The Search For Enlightenment

It’s exactly six months since the start of my dieting and cycling regime and I’m pleased to be able to claim a degree of success. On May 1st I weighed in at exactly 100kg, 15st 11lb in old money or 220lbs.

I knew I had put on weight, but seeing those figures was the short sharp shock I needed to do something about it. So here we are six months, or 185 days later, I’m down to 81.7kg, 12st 12lb or 180lbs and I’m feeling a whole lot better for it.

It’s been a long ride, literally at times, but over the last week I’ve changed the way I’m doing things. I was limiting my calorific intake to around 1500kcals per day, about 1000kcals lower than the recommended amount for a man, and basically slowly starving myself, albeit via a carefully controlled method.

At the same time, as you will have read, I’ve been getting out on my bike a lot over the summer, averaging around 500km per month, and so burning off yet more calories. But my body, and my mind to a lesser extent, decided that they had had enough it it.

Out bodies are really smart. They know how to look after us better than we know ourselves. So having allowed me to lose the excess weight I was carrying, my body decided, that not having enough calories on a daily basis, it would take over and stop me losing any more, and my weight has bounced up and down for a while

Our western diets are packed with calories, mainly from processed sugars and fats, particularly the fructose sugars that are fermented from waste corn and maize and then added to everything from soft drinks to cereals, bread to ready meals. We are eating it all the time, whether we realise or not.

Now I have been a vegetarian for a long time now, so deciding to move to a high carb raw vegan diet (HCRV) is not much of a change for me, though it does mean that I won’t be eating cheese, drinking milk or munching on roast vegetables if there was any oil involved.

Basically, I’m going to be living on fruit, vegetables, rice and corn pasta from now on. I’m looking at it as a life change rather than a diet, as it’s something that is sustainable and, in the long run, will be a far healthier way to live.

It’s very early days yet, I only made the change a few days ago, but it’s already having an effect. Not only has my weight started to drop again, even though I haven’t been able to get out on the bike very much in all this wind and rain, but my body fat is reducing too, and that is more important in the long run.

The determination to keep going is something people have mentioned over the months, but the alternative of quitting and going back to my clinically obese self is not an option. I would like to say that I’ve cheated a bit, my faith and chanting has provided an inner strength and will continue to do so, but it’s open to anyone, so it’s not cheating really.

With the festive season fast approaching, it will be interesting to see what challenges that presents, but the effort continues and it will be interesting to see where I am in another six months.