Do you ever think of yourself as someone else while you exercise?

It may be an odd question to ask, but I ask it now because of a YouTube video I recently watched titled “I Was Always Hungry: The Unseen Side Of Pro Cycling.” It made me recall doing just that as a 10-year-old boy while shooting hoops alone and providing the play-by-play for a fantasy game in which I was not only the announcer but also that oh-so smooth New York Knick named Walt Frazier.

But that memory came to me only after I remembered doing something somewhat similar as an adult while riding a bicycle alone and going absolutely nowhere 32 years later.

How — for about a dozen times around 5:30 a.m. on weekday mornings in the winter of 2003, with my bike affixed to an indoor trainer in my unheated attic and just before the first of six all-out five minute intervals — I became, at least in my mind, Tyler Hamilton.

Hamilton’s the former American cyclist who in July of 2003 would become well-known for winning the hilly 16th stage of the Tour de France. He did so by way of a 34-mile solo breakaway — one where he stayed seated on the bike the entire time.

He never stood to make the climbs easier, you see, because he couldn’t.

He had been part of the 35-rider pileup near the finish of the second stage and sustained a broken collarbone, yet somehow rode the remainder of the Tour, won that 16th stage, and finished fourth overall.

Dr. Gérard Porte, the chief medical officer of the Tour de France at that time, told The Guardian that Hamilton’s 2003 tour was “the finest example of courage that I’ve come across,” after explaining how “a normal person” would have needed four weeks away from cycling. While Porte’s pronouncement answers any questions about Hamilton’s desire — or his through-the-roof pain tolerance — you probably have one for me.

Why think of yourself as Tyler Hamilton months before he becomes so well known? Because doing six all-out intervals of five minutes even with equal length recoveries are almost as tough as Hamilton was in the Giro the year before.

On a tricky descent during the fifth stage, the spindle on his rear wheel snapped and he crashed. When in 2017 Graham Bensinger reminded Hamilton of the incident on his eponymous television show, the obviously inured-to-pain Hamilton recalled what was “fortunate” about the fall. “We didn’t know it [the head of the insert at the socket of his collarbone] was broken, so I kept going.”

Bensinger asked if the keeping going was done in pain. “A lot,” Hamilton said. “I spent a lot of time grinding my teeth on the bike — or even sleeping.”

That grinding led to Hamilton needing 11 teeth replaced.

After you try to imagine the degree of pain Hamilton was in during the majority of the Giro — a race in which he placed second by the way — I challenge you to imagine something else. Hunger. But not the type you experience three hours after supper when you’re comfortably ensconced on the couch and watching a show.

The type Hamilton experienced 90 percent of the time he’s riding as a pro and doubly so in the weeks before the Tour de France when his goal was to reduce his body fat to 2.8 percent. My guess is that you never want to experience that sort of hunger.

But my experience has been you don’t need to, regardless of the weight you want to maintain as a way to insure good health or lose to get better at a sport. All you need to do is to always consider a food’s energy density before eating it.

But it can’t be that simple, can it? Yes, it can.

The importance of a food’s energy density and the concept behind it took root about 25 years ago with the publication of The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan: Feel Full on Fewer Calories (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000) by Barbara Rolls, Ph.D. In this book, Rolls introduces a weight-loss theory she calls Volumetrics — which is really nothing more than the concept of energy density at work.

A medium-sized, three-inch-diameter apple, for instance, weighs 182 grams, 156 grams of which are water. It also contains 95 calories and 4.4 grams of fiber.

Because of the apple’s amount of weight, water, and fiber in relationship to its total number of calories, it’s seen as an energy dense food.

If for some reason you decide to eat as many apples as need be to sate your after-supper hunger, I highly doubt the number reaches three.

Three medium apples only contain 285 calories. They do, however, weigh 546 grams, a weight that is nearly 50 percent more than a 13.5-ounce bag of potato chips.

And it’s easy to eat a whole bag of potato chips as you watch a show. Doing so means — even if the chips are plain ones — you’ve consumed 2025 calories, about seven times the number in three apples.

That difference in calories between three apples and a bag of plain chips is close to the total number of calories a healthy but petite middle-aged women needs to eat in a single day to maintain her weight.