My down days may be numbered

I’ve been pretty happy with the Johnson UpDayDownDay Diet so far. It’s surprisingly easy to follow, and I’ve lost some weight in the almost-three-weeks I’ve been doing it (though not as much as I was hoping). I haven’t had any negative symptoms and like the guilt-free feeling I (sometimes) experience while eating yummy food. And now I’m thinking of quitting.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? Well, one thing I left out: it’s pretty much impossible to do a respectable bike ride on 500 calories a day. The most I’ve done on a down day was a 10-mile tandem ride, and only that because I figured if I toppled off, my husband would come back for me. And I can’t solve the issue by just eating what I need to exercise and counting the net calories; the benefit from JUDDDD is only reported to happen if the calorie intake is low, not if you work off a higher intake.

So far, I’ve gotten around this problem by only riding Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends. It’s worked okay, but now that biking season has really started, I’m finding it really limiting. Daniel wants to do some hill training on the tandem on Monday nights, and lots of the group rides around here are not on Tuesday and Thursday (though some of them are, and those are the ones I’ve been doing).

It (eventually…) occurred to me that it’s less than logical to avoid exercise I want to do because of a diet. Just a bit counterproductive. However, I don’t really want this to just be an excuse to quit, so I’m going to continue to do my down days as scheduled until I actually have a scheduled ride that conflicts. At that point, I’ll switch to a combination of Tim Ferriss’s plan and The Lose Weight Diet, which I’ll explain in detail when I get there.

I am, however, keeping the JUDDDD in mind for winter, when it’s freakin’ cold out there and I only get out twice or three times a week to snowboard. It would be nice to maintain through the winter for once instead of gaining…