74.9kg – I thought the day would never come and I’d be eating pizza forever…!!!

But it did, final day of pizza is done, and now it’s onto the best/worst phase – beer! This is going to be tough for me since I don’t really drink a lot of beer. I’m reasonably sure that I can’t drink more than about 5 a day, which is less than 1500 calories. On the plus side, it will probably go quite fast… I really hope so, since I’ll be at a conference next week, and surviving on beer alone would be err… “interesting”. On the other hand, there is bound to be an abundance of beer at the event, so there is that. 

If you think about it, beer is basically liquid bread. So everything will be ok. Yeah right. 

To prepare for the next phase, I ended today with 3 beers at a cool spot called Rayback Collective here in Boulder, catching up with good friend Osman and Leah. By the way, if you want to move to Boulder, Osman is your man! He represented us during the home buying process and I can’t recommend him enough.

Today I had 2 good ones. I still have the flu but getting some food in helped me to feel a bit better. Weight is still pretty much static, even though I can visibly see I’m a bit leaner. That’s the weird thing about the human body – you can look leaner, feel leaner and yet the actual weight is often a few days behind the visible changes. Given my lower calorie intake during the flu phase, there is no doubt that a bit of weight will drop off sometime this week.

Daily Totals

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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The man flu was still strong today – I spent a lot of the day in bed with the exception of a few meetings which I did via Google Hangout (which, incidentally, is a really great option for remote and distributed teams). My appetite was pretty much non-existent so I made a big bowl of Jello to try and get some calories in. On the pizza front, it was a really good “pepperoni and roasted garlic flatbread”. Now, I’m not actually a huge fan of pepperoni, but this was actually very good. 

That was it for the day – some jello and a pizza. 

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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I have to be honest, I thought the pizza phase was going to be a lot more fun than it is. Maybe it’s because the burger and ice cream phases exceeded my expectations, I’m not sure.

Analyzing my totals, the thing that really stands out on the pizza phase is how high the sodium intake is.

The “recommended” level is about 2300mg per day and I’m getting in over 5000mg most days, so there is no doubt that there is some extra water retention cause by that.  I never really pay attention to sodium intake, so this project has for sure made me a lot more aware of that, and how much sodium is in these types of foods. By the way, I don’t add salt to anything, and I never take sodium when racing (most triathletes do, but it’s not needed). 

Anyway, I’m getting a bit tired of pizza so I’m highly motivated to lose this kg and move on to the next phase. However at this stage I’m not losing much on this phase (see my day 5 weigh-in I had lost zero, probably due to water retention from all that sodium!)

Workouts today were decent – a 9 mile treadmill run to start the day (with a few 1 mile pickups to 6:45 pace), a 90 minute ride after that, and then a short 1k swim followed by a 55 minute heat prep session in the sauna. In the evening I did a short 2.5 mile recovery run at a slow pace.

On the bike project side of things, I’m experimenting with some mountain bike components on the tri bike. There seems to be a rapid rate of innovation in the MTB world, so it’s fun to play around with what they have.  I’ll be trying out a 9-46 cassette on my 1X 56t chainring to see how that works. Hopefully I’ll get that done by the end of next week.

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Since Michelle doesn’t eat chicken, I had today’s pizza all to myself. At first it looked rather bland, so I added some extra bacon and avocado. However, I shouldn’t have judged a book by it’s cover, since it was actually pretty tasty.

 Link to video on YouTube

Workouts were good – I did almost 3 hours early in the morning and then a short ride outside on the fatbike. One of my key metrics on the bike is “power at low heart rate” i.e. what my power output is at a specific (an low) heart rate; in my case 135 bpm. I tested it on today’s indoor ride, and I was getting around 250 watts @ 135 bpm, which is good. That means I’m not overly fatigued, and is a green flag to train hard if I want to. I also use the same benchmark after a big race, and I only return to normal training once my power:HR returns to what it was before the race.

Daily totals: 4301 calories (523g carbs, 144g fat, 228g protein)
Exercise totals: 1800 calories

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Two pizzas consumed today – for  lunch it was a cuban pizza made in Germany (really?) and for dinner it was an Italian-themed spinach mushroom alfredo pizza (alfredo usually being reserved for pasta dishes).

We had our first snow in a long time, so I also made some “maple syrup snow” which was actually really good. No, that is not a new type of canadian street drug, it’s actually exactly what it sounds like; a cup full of snow, with maple syrup poured over it. This is my new “go to” recovery meal on snow days!

Daily totals: 3763 calories (415g carbs, 102g fat, 233g protein)

Despite today’s high calorie count, I was still really hungry at the end of the day. Usually that means I’m going to drop some weight, which is about time since I’ve lost nothing since switching to pizza.

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Today most of my calories were loaded towards night time. I woke up, ran 10 miles into town (took 2 x Glukos bars), did the masters swim at lunch time (cut short because I was clearly low on calories), and then a 5 mile run in the afternoon.

Finished off the day with an amazing pizza at Proto’s in Gunbarrel.

Daily totals: 3490 calories (303g carbs, 58g fat, 106g protein)

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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It seems like each time I switch to a new “bad food group” it takes a few days to get it right. Today, I had most of my calories at lunch time with a pizza that sounded quite healthy but really wasn’t.  Many of the very tasty pizzas I’ve had are around 900-1000 calories for the whole thing, and this one was 1600. It was pretty tasty but I’ve definitely had better, so in other words, not really worth the calories. I’m definitely not a fan of the “braided crust” – keep it simple people!

I also have to say, shopping for pizza at the grocery store is much less exciting than shopping for ice cream. Most of the pizzas are pepperoni (of which I’m not a huge fan) and there are a lot of chicken ones too (I don’t mind chicken but it seems weird to have it on a pizza). Anyway, I did buy a chicken and bacon pizza which I’ll try in the coming days. The best pizzas I have had are pretty simple ingredients like ham (or bacon), cheese, mushrooms. And there are some fantastic veggie pizzas I’ve had too, that to me taste a lot better than pepperoni or sausage pizza. Anyway, all that is just personal opinion! The weirdest thing about my previous pizza experience, is that the best pizza I’ve ever had was in Switzerland of all places, not exactly the place that springs to mind as the mecca of pizza.

So for tomorrow, I’m going to hopefully venture out and try some non-grocery-store varieties from our local pizzerias.

Totals for the day: 2787 calories (313g carbs, 98g fat, 141g protein)
Some people ask me if I add calories back in if I do workouts. The answer is no if I only do something under an hour. Like today I only did 60 min easy on the bike, then I don’t add them back (maybe like 25%). But on a big workout day with something like a 3 hour bike ride, I’ll add some of them back in. So for a regular person doing less than an hour of exercise per day, I would not add any calories back. Instead I would just set a simple calorie goal and stick with it. As many calories as you can while still losing weight. For athletes, you need to have trust in how your workout calories are measured, since much of that can be quite inaccurate. So there is some trial and error getting that right. I would start off maybe adding back only 60% of workout calories, with the priority on making sure you fuel your workouts well. Doing under-fueled workouts is ok on occasion, but doing it regularly is going to downgrade the quality of your workouts and impact your training goals. That’s why I like to periodize my diet to meet the needs of my current training phase, but that is a whole other post in itself, that I will do later on, probably once this project is over.

Sorry, no video today – I just had too much going on (including taking a kid to urgent care) and ran out of time to do anything. If you need something to watch, check out this good talent.

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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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