Hello. For those of you who are curious about what it takes to decide to ride 5000 miles on a bicycle while carrying a load of camera gear and pulling a dog in a trailer, here’s a little story.

Three years ago, I was the living embodiment of everything that is wrong with the American lifestyle. I was well north of 400 pounds, a type-2 diabetic, high blood pressure, in fabulous amounts of debt… you know, the usual. Without the details, it’s safe to say that I was in a very bad situation, and in ways that are becoming more typical in this country every day. Why? Well, that’s a question without a simple answer, and I’m sure the answer is a little different for everyone who finds themselves in that place.

In any case, the situation hit rock bottom, and I made some decisions to change it. One of those decisions was to get my health back. I guess the thing that made it different from all the other times I had promised myself to lose weight, get in better shape, etc… blah, was that this time it was a core decision. It felt different from the periodic promises, and I knew I had no choice.

Now, being a typical American, I had access to 80 million ways to lose weight, and not one of them had ever worked. That’s not to say that some of the methods were wrong. It was clearly a matter of my lack of commitment to whichever plan I had decided to follow on any particular week. In other words, I had no idea how to do it.

I should point out that there will not be an ad for some miracle weight loss formula at the bottom of this page, because if a magic bullet exists, I don’t know about it. I’ve lost about 160 pounds to this point, and I’m going to share the secret with you for free. Are you ready? Here it comes…

I worked hard. Yep, sorry. I worked with great patience and reasonable consistency, and I kept track of what I was doing and eating so that I could make adjustments to fine tune the process. And honestly, from the beginning, if someone had told me that I had to do what I actually did, I probably would have talked myself out of it. But the important part is that from here in the middle, because I have not arrived yet, I can look back honestly and say that it wasn’t that hard. In fact, it was downright enjoyable most of the time. That’s an idea that I hope to spread, that, yes, it’s work to lose weight, but it’s not really that hard. It is worth the time.

So, right now, I’ll be honest. I’m still a lot of bicyclists’ idea of a “before” picture. I still go into some unenlightened bike shops and get the “fat dude in a bike shop” vibe. At 6′ 4″ and 260 pounds, I’m not the guy who you would expect to ride a bike for 5000 miles, but I’m going to do it anyway. I was once a guy who took an hour to walk around the block, who got winded while tying his shoes, and that was on the good days when I could actually catch a glimpse of those size-14’s. I was the guy who struggled to fit behind the steering wheel, and who was led to the skinny booth at lunch buffets in the proprietor’s vain hope that I would stop eating out of sheer discomfort. I was that American guy. I’m not ever one to claim that I did it perfectly, or even all that well at points along the way, and the journey has not been without major setbacks, but things have changed. Now I’m a guy who knows he can do a cross country ride and share that experience with you.

If you noticed that I never said what I did to lose the weight, stay tuned. You’ll hear all about it. Plus, I’m sure I can scrounge up some nice “before” pictures for you. Yikes!

Regards,

Jim