Scott Martin

Years ago, everybody obsessed over the weight of their equipment. We drilled holes in perfectly good parts, which started mysteriously failing. We replaced alloy nuts and bolts with criminally expensive titanium bits. We bought frames with metal tubing so thin you could dent it with your thumb. All to get a bike under 21 pounds.

Today we’re all astride 16-pound road bikes, so now we’re obsessing over the weight of our bodies.

The culprit is the dreaded power-to-weight ratio, courtesy of that horrible-wonderful invention known as the watt meter. The math is inescapable: Lose a pound, climb 15-20 seconds per mile faster.

No wonder every conversation with my cycling buddies eventually starts sounding like an anorexia chat room: “I need to lose 10 pounds so I stopped eating sugar, dairy, fat, carbs, gluten and foods harvested in months containing the letter ‘R’.”

So we turn to brides...
None of this works, of course. But now there’s hope, in the form of those paragons of nutritional expertise: brides.

Desperate to fit into tiny wedding dresses and look gorgeous in wedding photos, brides-to-be are engaging in some radical weight-loss strategies, according to The New York Times.

There’s the Master Cleanse diet: lemon juice, paprika and maple syrup in water, for 10 days. Or daily injections of human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone associated with pregnancy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s baloney, but one California clinic is offering the treatment for a mere $950. My favorite weight-loss plan: a feeding tube inserted through your nose for 10 days that delivers 800 calories a day. (Side effects may include constipation, bad breath and dizziness.)

Hmm. Maybe I’ll just ride a little more.

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