running late himself.  We rolled in to Ian’s unfashionably early.  It was already getting hot.

Ian had the blueberry pancakes already made and keeping warm in the oven while he cooked the bacon and sausages.  Ian is from England, and—knowing what I know about the superior bacon over there—I was very impressed that, while he did comment on the high fat content of American bacon, he did so non-pejoratively.  Perhaps he knew I’d be blogging about this and was worried about the NSA questioning his loyalty.  I think this NSA flap has frightened all of us.  (Note to NSA readers:  when I say “flap” I’m not saying it’s your fault.  Thank you for keeping us safe!)

Due to Ian’s brilliant pancake breakfast concept I changed my fueling strategy radically.  That is, I didn’t bother bringing any food on the ride, foregoing the sandwiches etc. I’d schlepped in a backpack last year.  You might think this is foolish since pancakes have a pretty high glycemic index (i.e., they burn rapidly), so my blood sugar could crash after just a couple of hours.  But bacon and sausage, being high in the right kind of fat (i.e., the chewy kind) have a very low glycemic index.  In fact, gristle probably has a G.I. of about 1.  And low-G.I. foods slow down your burning of high-G.I. foods.  This is why a big carnitas burrito obviates the need to eat for at least twelve hours.  Dang it, I’m making myself hungry here!  Anyway, I tried to keep track of the number of sausages I ate, but could not (though it was at least ten).  Ditto the bacon and hotcakes.

I tried to spam that last photo out to all my followers on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and it probably would have worked fine except I decided to get fancy.  I figured, hey, Ian’s great food will probably get me a whole bunch of Likes, but couldn’t I get even more Likes with a really nice stock Getty image of a visually perfect stack of pancakes?  Alas, between my fingers being greasy from the bacon, my smartphone touch-screen being fogged up, and my skills being rather poor to begin with, all I managed to do was send the photo to my Paypal account, which they’ve now frozen.

That whole last paragraph?  Yep—pure fiction.  I’m not on social media, beyond this blog.

So, yeah, no lunch needed after that bodacious spread.  Of course, not bringing a backpack meant I couldn’t bring a hat or sandals for our long wait, on the mountain, for the racers.  But Ian, who is apparently going for Man Of The Year, chucked some extras in his pack for me.  (If I hadn’t taken my boys out of the game, I’d try for a son and name him Ian.)

The ride was very hot—temperatures in the 90s by the time we left Ian’s—but not all that hard due to our conversational pace.  Full disclosure:  I was technically blood-doping for this ride.  Last week I donated blood, which normally is okay from a sporting perspective, but in this case it was platelets and plasma, so I got my red cells back.  Since having blood return to my body is technically a transfusion, I guess I was technically in breach of the rules and I really wonder what my blood passport would look like if the UCI did one for me.  But I’m not going to be one of those riders who, when finally admitting guilt, takes down a lot of other guys with me.  So from this point forward all the names of my fellow biker/spectators will be redacted in my report, following the example of the USADA rider affidavits.  Otherwise you might think them complicit in my transgression.

We headed up North Gate road, which is the harder approach of Mount Diablo, just so we could lord that over the racers later.  On the lower slopes my bike computer registered 103 degrees Fahrenheit.  It’s a good thing nobody asked me to spell “Fahrenheit” because my brain was being cooked.  We chatted the whole way up, of course.  [Spectator 3] extolled the virtues of base layers, because they hide his massive pelt of chest hair (which frightens other men and lures in women, creating marital friction) and when I tried to respond my poor brain got stuck.  I started out, “Your chest hair makes Austin Powers look like—” but here I couldn’t come up with the name of Austin Powers’ hairless cat.  Fortunately, some random cyclist within earshot called out, “Mr. Bigglesworth,” thus saving me from acute embarrassment.  (Actually, [Spectator 2] and [Spectator 3] had probably stopped listening to me anyway.)

That wasn’t the only time a complete stranger joined our conversation.  Another time, we were trying to remember at what elevation the officials closed the road to VUPs (Very Unimportant People), and someone helpfully said, “It’s at 3,848 feet.”  Wait, did I just say “helpfully”?  Well, I lied.  This comment wasn’t that helpful because that’s the elevation of the summit, as we already knew, not the info we actually needed.  But it was very nice of the fellow to try to help and I wish him well.

We finally found a great viewing spot a little past the 3-KM-To-Go banner.  There were a few trees, and though people were already massed below them, the gradual setting of the sun would thrust that shadow in our direction (as [Spectator 2] cleverly realized).  We’d refilled our bottles at around the halfway point but were still running pretty low.  I asked if I’d get lice from the loaner hat, and its owner said, “That hat hasn’t been worn since the Tour of California Mount Diablo stage last year.” 

Here we are maxin’ out while the racers made their advance toward the mountain.

Look at the big “E” on my jersey.  See that insect?  It’s an earwig.  There were flying earwigs all over the place up there, and they bit!  Not just “bit” as in “man, that totally bites!” but as in, they kept actually biting us.  So we had to keep brushing them off each other, sometimes a bit violently.  At one point [Spectator 5] told me, “There’s one on your groin but you’re on your own.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, two more pals, [Spectator 4] and [Spectator 5] arrived, separately, one having dropped the other en route.  [Spectator 5] rode all the way from San Jose, even though he has a newborn at home.  The fathers among us chastised him at length.  “I did a whole load of dishes before I left!” he protested.  [Spectator 4] said, “Look , did you have an episiotomy?  No?  Well then shut the hell up.”  I tried to explain to [Spectator 5] that housework and other methods of helping out are not fungible, but my sun-baked brain couldn’t come up with “fungible” so it took a lot more words to convey that you can’t just bank goodwill by doing housework in advance.  You have to hang around the house in case your wife says, “Please take your shrieking demon-infant away from me before I do something I regret.”

Nobody was giving out popsicles or drinks this year, but a guy did hand up some official Tour of California gas-station-grade sunglasses, and a woman gave us miniature Champion Systems jerseys.  You may not know this, but it’s against the law for a blogger to praise a consumer product if he received any perk from its manufacturer.  So it would be illegal for me to say anything nice about Champion Systems products.  That’s okay, though, because I already had my say on the topic of their dangerously undersized clothing.  Anyway, it was nice of them to give handouts, and it was in a good-natured spirit that  [Spectator 3] quipped (once the CrampSys rep was out of earshot), “Is that their size medium?”

At least half a dozen big vans drove by, toward the summit, with absolutely nobody in them.  I’m sure there was a point to this but I’ll be damned if I know what it was.  And damned if I don’t.

After a very long wait in the open-air sauna, we finally saw the official vehicles, then some motos, and  the leader of the race.  We had no idea who he was but it didn’t matter.  Half a dozen seconds later came the lead group, with Sir Bradley Wiggins right on the front.  Despite setting a blistering pace, Wiggo looked not only more comfortable than we had pedaling our casual way up the mountain, but more comfortable than we felt just watching the race.  I think he was breathing only through his nose.  Note to self:  abandon tentative plan to turn pro.

The peloton was in pieces.  Lone riders came by here and there, and small and large groups.  Tom Danielson rode by, well off the back, and [Spectator 4] yelled, “Hang in there, Tom!  I know it’s not easy when you’re clean!”  Indeed, he did look a lot, uh, cleaner than in past years.  Then [Spectator 4] set up an empty water bottle with a $5 bill sticking out the top, as an ad hoc crowd prime.  If the cyclingnews start list is correct, it was the Dutch rider Danny Van Poppel who wheel-thwacked the bottle off the road, to our great delight.

The final racers trickled by, then the broom wagon, and then the show was over and we made our way down the mountain.  It wasn’t nearly as clogged with biker-spectators as last year, perhaps due to the heat.  I rode hard all the way home, part of the time with [Spectator 2] and [Spectator 3], and though I didn’t tackle my beloved Lomas Cantadas (the heat was still in the upper 90s and it had been a long day) I did feel a moment of pride when I made it over the so-called “I hate pain” hill (on Wildcat Canyon Road, by the Brazil Building) in the big chainring.  It was only a moment of pride, though, because then I remembered that my so-called “big ring” is actually only a 50-tooth because, uh, well, I’m riding a compact these days.

When I got home I presented the sunglasses and micro-jersey to my daughters, and instantly achieved hero status.  Lindsay knew right away what to do with the jersey.

The jersey could use some tailoring but I think Ken looks great in it.  All those Barbies are going to be fighting over him!  Note how closely he’s shaved his legs.

I’ve already listed off my assortment of post-ride sugary snacks.  After those I did some cheese grating duty as my wife put the finishing touches on the aforementioned spinach-and-meat lasagne.  The Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera weren’t quite done yet so they came out as a second course.

What?  You haven’t heard of Brassica oleracea var. gemmifera?  Yeah, I’m using a code name there.  It’s a vegetable that is so unpopular among Alberts that its name must not be uttered.  My dad made an exception once, when he composed a bit of verse on the topic:  “It takes more than a muscled lout/ To make me eat a [Vegetable 1].”

Anyway, even that course was pretty tasty.  It was a great dinner after a great day, and my lips, for once, hadn’t even gotten sunburned.  Life is good!

South Beach Starch King

oooo

Introduction

I’ve been on the South Beach diet for almost a week now, and I’ve already dropped five pounds.  (If my fancy scale is to be believed, which it probably isn’t, my body fat is now 8.0%.)  If my goal here were the normal one (i.e., lose weight), I’d be making great progress.  But my only goal is actually to get off this diet, and gain back the five pounds.  This would seem to be a simple matter, but it’s not.

What brought about this state of affairs?  In this post I will explore the strange concept of secondhand dieting; the South Beach diet; the Starch King diet; and a few other diet-related subjects.

Secondhand dieting

A secondhand diet is where your spouse, who does most of the cooking, goes on a diet and prepares family dinners according to her new culinary palette.  Gone are the glorious lasagnes, fried chicken with heaps of mashed potatoes, and spaghetti alla puttanesca; now she’s serving steamed vegetables and poached fish.  Shared family dinners are important to you, and—not wanting to set a bad example for the kids—you cheerfully eat what you’re served.  Sometimes you sneak in a low-key post-dinner snack like a PBJ, and/or raid your kids’ leftover Hallowe’en candy, but just as often you get caught up in the post-meal machinery of the household and end up with but a fraction of your normal caloric intake.  Voilà!  You’re a secondhand dieter.

This is how I have found myself on the South Beach diet.  My wife Erin has started it up, in earnest, and has requested that I do my normal starch-bomb eating outside the home, at lunchtime.  That way I’m not testing her resolve with huge batches of pasta sitting around begging to be snitched from.  But I’ve had the flu for the last week and thus have scarcely left the house, so I’m leading a strangely pasta-free existence. 

Starch dreams

Since I started this diet, most nights I dream about glorious starchy food.  Two nights ago it was pizzas and pastries—kind strangers were handing them to me, one after another.  A couple nights before that I was woken up out of a deep slumber by the sound of my cough drop clattering to the hardwood floor:  I’d actually tried to bite something in my sleep.

And then, yesterday, I was talking on the phone idly watching the slide-show screen saver on my PC when I was suddenly struck dumb by this most tantalizing photo:

Just look at those damn fritjes.  Glorious.  Fries figured in to last night’s dream, my strangest starch dream yet.  In this one I came across my daughters and one of my nieces eating a big pile of “Lite Burrito,” a (fictitious) tortilla-less burrito from Burger King.  There were so many things wrong with that scenario I didn’t know where to start.  I was thinking of shutting down their party until I saw their side of fries, which I took for myself.  Burger King fries are the most tampered-with of all the fast food chains (the potatoes are coated in a starch batter before frying), but I ate them and they were good.  That’s right … dream on!

It hasn’t been easy going to bed kind of hungry and dreaming, and daydreaming, of food, but I can’t hold anything against Erin.  After all, I’m not exactly an innocent victim of this kind of situation.  For fifteen years I’ve been a bad influence on my wife, always wanting to cook (or wanting her to cook) rich, high-carb foods, or taking the family to some Mexican or Italian restaurant that serves huge portions.  When Erin and I were courting, we’d often go to Zachary’s and split a large stuffed deep-dish pizza that’s supposed to serve 4-5 people.  (I’d have five slices; she’d have three.)  When I cooked her a pasta dinner, I’d unthinkingly serve her up a cyclist-sized  portion, and she’d end up eating it.  As a result of my influence she quickly gained ten pounds, which she has now resolved to finally shed.

The South Beach diet

In high school, I decided (for no reason I can remember) to write my English class term paper on fad diets.  My research didn’t endear me to them, and over time my opinion hasn’t changed.  I hold particular contempt for the Atkins diet.  (I trust the opinion of the American Heart Association that Atkin’s own heart attack was caused by his diet, and I still buy into the USDA food pyramid, with carbs being the foundation.)  But the South Beach diet, despite its catchy name and widespread success, seems to be based on sound principles. 

As I understand it, the whole idea is to avoid the insulin overload you get from eating refined starches, that leads to inappropriate hunger and general overconsumption.  With South Beach, you eat foods with a low glycemic index—that is, foods that digest slowly.  For the first couple weeks on this diet you cut out all refined starches, as well as fruit and anything sweet, to sever your addiction to insulin-producing simple carbs.  Then in phase two you reintroduce carbs in the form of fruits, brown rice, and whole grain breads.  Then, when you’ve lost the weight you want and have overcome the habit of empty carbs, you are in “maintenance mode” and eat more or less normally (while avoiding certain unworthy foods).  At least in the edition of the South Beach book Erin has, beer is singled out as a particular evil, because it is alleged to contain maltose, which is a very simple sugar.  (It’s not hard to find this allegation vigorously disputed:  look here and here.)

Even in this first phase, the diet allows you all the carbs you want, with one important caveat:  they have to come from vegetables.  So dinner goes something like this:  you eat some London broil with mushrooms, with and a side of okra and squash.  After finishing a generous serving of okra, your jaws are so tired, and your palette so bored, that you just feel like stopping, so you clear the dishes and get on with your life.  As this behavior substitutes for getting unnecessary second and third helpings of something relatively unhealthy like macaroni and cheese (damn, I just drooled at the thought), you lose weight.

The Starch King diet

Historically I’ve been on what I’ve come to call the Starch King diet.  It’s not nearly as prescriptive as the South Beach diet, nor any other diet for that matter.  It consists of eating whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever quantities I want, with an emphasis on taqueria food (because it’s so tasty) and pasta (because I don’t know how to make my own taqueria food).  Here’s a sample pasta recipe:

Southwestern corn goo

Get the pasta water boiling.  Glug a bunch of olive oil in a hot pan and add diced onions.  Sizzle those awhile, then add two 17-oz. cans cream style corn.  Bring this to a boil and add a 7-oz. can of green chiles, diced.  Reduce the heat and boil this awhile to get rid of the excess water.  Boil the pasta (something long like linguine or spaghetti).  Grate a bunch of cheese into the corn goo:  cheddar, jack, mozzarella, whatever you got.  Drain the pasta and mix it in with the goo.  Eat it with salt and a little Crystal sauce.

(Notably, almost everything in this dish is illegal in at least the first phase of the South Beach diet.  On the plus side, it’s easy and tasty and kids love it.)

The Starch King diet is really easy, and it has always really worked—for me.  I suspect this has to do with all the cycling I do.  During an intense five-hour Mount Diablo ride, I’ll burn about 5,000 calories and take in about 1,000 in energy drink.  Some of that 4,000 calorie deficit comes from my stored muscle glycogen, but the rest comes from burning fat.  I doubt anybody burns fat as efficiently as a cyclist.  This is why I can (and routinely do) go eighteen or nineteen hours between (seriously huge) meals.  (I never eat breakfast, except socially.)

I can’t recommend this eating style to anybody else, though most of my cycling club pals are on this diet or something similar (e.g., Starch King With a Side of Bacon).

The South Beach experience

So far, I have to say that for Erin and me, the South Beach diet is actually not that hard to stick to.  Vegetables really do give the stomach a full feeling, and they are slow to digest so you don’t need to snack much.  The greatest hurdle is probably psychological.  I do feel hungry much of the time now, as does Erin, but hunger isn’t actually that bad a feeling, if you can get past the anxiety it produces.  I think we’re all hardwired to fear starvation, which is why hunger is such a powerful force.  Intellectualizing the experience and reminding myself that I won’t actually starve takes care of the fear, and the suffering is no worse than what I subject myself to on the bike.

The other thing I’ll say about the South Beach diet is that it’s interesting.  Erin and I have enjoyed many conversations about the diet itself; the strange phenomenon of refined starch consumption causing appetite; the strange sensation of being hungry and yet having a full stomach; and so on.  (I think of this dialog as payback for all the chatter Erin’s had to endure from me about bike parts, training, percent grades, and such over the years.)

Last night I was enjoying a New Belgium Mothership Wit ale, in a festive short-stemmed beer glass, and Erin approached with something like hostility.  “That beer is tempting me more than anything has so far,” she said severely.  Fortunately I have a (mostly useless) talent for chug-a-lugging, and I slammed  the beer down in about a second.  Thus marital strife has been avoided, and I’m one step closer to getting off this diet….