I’ve started this four times and deleted. Even this go round has been stutter stepped with backspacing and rethinking.  It’s not that it has to be perfect. It’s just that sometimes the words don’t convey the power of what we are trying to say. That matters for most things but for some reason I want to get it really right here. So let’s go. You (me) are taking too passive a role in your life with regard to food and alcohol. There. That’s a start. 

For the past 4-5 months I trained for an Ironman. Yes I know. I’ve blathered on incessantly about it. It’s easy to. It can occupy your whole world, and so, sometimes it’s all you talk about. Having toed the line eight times I’ve done my share of blathering and for that I apologize. This year’s endeavor included trying a few new things as well as a practice of something old but with different realizations. 

In past races I’ve cleaned up my eating and removed alcohol from my diet wit 2-3 weeks to go. I really don’t know if there’s much benefit but it always feels like the right thing to do. Shave a pound, feel a little spring in the step. 

For most of the past year I’ve weighed myself. It started really as a way to just see what happened and lose a couple pounds. I don’t know that I’ve ever owned a scale so I’m really not sure what I thought the results would be. Thanks to the Garmin scale/app, I now know that from April to October I averaged 178 lbs. this is about 10lbs up from when I last jumped on a scale at the gym. It wasn’t the end of the world and I just chocked it up to aging and whatever. Then came the last month. 

Losing weight by exercise is one of the greatest lies out there. Yes. It is possible but I’ve long said that it’s 90% food choices. The last month has proven this 10 fold for me. From October 12-20th I completed the largest training week of my tri career, nearly 24 hours of rides, runs and swims. At the end of this week I weighed in at 176 lbs. this was on a day that I rode 100 miles. I was losing nothing. 

On the 21st I decided I’d get strict for the last two weeks leading up to the race. I stopped drinking and went vegetarian, which soon turned into mostly vegan as I don’t eat much dairy anyway. The results have been beyond “interesting”.  

On October 24th, the beginning of the 4th day of this experiment, I woke up early for a bike ride. It was more to get the legs moving than it was anything else. About 30 mins into the ride I had a vivid realization. I felt genuinely happy.  I couldn’t remember the last time I had that come over me. I started thinking about what had changed. From a life stress standpoint, nothing. From a diet standpoint. A lot. 

Drinking is to Louisiana as blue is to sky. It’s an ingrained part of life here and I’ve apparently done my best to oblige. For the 90’s I was for sure all in.   In late 2000 when I started to try and balance working in bars with 5:30 am runs, I slowly drank less and less. Over the last 6-7 years though there’s been this “I can drink or eat whatever, I’m training mindset.”  For a long time I was the train hard, race hard, guy. Slowly, I’d become the train hard, race hard, drink hard guy. It has a way of sneaking up on you like that. I needed a hard stop. 

During the last year of this blog, I’ve shared openly about depression and struggle. Today I’ll be tying together some loose ends that just hit me. Above I mentioned that I realized I was happy. This is big. The other realization I had was that I wasn’t awaking in a wave of panic an anxiety every day. Again, whiled I’d love to believe this was from some sort of utopian veggie high, I knew better. If you don’t remember the drugs and drinking messages from the 80’s and 90’s, alcohol is a depressant. While this may not have any affect on you during your evening couple of beers and or glasses of wine. I can personally connect it to one of depressions number one symptoms. Anxiety. On the mornings after I had eliminated alcohol from my daily life, I woke up without a wave of panic about the day ahead. Not one of my daily stressors changed but how I started the day and the processing did. After IM I had a few beers in celebration and then a couple the next day celebrating a birthday. True to form. The Monday following, the wave was there. I was thankfully aware of it but it was there nonetheless.  I don’t want that anymore. So while I may not quit drinking forever, it’s going to be fewer and farther between. 

As for the eating. I have the same attitude.  If I can easily keep doing it, I’ll likely eat mostly vegetarian. I don’t care about the animals (not sorry).  I’ve just felt better and lost 10 lbs in 20 days. This is on almost no exercise for 7 of those days. 

Don’t worry. I’ll never tell you to be vegetarian, paleo, keto, or whatever. I will say this. We all need rigidity in our lives. Periods of time where we hit a hard reset and get cleaner. This is why every diet can work.  It’s the rigidity, not the carbs or the protein or whatever.   It’s about the added discipline. It’s about having to cook food instead of eating out. It’s about eating  as little processed food as possible .It’s about making yourself a little uncomfortable with your choices and creating a lifestyle you can sustain. 

Again, I don’t know what I’ll do long term. I drank some during the Alabama game over the weekend. Not the end of the world....well except that morning wave of panic. 

#hugsandhi5s