I forgot to post what came in the mail on Monday:

The following request to change your USCF category has been approved and processed by USA Cycling:

Member: Erik Selberg

License: Road Racer

Request to change category from Cat 5 to Cat 4

Yeah baby!

The 20/20 Lifestyles Program puts people on a diet (and by this I do mean a temporary change in eating) for a couple reasons to help them lose weight. This is also similar to the Atkins / South Beach Diet’s induction period.

The diet, roughly, is the following:

1. 5 meal-replacement shakes, 12oz cooked lean meat. Shake & slab!
2. Add Veggies
3. Add Milk & Yogurt
4. Add Cheese
5. Add Fruit
6. Add Beans
7. Add (whole wheat) bread
8. Add high-glycemic fruits (such as bananas)

Note that after adding something, the meal replacement shakes and some of the meat goes away, so calories are kept the same. The meal replacement shakes are supposed to be some specially formulated shake designed for the 20/20 program. They’re effectively just protein shakes as near as I can see.

The idea behind the diet is that there may be certain foods, or certain types of foods, that cause a given person to feel hungry or gain weight. By trimming down the diet to these shakes and bits of meat and then slowly adding food back in, the idea is to isolate and identify those foods to determine where they fit into normal eating. Personally, I suspect it has a number of other effects:

• By removing all normal meals, it forces the person on the program to recreate the types of meals they eat — ideally in a healthier fashion.
• By creating a radically different diet, the person on it is much more likely to keep to it versus eating normally.
• By radically changing the diet, you don’t give the body a chance to adjust to simply eating less of the same stuff.

The third point is probably the most unsubstantiated, but I think the most important, at least for me. Weight loss is a radical change for the body… and thus lots of eating plus lots of dietary change is necessary for the body to change, versus simply adapt.

Unlike Atkins, the 20/20 diet isn’t zero or low carbs. Veggies are highly encouraged — and it turns out it’s hard to eat that many veggies and gain a lot of weight (although adding fatty salad dressings can add up those calories in a hurry!).

OK, there’s the diet. Next up: water!

As I come on the year anniversary of starting the 20/20 Lifestyles program at the Pro Club, I thought I’d reflect on some of the aspects of what it took to lose 70 pounds. Perhaps the biggest question I get from people is about the diet:

• What can you eat? (or it’s evil twin: what did you have to give up?)
• What can you drink? (or, it’s evil twin: can you still drink?)
• How can you stand it?

First, let’s talk about what you eat and drink once you start on the 20/20 Program. I’ll refrain from calling it a diet. While a diet is supposed to mean a choice of food & drink, invariably it has come to mean a temporary choice of food and drink to reduce weight. The temporary bit is what tends to get most people — if you do something that has caused you to gain a lot of weight, then you do something to lose it, then you revert back to what you did to gain the weight… what do you think will happen?

According to the dieticians at the Pro Club, I, a 6′1″ 33-year-old male, am supposed to consume 15-1700 calories a day, so averaging 1600. Your mileage will vary, but for this discussion we’ll use this number. If you’ll recall, a pound contains 3500 calories, so I’m consuming a little under half a pound per day to keep the body running. More than that, and the intake is converted into fat. So, the question is now, what does 1600 calories look like, and how can you get through a day / week / year on that?

The program advises that people should eat 5 times a day: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and dinner. For example, about 300 calories for breakfast, 100 for snack, 400 for lunch, 100 for snack, and 700 for dinner. The other aspect is to consume about 40 grams of fat (yes, fat) throughout the day, especially the earlier meals. The reason being is that it’s fat that is one of the key things that makes you feel sated or full. So, what do you eat with a budget of 1500 - 1700 calories per day?

Well, for starters, remember the Food Pyramid? Here’s that famous picture you probably saw:

6-11 servings of grain;
3-5 servings a day of veggies
2-4 servings of fruit
2-3 servings of protein (meat, fish, eggs, nuts, or beans)
2-3 servings of dairy
a pinch of fats, oils, and sweets

Well, don’t do this. This makes people fat. In particular, let’s look at calories. A serving is basically 100 calories, so the above has you eat 1500 - 2600 calories per day (averaging 2000, thus the 2000-calorie average you often see on food labels). Now, it isn’t completely wrong. Veggies, fruit, dairy servings are good, and minimizing sweets (meaning refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup) is good. The main gotchas are high grain, low protein, and no fat. First, ask any rancher what a grain-fed diet vs a grass diet does for beef. Grain-fed is super fatty, while grass-fed is lean. People aren’t cows, but turns out that grain-fed people tend to be fat. This is why diets such as South Beach and Atkins have worked so well. But it’s only part of the solution.

BTW, you can’t find the Food Pyramid anymore on the USDA’s site; they have a new one that’s all about picking a pyramid for each individual. So at least they’re recognizing things and trying to move in the right direction. Dr. Mark Dedomenico, the founder and director of the 20/20 Program, has a fair amount of evidence that he presents that also supports why a higher protein / low grain diet works well.

So what should you do? Again, 1600 calories, 40 grams of fat, high protein. Here’s what it looks like

This is a sample of what I’ve eaten, with some variety to show what you can do. It’s not much different than lots of other meal plans; the main thing you’ll notice is that there’s very little bread. Turns out that a hamburger bun is 200 calories right there. Rice is another one… 15pc sushi is about 900 calories, while 15pc sashimi is 450 — that’s 450 calories in the rice alone! Yow!

Next up: induction, or how to get your body to start to lose the weight!

A few weeks ago, I joined Union Bay Cycling / Wines of Washington cycling team. However, with Microsoft Flag Football games on Saturday (Fatal Errors are 10-0! Playoffs after holiday! Woot!) and my son being born two weeks early, I haven’t been able to join the Saturday devo (development - Cat 4/5) rides. Well, today was our football bye week, so 9 AM I met up with another 50-odd new friends and off we went!

One of the reasons for joining a team is to learn how to ride fast in a group. Certainly, there are classes available, such as the one Cascade holds . But ultimately, the theory is pretty easy to get across for a paceline: ride about a foot off the wheel of the person in front of you, keep your eyes on the shoulder not the wheel, and don’t pull (be at the front) more than you should.

What you then need is lots and lots of practice. Riding a foot off a wheel while dealing with changing speeds along the road is a lot tougher than it appears… and invariably, your reaction to almost anything is to slow down and get some space — which means you open up a gap of more like 3-6 feet between you and the next rider. The difference? One enables you to draft, the other gives you a face full of wind.

Tomorrow is the skills clinic the guys put on… lots of additional detail outlining what us rookies should be doing, how to ride together, team strategies, and so forth. Good stuff… I can’t wait!

So, I went for another meet the team ride with Union Bay Cycling, In the pouring rain… fun. Invariably, while talking with the riders, the topic came up as to what I do for a living. I mentioned I work for Microsoft’s search group — in particular, the new Search Labs group. One of the other riders asked if this was just a matter of marketing our product better… to which I replied that no, we actually have to make a better product. He then asked if the new stuff would be off MSN or something else… I mentioned it was Live.com. He hasn’t heard of it yet.

What’s the point? Well, a number of people out there believe that Microsoft will win because we’ll link in search throughout the operating system (Vista) and IE, and as people adopt Vista / IE7+ over the next 1-5 years, people will accept live.com as the new default.

Except that it won’t happen that way.

Sure, there will be some people who use live.com because it’s the default, just as some people use msn.com now, or people use Google because it’s the default on Firefox. But Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all busy trying to change the defaults and hook into the APIs of IE and Vista. And with 1-3 year ship cycles for IE / Windows, there will be ample time to change the defaults. Best of all, OEMs like Dell and HP are going to charge Google / Yahoo to change the defaults — which of course means that Google and Yahoo will pony up the dough to do that.

But fundamentally, “winning by default” isn’t a way to win. In fact, it’s a great way to lose — you need to have a winning product in a marketplace, you need to have something that brings people to it. Hoping people will use your product if there’s a superior one out there just because you’re the “default” is just delusional. And people will use a superior product — just look at the rise of market share of Firefox over IE, the “default.”

No, this is going to be a long, drawn-out competition. It took Google about 3-4 years, from 1998 to about 2001/2, to dethrone AltaVista. And in truth, what really helped was the ton of people that came online and picked Google — AltaVista didn’t so much lose people to Google as a lot more people picked Google than AltaVista when they came online. So, you can imagine how long it’ll take us to get Live to that level. Plus, it has to be better, so it’s a stand-up fight. Our smart people vs Google’s smart people. Live.com is just a start, and has tons of stuff coming out… so keep watch.

And it starts with one rider at a time.

So today, I went on a Meet the Team ride with some folks from Union Bay Cycling, aka Wines of Washington team. We did just under 40 miles from 25th and Blakely down around the southern tip of Lake Washington and then back again via I-90. The fun bit was we did this going at about an 18 MPG clip, including a few faster sprints. Pace lines and groups are fun!

Ruben and I represented the Pastry Powered T(o)uring Machines at the final ride of the cycling season (according to Cascade , at any rate) — the Kitsap Color Classic . We did the Poulsbo loop and Hanville loop, for a total of about 55 miles (GPS forthcoming). The route was surprisingly hilly, especially the Hanville portion. Here are some pics we took along the way:

Ruben and Erik at Port Gamble

Ruben finishing a climb. Notice the bay in the background of the road? We came up from that…. huff!

Now, just how many bikes can you fit on the back of a Washington State ferry?

Erik’s Bell helmet gives him a lovely ‘do after a ride… just imagine how much he’d have to pay for that!

A day after Universal Cycles said they shipped my Craft jersey and A700 SLAM aerobars, they arrived. Oh, and it’s now clear that whatever Gotta Ride Bikes sent wasn’t even a recent A700 SLAM… the packaging was much more cleanly put together, and contrary to what Michael at Gotta Ride Bikes said, everything was there and accounted for, including the shims (2 metal pieces, not rubber that will eventually compress and loosen) and O-rings (including two with notches cut out for cables if you want to put in bar-end shifters or brakes).

So, looks like I’ve found where I’ll spend my cycling money!

A brief update on my grumping on mail order… yup, WesternBikeWorks.com did get the order right, and the DiNotte light works great! (and the celeste cork tape also came, so I can tape up the A700s when they arrive).

Maybe I should just order from shops in Portland…

A month ago, I posted about hating mail order. The reason? After placing an order with Gotta Ride Bikes (gottaridebikes.com), an outfit down in Texas, and receiving the item in question (an Oval A700 SLAM aerobar for my bike) within the week, I discovered that the aerobar was missing a number of parts, rendering it uninstallable and useless. In particular, what was missing was:

Part #    Qty    Desc

4         2      31.8 to 26.0mm Bar Adaptors (Shim) Right

5         2      31.8 to 26.0mm Bar Adaptors (Shim) Left

6         4      Bar Clamp Bolts (M5x15mm)

7         4      Extension Clamp Bolts (M5x12mm)

10        2      Arm Rest Riser Posts (12.5mm)

18        4      Bar End Plugs ("O" Logo)

19        2      Extension Bar Insert for Riser

I sent down an e-mail to Michael, who responded fairly promptly and said they’d send out a replacement. Well, a week goes by, and nothing, so I ask what the status is. He says they sent one out, but neglected to get a tracking number or anything. I’m skeptical that one went out personally. At this point, he says they don’t have the unit, but are willing to work with me to make things better. Michael offers to send me a demo unit they have, and knock off 15%. I’m fine with that, as long as it has the above parts. He says it does minus the 12.5mm riser. I agree, with the caveat that if it doesn’t quite fit, I’ll just return everything for a full refund as I won’t be able to try it with the low riser.

Well, the demo arrives, but I’m still missing the shims, the extension clamp bolts, and the bar end plugs. Sigh. I could probably use the bolts used for the 12.5mm rider as extension clamp bolts (they’re pretty close in length, and all the bolts are M5), so I could install it, but I still need the shims, and unless I want this to rust out I need the bar end plugs. But this really isn’t worth 15% (which is about $10). I’ll just send it all back and go with somebody else.

What baffles me about all of this is that even after mail explicitly stating what I needed, I was still sent something that wasn’t right. If you’re in the middle of a customer service nightmare, wouldn’t you double-check everything to make sure you weren’t going to make things worse?

So, moral of the story: stay away from Gotta Ride Bikes…

On the plus side, I placed two orders with two other vendors, both in Portland, OR - Western Bike Works (http://www.westernbikeworks.com) and Universal Cycles (http://www.universalcycles.com). >From Western Bike Works I picked up the Dinotte Lighting Ultra 5 Ultralight for $169 and from Universal Cycles I picked up that A700 SLAM and a Craft Pro Zip Mock Turtleneck Jersey. The orders were placed Tuesday early AM. The light came in today, and the SLAMs and Jersey shipped and should be here tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll now have some new online bike shops I can recommend!