A number of years ago I weighed about 220 pounds which was the heaviest I had ever been up to that point. At the time I eat whatever I wanted and the only real exercise I got was walking 2-3 miles a day to and from my brother and cosines house to hang out. My cousin, who lived on the same street as my older brother, was nice enough to lend me her bike so I wouldn’t have to walk back and forth anymore. The bike was an expensive race bike, although I didn’t know it at the time. The first time I road it I was so out of shape I thought I was going to puke half way home. I ended up walking the rest of the way that day. The next two weeks I would ride it as much as I could everyday going back and forth until I was able to go the whole way. Eventually I started riding it everywhere I went and I was able to go fast enough to even keep up with cars on the local roads. I turned into a complete speed demon too, always trying to go as fast as I could. I would time myself to see how long it would take me to get somewhere and just push as hard and as fast as I could go. One day I ran into a friend that hadn’t seen me in a few months. He said I looked like a rail and thought I was sick. The following day I stopped by my grandmother’s house and she said the exact same thing. So I when I got home I got on the scale and I weighed 170 pounds.
I had lost 50 pounds in less than two months without even trying to lose weight and I had a blast doing it. I wasn’t thinking about what I ate, counting carbs or fat. In fact there where many days I only had a few dollars and I just drank soda and eat chips in between trips and I would stuff my face at dinner and go to sleep. Not that I want to go back to eating like that, but if I was really doing something active that I loved like I did on the bike, I bet the weight would just fall off before I even knew it. Hitting the gym is great but there is nothing like the feeling of speed on a bike and owning the road. To me it felt like I was flying and I never felt so free. I would love to find that bike and do it again. The one thing I learned thinking about this was it doesn’t matter what your diet is, if you’re active enough and burning thousands of calories every day, almost nothing will keep you overweight. So forget about low carb diets and low fat diets, the biggest thing I can do that will have a huge impact is physical activity.
