While replacing "The greatest" with "A great" probably makes the quotation more accurate for most people, Walter Bogehart still made a solid point when he said, "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

But I believe there's a variation that's even more profound: "truly great pleasure in life is doing what you yourself thought you couldn't do."I say this because on Sunday, Oct. 12 I did just that and derived from it a truly great pleasure by doing what I normally do, but under such circumstances that I thought the normal was impossible. I completed a typical Sunday off-season bicycle ride 77 miles in just over four hours when a rather atypical diet during the half-day beforehand should not have allowed me to do so.On Monday the 13th, I was scheduled for a colonoscopy, so that meant from 12 a.m. Sunday until the procedure about 34 hours later I could eat no solid food though ingesting clear-liquids (calories from apple juice, broth, Jell-O, or a sports drink like Gatorade) was permissible for the first 24 hours. But I didn't intend to do so.These clear-liquid calories are simple sugars (except for the broth) and I was not about to put hundreds of calories of simple sugars into my system even if that was my only caloric option.So how could I expect to survive the aforementioned ride that includes 12 miles of simulated racing without any calories in my system? Knowing what I know about nutrition, I assumed I couldn't.I imagined I'd begin to feel the effects of no food around the ride's two-hour mark just about the time the racing part starts. The racing would amp me up, however, and I really wouldn't feel the muscular agony and suffer a big-time bonk until I finished the racing and began the 25-mile trek back to my father's house.So before I began, I told my father to expect a phone call and to use my car since it has a bicycle roof rack when he picked me up.But I never called him.Though I was a bit more restrained than normal during the racing part, I finished the typical four-hour ride and didn't feel the effects of exercising with no food in my system a light headache and a sort of stinging in my hips, flutes, and quads until the last 30 minutes or so.But in my mind, the riding was the easy part of the fast, for until those last 30 minutes I really didn't think about food. What I had really been dreading was the immediate time after the ride when I'm conditioned to eat heartily and frequently to aid recovery.Surprisingly, I really didn't feel that hungry that afternoon. I even felt energetic enough to do about 90 minutes of yard work. When I came indoors afterwords, however, I decided not to press my luck, and ate a quart container of sugar-free Jell-O.That was a mistake and the point to this entire story.Minutes after eating the sugar-free Jell-O, I went from feeling perfectly at peace with the idea of consuming no food for the next 18 hours to insanely ravenous. Now I believed there was no way I could survive the night without eating something.But I had to. When I had questioned things, a nurse told me that if the doctor found any food in my system during the procedure, he would stop and reschedule.Luckily for me and rather ironically, the feeling of ravenous hunger occurred close to the part of the procedure everyone claims is the absolute worst: drinking 96 ounces of a clear liquid mixed with that god-awful bowel-cleansing stuff labeled Mirilax.After chugging about a third of that, I quickly lost my desire to eat anything.I slept soundly, managed to do a very lethargic indoor bike ride the next morning, and then had the procedure performed flawlessly Monday morning.Now I look back at that Sunday ride with a great deal of satisfaction, especially when other cyclists ask me about it with that How-in-the-world-did-you-ever? look upon their faces.But why is any of this in any way pertinent to you? How does this story illustrate anything you can use in your life?Because it illustrates how much about nutrition and dieting we collectively do not know.I chose to begin to address this concept by sharing a personal anecdote that I hoped you would find interesting. Next week, you'll read about research that in essence calls into question what was thought to be established science that simplified dieting.