There’s No Need to Weigh Yourself: Not If You ‘Weigh’ Your Foods Choices
By Kevin Kolodziejski
Who are you while you’re on the bicycle?
It’s a rather existential question, one you probably don’t expect to be asked on a cycling website. Yet it’s one I’ll ask you to contemplate because of what I read on this cycling website two weeks ago.
In Issue No. 1223 under “Cool Things to Read,” you find a link to a Tyler Hamilton podcast titled “I Was Always Hungry: The Unseen Side Of Pro Cycling.” I watched it, and it caused me to wonder if you ever think of yourself as someone else when you want to or need to ride hard. The question occurred to me because seeing Hamilton caused me to remember a dozen or so weekday mornings in the winter of 2003. It would be around 5:30 a.m., and I’d be on the wind trainer in my unheated attic. It would be just after a 20-minute warmup and just before the first of six, five-minute ascending intervals.
And I would become Tyler Hamilton.
Who Is Tyler Hamilton?
Hamilton’s the former American cyclist who in July of 2003 would become well-known for winning the hilly 16th stage of the Tour de France. He did so by way of a 55 kilometer breakaway — one where he stayed seated the entire time. He never stood, you see, because he couldn’t. He had been part of the 35-rider pileup near the finish of the second stage and sustained a broken collarbone. Yet he rode the remainder of the Tour, won that 16th stage, and finished fourth overall.
Dr. Gérard Porte, the chief medical officer of the Tour de France at that time, told The Guardian that Hamilton’s 2003 tour was “the finest example of courage that I’ve come across,” after explaining how “a normal person” would have needed four weeks away from cycling. While Porte’s pronouncement answers any questions about Hamilton’s desire — or his through-the-roof pain tolerance — you probably have one for me. Why become Tyler Hamilton months before he becomes so well known?
Why Become Tyler Before He’s So Well Known?
Because doing six ascending intervals of five minutes even with equal length recoveries is almost as tough as Hamilton was during the Giro in the year before. But more on that race later. For now, you need to know why I was so hellbent on doing what I called AI back then, back when saying it made people think of Allen Iverson and not Artificial Intelligence. It’s because AIs were recommended to a buddy of mine and called “the key to road racing success” by a legend at our local velodrome. That being Shaun Wallace, a British cyclist who was not only a four-time medal winner on the track at the Commonwealth Games but also a two-time Olympic Games participant.
To do AIs, you estimate the speed you can hold going all-out for about two minutes or so. That speed, let’s use 32.5 mph, becomes the speed you strive to reach during the last minute of each interval — but only after riding for a minute at 28.5, 29.5, 30.5, and 31.5 mph. If you’re thinking, “Ouch,” you’re thinking correctly, even though during each recovery you’re allowed to pedal as easily as you like. If I’m thinking correctly, you’re just dying to know what happened to Hamilton in the 2002 Giro.
What Happened to Hamilton in the 2002 Giro?
On a tricky descent during the fifth stage, the spindle on his rear wheel snapped and he crashed. When in 2017 Graham Bensinger reminded Hamilton of the crash on his eponymous television show, the obviously inured-to-pain Hamilton recalled what was “fortunate” about it. “We didn’t know [the head of the insert at the socket of his collarbone] was broken, so I kept going.” When Bensinger said the “keeping going” had to keep him in pain, Hamilton explained how he managed it. “I spent a lot of time grinding my teeth on the bike.”
The grinding led to Hamilton needing 11 teeth to be replaced.
After you try to imagine the degree of pain Hamilton was in during most of the Giro — a race in which he placed second by the way — I challenge you to imagine something else. Hunger. But not the type you experience three hours after supper when you’re comfortably ensconced on the couch and watching a show. The type Hamilton experienced 90 percent of the time he rode as a pro and doubly so in the weeks before a Grand Tour when his goal was to reduce his already scant body fat to 2.8 percent. My guess is that you never want to experience that sort of hunger.
And my experience has been, regardless of the weight you want to maintain as a way to insure good health or aid your cycling, you don’t need to. All you need to do is something I knew to do even before I knew about those lung-gasping and leg-burning ascending intervals. To always consider a food’s energy density before eating.
It Can’t Be That Simple, Can It?
Yes, it can, and here’s an example of why.
A medium-sized, three-inch-diameter apple weighs 182 grams, 156 grams of which are water. It also contains 95 calories and 4.4 grams of fiber. Because of the apple’s amount of weight, water, and fiber in relationship to its total number of calories, it’s considered an energy-dense food.
If for some reason you decide to eat as many apples as need be to sate your after-supper hunger, I doubt if you’ll consume three. But if you do, three medium apples only contain 285 calories, and they weigh 546 grams, nearly 50 percent more than a 13.5-ounce bag of potato chips.
And it’s easy to eat a whole bag of potato chips as you watch a show. Doing so, though — even if the chips are plain ones — means you’ve consumed 2025 calories, about seven times the number in three apples.
Making swaps like this one a few times a day and regularly eliminates the need to weigh yourself — unless you need a good dose of positive reinforcement.
Kevin Kolodziejski began his writing career in earnest in 1989. Since then he’s written a weekly health and fitness column and his articles have appeared in magazines such as “MuscleMag,” “Ironman,” “Vegetarian Times,” and “Bicycle Guide.” He has Bachelor and Masters degrees in English from DeSales and Kutztown Universities.
A competitive cyclist for more than 30 years, Kevin won two Pennsylvania State Time Trial championships in his 30’s, the aptly named Pain Mountain Time Trial 4 out of 5 times in his 40s, two more state TT’s in his 50’s, and the season-long Pennsylvania 40+ BAR championship at 43.
