A Year Without Carbs

I love to run. I have been a pretty steady runner for the past twenty years, having started when I was in high school. I took to it easily and can recall one day early on in my running "career" where I ran up and down the dirt road we lived on. For hours it seemed I ran to the main road and back to the house and back again, until my mom yelled at me from the front door to come inside. I had been at it for at least two hours. I went back later and measured the distance with the odometer of my car and found I had run nearly a half-marathon that day.

I kept running throughout my time in the Navy, partly because we had to but also because I wanted to. On a cold winter morning, I went for an early jog near the naval base in Chicago, wearing the first thing I could grab: an old t-shirt from boot camp. About twenty minutes later, two cops stopped me because they thought I was a recruit escaping the base. Nope, I said, just out for an early run in the dark. After we all had a good laugh, I learned that day that I needed to think about what I wore while running.

Fifteen years later, I'm still running. I've run 5Ks because I wanted to drink a beer at the end (Oktoberfest Bier Run in Nashville). I've traveled out of state just to run a 5K (the annual Columbia St. Patty's Day 5K). Last year I trained for the Nashville Rock 'N' Roll Half marathon. Just recently I ran a local YMCA race here in North Carolina. I trained for months and, in the end, posted my fastest 5K time in over a decade, finally cracking the 30-minute mark.

I'm proud of that time. I worked hard for it, putting in hours at night on the treadmill after work, early weekend morning runs in the cold. I trained at speeds and inclines I had never used. I learned how to pace, how to increase my speed toward the end of a race, how to taper my training prior to race day. 

Yet through all of that hard training that saw nearly two minutes cut off my PR, my weight never changed. On January 1st, 2012, despite all the running, I weigh basically the same as I did this past July: about 230 pounds. Through all the miles, my weight has fluctuated over a range of only two or three pounds. There were weeks I did not run, weeks I ran 15 miles -- yet, little change in my weight. If weight loss comes down to diet and exercise, well, the latter's not working for me.

Maybe then my diet's the problem, you might say? About 10 years ago I found low-carb dieting for the first time (it was everywhere then) and it helped some. I had reached about 245 pounds at one point and I remember the day I knew I needed help: I leaned over to tie my shoes and my gut started to cut off my lungs so much I had trouble breathing. I started that week watching my carbs and credit it for the reason I am still at 230 and have not ballooned upward. My friends and family will attest, I'm the last one at the restaurant to order pasta, I'd prefer a chef's salad. I can only imagine what I would weigh had I not begun to watch what I eat over the past few years.

But that got me thinking: what if, instead of just cutting carbs out here and there for a few weeks at a time, I instead cut them as much as possible for a long period (say, a year)? I'd keep running as I did before, a 5K at St. Patty's, a half marathon somewhere perhaps, but the biggest change would be my diet; no more going half-in, I'd really commit to low-carb for a while. Will I get fatter? Will I lose 5 pounds of water weight? Will I lose more? Will my cholesterol shoot through the roof? Will I start to hate meat? Will I rue the day salad was ever created?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions definitively. I have my guesses but that's all they are. And so to keep me honest, I thought, for 2012 instead of a resolution, why not an experiment? On me. What have I got to lose? I'm too heavy as it is, all my weight is in my gut and thighs, I have knee pains on occasion; it can't get much worse, right? And to keep me honest, I'll blog about it all here. Probably with too much detail for some, a boring run-down of menus, a mix of anecdote and technical information, a little about dieting and a little about exercise. Think Super Size Me but with a lot more bacon.

And at the end of the year, we'll look back and see where this took me. For better or worse, here we go.