Jesse's Famous Bean Diet

I've lost twenty-three pounds in the last forty-three days. Am on track to lose another ten pounds at least in the next five weeks, perhaps fifteen, depending.

May 19th I weighed 273. Today, July 1st, I weigh 250. On August 4th when Chelsea (daughter #2, 19), David (son, 14) and I, head out on RAW (Ride Around Washington), a 6-day, 435-mile ride, which this year starts at the mouth of the Columbia river and heads upstream, I’ll be no more than 240, and quite possibly less. I’ve never weighed as little as 240 on a serious bike ride, not since I was a teenager anyway.

Welcome to Jesse’s Famous Bean Diet. Doctor’s permission required; all disclaimers apply, as in, this is risky, so if your doctor doesn’t approve, don’t do this. No kidding.

(No, you won't fart. You're so Junior High School. Seriously though, the beans on this diet aren't the kind that give people gas; no Blazing Saddles campfire scene, and no Mongo either.)

The diet is simple:

Water, water, water, water, water, water, water, water.

Plus…

Monday – Saturday: Days: Roasted Unsalted Soybeans
Nights: One can of Baked Beans. I like Bush’s brand. Yummy.
One cup of sherbet. If you’re hungry.

Sunday: Anything you want, in moderation. I said, moderation, dammit.

This means, Monday – Saturday, you eat well under 1,000 calories a day. Under 500 if you don’t eat the sherbet. And on Sunday if you don’t go nuts, you shouldn’t eat more than 2,500 calories.

One pound is 3,500 calories. I burn roughly 2,500 calories a day. That’s called my BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate. It’s what I burn working, just goofing off, or even lying in bed reading a book.

Now let us say I also exercise a little. I ride a road bicycle. Say I burn 500 calories a day on average:
2,500 calories BMR + 500 exercise = 3,000 burned per day
Calories eaten = 1,000 ingested per day
3,000 calories burned daily - 1,000 ingested daily =
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2,000 calories burned per day

One pound = 3,500 calories. In other words, at a rate of 2,000 calories burned a day, I’m dropping a pound a little more often than every two days. Throw in Sunday where I eat what I want, throw in I often burn a LOT more exercising. Throw in some days I eat extra, and some days I eat nothing at all except soybeans. Some days I get a craving for a CostCo hotdog with mustard and onions, other days I have to eat a taco. Sometimes I’ll go three days in a row with nothing to eat but water and soybeans and a few scoops of sherbet. Now throw in that that I don't mess with the diet at all the first two to three weeks; beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a touch of sherbet for my sweet cravings... My weight drops like a rock.

I don’t give a damn that this is a lousy way to lose weight (so some people say.) It’s working for me. YES I take vitamins. I take a daily multivitamin plus One-a-Day Men’s Health Formula plus Omega-3 Fish Oil supplements plus fiber caplets to keep my system moving. I weigh myself once a day including body fat percentage (which is down two points).

I’ve also started watching the Food Channel, and purchased a cookbook. Classic Rachael Ray 30 Minute Meals, if you must know. Because the tough part is going to be, learning how to maintain after I’ve stopped dieting. I figure -- thank you MM -- I can spend thirty minutes cooking; hell, it’s just hacking with food, and I love to hack (the good kind, not cracking, silly bears) and make some decent food for myself and the bear cubs. Once I’m off the long ride in mid-August, right back on Jesse’s Famous Bean Diet for another two to three months, all the way to Halloween. Whatever weight I’m at then, that’s what I’m at -- 210 is my guess, but I’d love 200 -- and maintain all the way through the storm season (y’all call it the holiday season, but you don’t live in Seattle.) Ride my bicycle on a trainer indoors, cook from the cookbooks, kick onto beans if and when I must, but the point is, don’t gain any damn weight back. Learn how to cook and live at that weight.

Come spring, back outside on my bicycle, back on Jesse’s Famous Bean Diet for a few more months, and drop all the way down to 180, my Army weight, and then, back to the same maintenance diet, but finally at my proper weight and body fat percentage. I am not going to yo-yo. If my body starts trying to jump back up, I’ll simply drop back onto the diet and hold till my body figures out it is staying right where it is.

People die from being overweight, and I want to watch the grandkids I don’t have yet, grow up.

Seriously -- please don’t try this without clearing it with your doctor. There are lots of risks to losing weight this fast, not the least of which is the strong likelihood of gaining all the weight right back again because your body goes into famine mode and tries to convert everything it gets into long-term storage, that’s spelled f.a.t. Also spelled, yo-yo.

So…

Forty-three days. Twenty-three pounds. 250 as of right now. By August 4th when the kids and I go ride RAW, I’ll be at 240 or less and a hill-climbing fool. All that weight I won't be carrying up five miles of 6% grade, two miles of 8%, the occasional 12% grade, and even better, not having to oxygenate that extra thirty to forty pounds. Heaven.

RAW this year is going to be a great ride. I LOVE climbing hills!