A new lifestyle: Biking, hiking, and eating right

Hey, all! Back on January 1st, 2015 (just a month and a half ago), my dear friend Oji "Pedal Poppers" and I - Mason "Sprocket" decided to make some life changes. We didn't set out to make a New Year's Resolution; we just happened upon Joe Cross's Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead on Netflix one day before the new year. So, we watched it on a whim. We had no idea our lives were about to change. Having tried to change things many times over the years, but never having a good plan on how to do that, we identified with Joe and Phil in the documentary.

As a graduate student who sits around a lot, writing papers, reading journal articles, rewriting papers, reading more journal articles, and re-rewriting papers, I hadn't exercised much in recent years. Pedal Poppers was doing what I was doing, so we were both sizing out of the most common clothing sizes at department stores. I can't say we were nearly dead, but in our 40s, we were both fat and sick - the wheat was giving Pedal Poppers stomach and skin troubles. For me, the arthritis had already set in. At 300 pounds each, we may have been fun folks to have at a kegger and barbecue, or out on the lake in a boat, but otherwise, we were physically miserable (I'm the guy with the Yankees hat and my little chihuahua, Ziza. Pedal Poppers is the one sporting the Osh Kosh B'Gosh look).

For fun and relaxation, we gamed for hours, ate greasy burgers, fries, and pizzas (sometimes all in one night), and we didn't care much about what we were looking like. But in a fairly active college town, we were beginning to notice that we were unable to do a lot of what our friends were doing. We weren't able to go to the beautiful Oregon natural scenic areas that our friends visited while hiking or biking. Still enjoying a bike ride now and then, I broke two rims on my commuter bike, and blamed it on the bike when it was my weight that was causing the problem. When friends invited us on physical outings, like kayaking adventures, we wanted to go, but made excuses why we couldn't.

When you want to be viewed as an intelligent and active individual by friends, family, and colleagues, it's hard to admit that you somehow inadvertently allowed yourself to reach 300 pounds in adulthood while having once been very physically active.

So, Joe Cross taught us about juice fasting, but we knew on a graduate student budget that buying nothing but vegetables and fasting for a month might be difficult with work and school and might dip into the rest of our budget for housing costs, our dogs, and car payments. Produce is pricey! We wanted to juice, but we also hoped to change our outlook on food and health long term.

On January 1, 2015, after staying up all night talking about how we might go about eating better and living healthier, Pedal Poppers and I decided we should order the Juice Fountain by Breville (just like the one Joe Cross had others using in their kitchens). We looked up Dr. Fuhrman's website as well. We went to the produce markets and groceries and priced out what it would cost for the two of us to juice at least one time a day in the place of a meal. We visited Grass Roots Bookstore here in Corvallis, and picked up a book called Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, and another called The Budget Friendly Fresh and Local Diabetes Cookbook by Charles Mattocks, "The Poor Chef."

Neither of us are diabetic, but we may have been headed that direction, so we decided it would be best to give up the processed sugars.

Reading the books we purchased, and through more of Dr. Fuhrman's recommendations, we emptied the kitchen of all the junk food and sugar on January 2nd. We packed all the wheat, the red meats, and potatoes over to my folks' house. We then went to the store and purchased enough healthy food for one week, looking very closely at labels. In total, we were in the store for nearly three hours teaching ourselves what not to eat.

I will not say it was not difficult at first, with our bellies rumbling, our heads spinning from the detoxification process, and a number of meals tasting like cardboard pulp, almost all with the texture of cold mashed potatoes. This improved rapidly as we found ourselves understanding grains other than wheat. We soon enjoyed making meals and planning our daily caloric intakes more carefully. Now a month and a half later, we have settled into our new lifestyle, and the cravings for big juicy burgers have almost gone away. We know exactly when and where produce is on sale.  Our spice cabinet selections have grown tremendously while we have eliminated a lot of sodium from our diets.

Having a low-cal protein base for breakfast (either an Alive pea-protein shake, flaxseed banana bread, steel-cut oatmeal, or a hardboiled egg), then juicing for lunch, and amping up our vegetables at dinner, we are now at the target 70% of our meals as vegetables and fruit. Strangely, I feel my tastebuds are experiencing more complex flavors than I can recall, and vegetables taste awesome! Skin issues that Pedal Poppers had for years have cleared up. My joints feel healthier everyday. Was it the wheat? I just don't know.

We have really worked to eliminate butter and most dairy milk (we still enjoy a Tillamook Yogurt from time to time), wheat, red meat, as well as processed sugars (no white sugar or anything at all with HFCS). I would love opinions on honey, maple, and agave sugars, as we are using only small amounts of these very rarely to sweeten our flaxseed breads. Flaxseed, black beans, brown rice flour, coconut flour, black rice, chia, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, and quinoa are now our primary grains, beans, and seeds.

Cost? Well, when you eat less, and count your calories, you can still manage this lifestyle on even the smallest of shoestring budgets! We spend $400 per month on groceries, which certainly ranges from higher to lower depending on a person's location, but for two people, this has been ample for this much healthier dietary lifestyle.

To track calories, I keep it simple and use Excel, and look up calories following each meal either on my phone or on my computer. I've entered many of these counts into a spreadsheet so I can easily find them again. I am sure there are better programs and templates for this, but since we are still relatively new to this, after 7 solid weeks of doing this every day after every meal, this is what's working for me. Pedal Poppers can consume slightly more calories than I can due to our height differences, but I try to keep it around 1000 calories a day, sometimes I have as many as 1200, but on other days, I may only have around 800. At 5'8" in height, I've found it best to keep weekly calorie average around 7000 for weight loss and good energy levels. I sometimes give this a boost on days where we have harder workouts. Pedal Poppers, at 5'11", is averaging around 9700 calories per week.

To sum up how everything is going, since week 4, we've begun hiking and biking all around Corvallis, up Witham Hill, up Bald Hill, and we are looking for more trails. We are still in slow-mode, but we're doing it, staying positive, and really supporting each other. I am down from 306 to 285lbs in just a month and a half. Pedal Poppers is down from 299 to 277lbs in the same amount of time, which is 43lbs lost between us! We are currently using big bulky commuter bikes to ride around, but are now saving for touring bikes so that we can plan our first short biking and camping tour of the Blue Mountain Century Scenic Bikeway in Northeastern Oregon perhaps at the end of the summer, 2015. By the time of my M.A. graduation in June, Pedal Poppers and I should be down around 250lbs each. And before I start my doctoral program in the fall, this is something we really want to do together.

This will work perfect broken up over four days at 35-50 miles each day, since this route has campsites at these perfect intervals along the way. Looks a lot more fun than sitting around reading and writing and gaming to me!

Hope you enjoyed reading about the beginning of our healthier life adventure here in Oregon. Follow Pedal Poppers and Sprocket's blog for regular updates on our progress. All our best to all of you. If you've already gone through this, you are our inspiration, and if you have yet to travel this path, we humbly hope to be yours.

The next blog will include some of our touring bike plans, which will include some thoughts on our dream bikes.