330 calories for the burger patty, plus another 10-15 or so for the tomato and onion. Say round it off at 350. I had two yesterday while we were at an outdoor event in a club my wife and I are members of.
I’ve said before that I’m not dieting in the last days before I start my trip. I am counting calories pretty strictly, though, and am keeping a detailed food and exercise log on an iOS app called MyFitnessPal [linkie].
My dietitian recommended it, and it has proved both easy to use and an invaluable tool. Free!- there is a premium version you get nagged every so often to buy, but it meets all my needs at the basic level. It even has a “Friend” feature- you are welcome to be a friend if you would like to follow my diet on the ride- my username is “davidedgren”.
So here’s what I’m doing pre-ride. I’m about two weeks in to doing nothing more than counting calories very strictly. I set a daily maximum of 2,000 calories and have only exceeded that once by a little bit in that two weeks. Most days I’m around 1,500. My exercise each day burns about 300 calories- you’ll see more about that in my post about the new bicycle shoes that is coming up. My goal is to start the trip as close to 350 pounds as I can get. I will weigh myself every Monday both before and during the ride, probably in the late afternoon. I will post the weekly results here, of course. So tomorrow we will see- stay tuned.
In the interest of gathering as much info as I can, I went early this week to a local place also recommended by my dietitian that has one of these fancy body mass index calculating scales. The process took a couple of seconds and involved standing on a large scale while holding an electrode grip in each hand. Doing this, plus lightening my wallet by $30, caused the following report to be generated.
Now I’m not going to whine about how I shouldn’t have eaten lunch before I got weighed or that I had my heaviest pair of pants on. My home scale is reading about 5-10 pounds/2.5-5 kilograms lighter than this weighing myself buck-naked. But I get the message. I could drop about 120 pounds/55 kilograms and be a lot more svelte than I am today. Not to mention healthy. We’ll see.
David Edgren
b2bbiketrip.com - A 2019 bike trip blog 
If you just wanted to see what readers around the web thought about the eating and evening exercise habits:
I like it. Bet you’re gonna eat a lot more than that while biking, but for now it’s sound.
There’s only so much weight you can drop in one month, so if I were you, maybe the bigger goal is to improve cycling performance in that time. It seems clear you’re doing quite a lot of that already, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and almost all people who aren’t already full time pro athletes can safely train a little harder.
I don’t know anything about bicycles, much less endurance runs across the country. But, I want to share some more general ideas that you might like to look into when your bike trip is over. High Intensity [Interval] Training has great proven fitness benefits. No idea if it’s the precise best thing for performing well on a thousands mile long bike trip. It is, though, better than straight endurance exercise for improving cardiovascular parameters, hormone profile, and body composition. It sends an unmistakeable signal to your body’s maintenance sytems that says, “HEY! I AM STILL USING THIS STUFF! AMP UP THE REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE!” For cycling, an example HIT routine would be: cycle at a super high ALL-OUT pace for 30-90 seconds. Then cycle slowly for 2-4 minutes and follow that bit of “rest” with another ALL-OUT stretch. You might repeat this around 5-10 times. It’s REALLY hard. It also stimulates your body into adaptation better than steady sustained pacing, and it preserves muscle tissue. Weightlifting, especially if it’s focused on the big lifts (squat, deadlift, benchpress, rowing), already naturally tends to fit this profile and you can do that too.
Also. It sounds like your weight loss and the bike trip are related goals (makes sense!). Whatever happens, the bike trip will end some day and you’ll still want habits to take care of the rest of the weight. I recommend switching to HIT and/or weightlifting. Notice above how HIT can still use cycling if you like that activity. Good thing about HIT is it makes your body burn fat even while you’re resting afterwards. Also, AFTER the bike trip, I suggest looking into Intermittent Fasting, where you usually skip eating for about 15+ hours at a time (although longer fasts are good too). A related protocol is to semi-fast, but only eat moderate amounts of food that are almost entirely fat. An example might be, if you’re fasting but instead of taking black coffee, you put an all-fat creamer (or something similar like butter or coconut oil) in the coffee. Turns out there aren’t a lot of foods that are almost entirely fat, but 90-100% dark chocolate will also do, if you like that.
BTW, long term weight goal to shoot for is to be under 210. It could certainly be achieved by some time in 2018, but if you go after it with the analysis and enthusiasm I see behind this blog post, you could also get there in 2017. But if you’re able to deadlift 2x your own body weight, then you earn a special pass to weigh more than 210.
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Wow, thanks! Excellent insights, and over the coming week I will be incorporating high intensity training periods into my daily exercise regimen. It also helps to know that my shoes aren’t going to kill my feet when I start ramping things up.
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I used to weigh 320. Now ~200. Getting diet under control was the first step. Went from eating burgers 4-5 times a week to 3-4 times a month. Eating salads nearly every day from nearly never. Now my cycling means I can eat more, or have a beer.
While you are cycling, start eating something after about an hour in. Carb heavy foods to replace the glycogen. Granola bars, fruit gels, even jelly beans. Try to ingest 200-400 calories per hour. You will be burning it at 500-700 per hour, so you should lose weight over time, but not hit the infamous “wall” or bonk that makes turning the pedals so hard.
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