Rainy Tuesday Treat

For the second consecutive week, the team ride was rained out. Now I’m home and wondering what to do. Ride the rollers? No, I really need to, but that’s such a hard thing to do when it’s not wintertime and I only have the choice to ride indoors or not at all. Maybe I’ll fire up the old PC and update the blog. But what to talk about? Lately, religion has been on my mind again, but I know better than to bring that up. Surely I can think of a less polarizing subject on which to state my humble opinion. Someday I will publish a treatise on my beliefs and change the world forever, but for now…
Butterscotch pudding is good! I just made some tonight, and although it’s just the instant kind, it’s still pretty good stuff. Just two cups of milk and a packet of flavor/ coagulant of some sort. I really don’t know if this orange- colored gelatinous substance is very good for me or not, but it sure tastes good. My diet has been severely lacking in decency lately, and every day I start with the intention to change that, only to fail miserably. With my tendencies towards late morning wake- ups and lack of an actual lunch break, my daily caloric intake often consists of pop- tarts and McDonald’s dollar menu fare. I loathe myself for this, but can’t seem to get out of the rut. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, I used to be pretty serious about my nutrition. Just a few years ago, my brother and I had a “competition” of sorts, with each of us trying to one- up the other by giving something “bad” up. I finally stopped keeping track one day when we were talking and he casually told me that he had given up refined sugar. How the hell do you cut out refined sugar? It’s everywhere! I still think he may have been making this up to ratchet up the stakes so high that no one could follow. I fall short of calling him a liar, though, since I had visited his apartment and seen the contents of his refrigerator and the gram scale on his counter he used for measuring out food. At the time, I thought this constituted commitment, just to demonstrate how serious I was about the whole nutrition thing. Over the years, I have tried, without much success, to alter my body type by gaining or losing weight. In 2002, I weighed 143 pounds after training for 6 months to run the Chicago marathon. At 6’ 2”, this is a pretty good weight for me to be a runner. Being a cyclist takes much more power, though, and at some point after that I got the idea that I needed to gain weight. I was briefly at my heaviest by making it to 160 lbs. It took a lot of work to get to each point, though, and I didn’t really enjoy being at either extreme. So now I’m back where my body likes to be, right around 150 lbs. Now that my diet has nothing to do with my weight, though, I‘ve stopped being so concerned about what I eat and that’s where the problem is. I know that my calories should be coming from more healthy sources and I aim to change that soon. But for now… yeah, I just finished my pudding.