I like to ride my bicycle...

Just shy of 400 miles now...

Just a little over nine weeks ago I posted a picture of myself on my new bicycle and proclaimed my refusal to pay four dollars a gallon for gasoline. Most everyone, including my neighbors, laughed at my silly looking bike and the fat guy sitting astride it. No one thought I'd last very long on the thing and most folks just couldn't wait until the day it appeared on the front lawn with a for sale sign hanging from the handlebars.

My P.T. Cruiser has now remained parked in the very same spot in front of our house for sixty-four consecutive days now. Rain or shine, nice or not so nice I've either walked to the grocery store for what I needed or to the Walgreens for my prescriptions. The bicycle takes me wherever else I want to go for fun and entertainment. No one in my neighborhood is laughing anymore let me tell you.

I'm now down under two-hundred pounds in weight for the first time in a very long time. I feel better physically than I have in several years. I was taking eighty units of Insulin a day and still couldn't keep my blood sugar levels under three and four hundred. I felt like death on a stick with a side order of crap every waking minute of each and every day. I was contemplating taking up the cigarette habit again because I know it to be a guaranteed form of suicide with the added benefit of being slow enough that should a cure for diabetes be found I could quit smoking and get myself cured.

I take maybe twenty-five units of Insulin now every other day or so. My blood sugar levels stay within a range of one-hundred and twenty to one-hundred and forty. (Yeah, I've changed my eating habits too.) I feel like a new person. I look like a new person too.

Now, a lot of people have started asking me a lot of questions about bicycling and I normally don't mind answering them. However, I recently noticed that the vast majority of questions people were asking tended towards the negative; "What do you do when it rains? "What if you get a flat tire?" "What if you get attacked?" What if you need to get to California?" "What if you need a week's worth of groceries?" . No one ever asks me; "How far can you go in a day?" "Did you lose all that weight biking?" "How much have you saved on gasoline?" "Has your sex life improved?" (The answer to that one would be yes! I now masturbate up to four or five times a day.)

You can ask all the questions you want to ask and easily convince yourself that you simply couldn't use a bike in any degree in your life. It's very easy to do and takes very little effort to accomplish. I'll just finish this post by saying that I am a fifty-four year old Diabetic with a wife and a son and yes, our lives are actually a bit better because of the benefits accrued from bicycling; we have extra money from what isn't being spent on gasoline for two automobiles, daddy is saving big money on Insulin and quite frankly a healthy daddy is a fun daddy.

There are ways to beat the system. Yes, they take a little bit of effort on our part, but in the long run the benefits are well worth it.