"Keep Ridin' . . . Always"

By fall 2006—thousands of miles now put on the pedals—Cutshall weighed in at 350 pounds. A new person was emerging from a shell.

A bike was saving his life. And the person who built that bike, Bob Brown of Bob Brown Cycles, lived in Minneapolis. “Other frame builders turned me down, even laughed at me,” Cutshall says. “But Bob embraced the project.”

Knowing no one but Brown, the Cutshalls—Scott, his wife, Amy, and eight-year-old Chloe—moved halfway across the country in June 2007.

“We wanted to go somewhere to embrace the cycling lifestyle,” says Cutshall, who considered Portland, Oregon, before Brown and other local cyclists persuaded the family in Internet discussions that Minneapolis—the nation’s number-two cycling city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—was the best choice.

They sent a deposit for an apartment and made the move, sight unseen. Amy, a nurse, got a job in St. Paul. Scott home-schooled Chloe from their new apartment in Minneapolis’s Seward neighborhood, bike lanes and parkway trails streaming to all compass points right outside the front door. The family owns a car, but Cutshall says 99 percent of errands are done on two wheels, pannier packs and a trailer hauling groceries home from the store. Chloe rides on a tag-along bike attachment.

As the family settled into life in Minnesota, the pounds continued to fall away. A weight check in August last year—Cutshall gets on a scale every six weeks—revealed digits blinking at 278.2. It’d been 20 months, and Cutshall had dropped almost half of his body mass.

Riding through the Minnesota fall and into the cold, Cutshall calculated that so far in 2007, he’d gone 4,083 miles.

He ate essentially the same thing every day, three meals based on research from the book Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a New Jersey physician. The food equaled a daily dose of about 1,200 calories, and provided all the nutrients, protein, and vitamins essential for good health, though nothing more, Cutshall says.

He has an espresso with breakfast and a glass of wine with dinner. Cutshall never tires of the menu, as it was designed to include “everything a human craves,” he says. “There are things that are hot, cold, salty, creamy, chewy, spicy, savory, and crisp.”

Cutshall emphasizes that this meal plan is not a diet. In fact, don’t even say that word around him. After years of trying fad diets, the D-word no longer exists in the Cutshall nomenclature: “It takes a total lifestyle change, with food being one part of a larger picture.”

In March, Cutshall weighed 232 pounds. I’d seen a picture of him near his peak weight. Now, sitting next to his daughter, a mug of black coffee steaming on the table between us, Cutshall is unrecognizable from the photograph.