Wogster

You need to get serious, most of us that start and don't get very far, I include myself here, are simply not doing enough. The most common reason for this, is that we don't really want to go through the pain and aggravation of actually doing what it takes. When it comes to eating, we simply don't know how, so we need to learn. Second, life has a nasty habit of getting in the way.

Let me deal with the second point first, "riding my butt off" this is a relative term, how far is this, in distance per week, 10 miles, 20 miles, 100 miles? After 2 years, unless you have medical reasons not to, you should be riding somewhere beyond 100 miles per week, unless you live in a winter climate, and if you do, you should have a trainer and use that in the off season to stay in shape so you can get back to that 100 miles per week, fairly quickly. If you follow the general rule, starting at 10 miles per week and increasing by 10% each week (rounded to the nearest mile) you should hit 100 miles per week in 26 weeks. What becomes the problem is that at 12MPH for 100 miles takes about 8½ hours per week, and modern life with it's go go go attitude tends to mean that taking 8½ hours for anything means your sanity is in question. The only exception seems to be watching the idiot box, if it comes between riding and television, riding should be the priority, even the World Cup isn't a reason to replace riding with television, you can get the highlights at fifa.com anyway.

Now if your going to ride more, you need to make sure that you get the most nutritional value from your food at the lowest caloric intake level, this is hard, and often you need professional help, your doctor can recommend someone who is a nutritionist specializing in athletes. This is to retrain yourself to eat properly.

The problem with food in general, through much of human history, there was a feast/famine cycle in place, for a period you had bumper crops in everything and you feasted, even the skinniest people would put on weight, then the feast cycle would end, and a famine cycle would start and nobody was able to eat well, even the King was looking a little thin by the end of it, you would then lose the weight you put on during the feasting. Now of course we can ship food vast distances, so even if the local crops fail you can import food from other places, the last famine cycle in North America was in the 1930's. This of course has lead to a permanent feast cycle in some parts of the world and a permanent famine cycle in others.