So, July was a month of experimentation. I've lost a ton of weight over the last 14 months (113 pounds to be exact), but I've still got all this FAT on my body. So, I thought I'd try an experiment in July. I'd done some reading on heart-rates and how your body burns calories within those heart-rate zones, and all the literature consistently said if you keep your heart-rate in the "fat burning" zone, 50% of your calories burned comes from fat (versus only 15% of calories from fat when you are in the anaerobic zone). Anyway, livestrong.com has some good articles if you want to read more.

So, my goal in July was to keep my heart-rate in that fat burning zone, to see if that helped get rid of some of this fat I'm carrying around. I did well... in 35 days, I rode 28 times, and 22 of those rides were within the fat burning zone.

My results? My body fat percentage went UP 0.5%. From 31% to 31.5%!!! I call that a failure of epic proportions.

It's very interesting to me how our bodies don't work in the ways we would expect them to. How it's not as easy as calories in versus calories out. I also only lost 0.8 pounds in 5 weeks... even though I burned over 16,000 calories (per my heart-rate monitor). I know I ate on plan, which ends up being about 1,600 calories/day, so... it would seem I should have lost 5+ pounds. I can't explain it.

I just know, starting today, I'm going back to my "normal" way of riding my bike, which will have my heart-rate mostly in the anaerobic zone. That seemed to work (given previous months' results). We'll see what results August brings.