Sunday yet again and time for my weekly weigh-in.
This week was a tricky one for eating smart. As most of you probably know, and the rest of you are probably among the ranks of the undead, Thanksgiving was this week. Due to both sides of my family being in town, that meant not one but two large and delicious meals in honor of said day. I did my best to limit myself to reasonable portion sizes, and I feel like I did a decent job, though we'll see what the scale has to say about that later on.
Last week I mentioned that I was done talking about the diet part of my plan for a bit and that I'd be filling this space with something else this week, and going forward, and so here it is, let me know what you think in the comments.
Diet is only really one part of the equation when your goal is more about being in better shape than merely losing weight. As such I moved a while back from a plan based almost exclusively on diet to one that includes at least a reasonable amount of exercise as well. Those who have known me a while know that I have never been one for dedicated exercise, or really much at all, in past years. When I was younger, as is probably the case with most of you, I was much more active than I am now. I played sports when I was young, and then again in high school for a little while, and for a while I even did martial arts. I enjoyed all these things when I did them. But for some reason I got it into my head that I didn't like exercise and thus I didn't do it.
Recently I've been bitten by the bug, and my interest has been piqued. As a result I've started running. 3 times a week, 30 minutes or so at a time. I'm using a training plan I'll talk about more in a coming installment. It's been really great for me I think. I tend to do my runs in the morning before breakfast or work, so that it wakes me up and leaves me energized most of the day. I'm much more awake than I was before on less sleep than I was getting. All in all I am really glad I started doing this because I feel better, and combined with the weight I've been working on I look better too. I was never really that big on what I looked like so it's nothing like that, but I'm much more comfortable in my skin now than I used to be, and I like it. I feel great and I hope to continue along the path to feeling even better. I've got some designs on how I'm going to get there as well.
That's about all I've got for now, so time to get to the numbers. What does the scale have to say about my thanksgiving week? 215.0, down 2.8 pounds since last week. So it would seem that I'm doing alright for myself. Let's hope I can keep it up. See you all next week.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 44)
Sunday morning yet again and time for the weekly weigh-in.
Been a hectic week for me, as this weekend was the opening of the biggest movie so far since the end of summer. That said, I've been pretty good about my food this week. Kept myself to reasonably sized meals, and often only 2 of those a day. Sporadic cravings for salad have been helping keep me feeling nice and healthy about my choices too, mental victories if nothing else.
Now, last week I mentioned that I was using some statistics magic to help me track my weight, and I thought I should give a little credit to where I got the idea for that. A few weeks ago I found a book online called the Hacker's Diet. It was written by a computer programmer who had struggled with weight problems for years and had finally beaten them and decided to share what he had learned in that time. While much of the book was things I already knew, the reading was quick and included a few things I either didn't know or hadn't realized before.
Losing weight is easily, and at least mostly accurately, abstracted by looking at simply the amount of calories in compared to the number of calories out, if you are putting out more calories than you consume you will most likely lose weight at a rate related to that imbalance. That combined with the fact that fat contains about 3500 calories per pound can help you estimate how much of a defecit you need to run to lose a given amount of weight. That won't really hold up perfectly in all cases due to varying body composition and what types of exercise you are doing etc. but it works well enough for now. By tracking your calorie intake and your weight you can estimate your calorie burn more accurately than the values you can look up on a table, but those are a good starting point for figuring out how many calories a day to start with.
Tracking weight is an important subject as well. If you just look at the readings from a scale every day they fluctuate a lot. You can reduce that fluctuation somewhat by taking your measurements at the same time of day, wearing the same amount of clothing, or various other means, but no matter how hard you try it will fluctuate, sometimes wildly. Why is that? Water. The human body is composed of about 75% water by volume. The amount of water you have in your system at any given time causes your weight to fluctuate, and factors like having eaten a salty snack before bed can cause your body to have more of it in the morning than if you skipped the snack and went straight to bed. So some way to account for the randomness becomes a handy tool to have for tracking weight. For that I have come to use an exponentially smoothed moving average. Which is a fancy way of saying that I take each days reading, combined with the previous result, and apply a small amount of math to it to help make sure that random fluctuation doesn't throw off the average wildly, and that things which happened more than a week ago are less relevant to the average than things which happened yesterday. All in all, it smooths out the graph and helps me see what my weight is a little more accurately than I did before. If my weight is above the line that day the average goes up, if it's below, it goes down. Pretty simple.
So, feeling good this week, got the tools and the knowledge to monitor what goes on with my weight and my diet, what do I have to show for it? Well the scale tells me that today I'm 217.8, same as last week. No progress, but nothing gained either so I'll take what I can get. This is probably going to be the last post focusing on the diet and measurement part of my weight loss for a while, though I will still be posting my weekly weight change each week. Stay tuned for what will fill the middle of the posts in the future.
Been a hectic week for me, as this weekend was the opening of the biggest movie so far since the end of summer. That said, I've been pretty good about my food this week. Kept myself to reasonably sized meals, and often only 2 of those a day. Sporadic cravings for salad have been helping keep me feeling nice and healthy about my choices too, mental victories if nothing else.
Now, last week I mentioned that I was using some statistics magic to help me track my weight, and I thought I should give a little credit to where I got the idea for that. A few weeks ago I found a book online called the Hacker's Diet. It was written by a computer programmer who had struggled with weight problems for years and had finally beaten them and decided to share what he had learned in that time. While much of the book was things I already knew, the reading was quick and included a few things I either didn't know or hadn't realized before.
Losing weight is easily, and at least mostly accurately, abstracted by looking at simply the amount of calories in compared to the number of calories out, if you are putting out more calories than you consume you will most likely lose weight at a rate related to that imbalance. That combined with the fact that fat contains about 3500 calories per pound can help you estimate how much of a defecit you need to run to lose a given amount of weight. That won't really hold up perfectly in all cases due to varying body composition and what types of exercise you are doing etc. but it works well enough for now. By tracking your calorie intake and your weight you can estimate your calorie burn more accurately than the values you can look up on a table, but those are a good starting point for figuring out how many calories a day to start with.
Tracking weight is an important subject as well. If you just look at the readings from a scale every day they fluctuate a lot. You can reduce that fluctuation somewhat by taking your measurements at the same time of day, wearing the same amount of clothing, or various other means, but no matter how hard you try it will fluctuate, sometimes wildly. Why is that? Water. The human body is composed of about 75% water by volume. The amount of water you have in your system at any given time causes your weight to fluctuate, and factors like having eaten a salty snack before bed can cause your body to have more of it in the morning than if you skipped the snack and went straight to bed. So some way to account for the randomness becomes a handy tool to have for tracking weight. For that I have come to use an exponentially smoothed moving average. Which is a fancy way of saying that I take each days reading, combined with the previous result, and apply a small amount of math to it to help make sure that random fluctuation doesn't throw off the average wildly, and that things which happened more than a week ago are less relevant to the average than things which happened yesterday. All in all, it smooths out the graph and helps me see what my weight is a little more accurately than I did before. If my weight is above the line that day the average goes up, if it's below, it goes down. Pretty simple.
So, feeling good this week, got the tools and the knowledge to monitor what goes on with my weight and my diet, what do I have to show for it? Well the scale tells me that today I'm 217.8, same as last week. No progress, but nothing gained either so I'll take what I can get. This is probably going to be the last post focusing on the diet and measurement part of my weight loss for a while, though I will still be posting my weekly weight change each week. Stay tuned for what will fill the middle of the posts in the future.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 43)
Sunday morning again and time for my weekly weigh-in.
This weekend I'm having a change of scenery and visiting some good friends down in Tucson. With good friends come good times, and with that food that while good may not be good for me. But, I'm not worried. I've learned a lot about watching what I eat of late that I feel confident will keep me from any serious pitfalls. This week saw a bit of a plateau in my daily weight that was a tad worrisome to me. Now, I knew there wasn't a real reason to be worried, I've moved past focusing on the daily weight and toward a focus on the more long-term trends in my weight . To help smooth out the randomness that gets introduced by the human bodies fluctuating water levels I use a little bit of stats magic and daily weigh-ins to help give me a better picture of my weight over time. That has been steadily downward, though at varying speeds.
So, with that knowledge giving me the surety that this was if anything a temporary setback I decided that I'd try and see what I could do about it anyway, as 3 days of the same weight felt like good enough reason to try something. So, by accident more than anything, Wednesday and Thursday both ended up including a fairly harsh calorie restriction by the name of intermittent fasting. In neither case did I really feel much hungrier than on a normal day so nothing to worry about there, but I feel like it's helped me power through that plateau from early in the week and might help me see some good results. If so it's likely that the intermittent fast may become a part of my regular regimen for dealing with such annoying weight stability, and if not I may still do it if only because it actually felt rather nice at the time.
So, did my trickery yield results or did my trip to Tucson have more of an impact on my weight than I thought? That is to the scale to decide. 217.8, up 0.4 since last week. So it looks as though my efforts balanced out my weekend at least. Have to see what I can do to power through this flat spot next week.
This weekend I'm having a change of scenery and visiting some good friends down in Tucson. With good friends come good times, and with that food that while good may not be good for me. But, I'm not worried. I've learned a lot about watching what I eat of late that I feel confident will keep me from any serious pitfalls. This week saw a bit of a plateau in my daily weight that was a tad worrisome to me. Now, I knew there wasn't a real reason to be worried, I've moved past focusing on the daily weight and toward a focus on the more long-term trends in my weight . To help smooth out the randomness that gets introduced by the human bodies fluctuating water levels I use a little bit of stats magic and daily weigh-ins to help give me a better picture of my weight over time. That has been steadily downward, though at varying speeds.
So, with that knowledge giving me the surety that this was if anything a temporary setback I decided that I'd try and see what I could do about it anyway, as 3 days of the same weight felt like good enough reason to try something. So, by accident more than anything, Wednesday and Thursday both ended up including a fairly harsh calorie restriction by the name of intermittent fasting. In neither case did I really feel much hungrier than on a normal day so nothing to worry about there, but I feel like it's helped me power through that plateau from early in the week and might help me see some good results. If so it's likely that the intermittent fast may become a part of my regular regimen for dealing with such annoying weight stability, and if not I may still do it if only because it actually felt rather nice at the time.
So, did my trickery yield results or did my trip to Tucson have more of an impact on my weight than I thought? That is to the scale to decide. 217.8, up 0.4 since last week. So it looks as though my efforts balanced out my weekend at least. Have to see what I can do to power through this flat spot next week.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Weekly Weigh-in (Week 42)
Sunday yet again and time for my weekly weigh-in.
Been feeling the urge for salad the past couple days, an urge I make a point of sating whenever it comes up for two reasons, if my I'm getting a craving for something I generally consider there to be only a couple reasons, my body is trying to tell me I need that, or that it thinks it needs it. Since I fail to see myself as a salad addict, I'm going with a legitimate need. Secondly, I actually like salad.
I've been doing falling down a bit on my fruits and veggies of late, which probably accounts somewhat for the salad craving, but I've been doing better with my calories most of the time. Now, last week I hinted that there was a reason I put all the calorie information for various dishes that went into my pocket index into excel, and this week I'd like to share that reason. An iPhone app called Meal Diary. Meal Diary has been deprecated in favor of another app, but I prefer Meal Diary for a few reasons I'll detail below.
The reason I put together the excel chart is because using that I was able to have the system calculate an average and standard deviation, which I used as the Small, Medium, and Large sizes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack on Meal Diary. I like the way it handles calorie entry for meals because I can either enter an exact number if I know it, or just pick if it's Small, Medium, or Large if I don't know the exact number. Once it's entered in the app takes care of charting the data, and provides charts for the past couple weeks for calories in. It also can track calories burned from exercise and etc. so that helps keep my calorie counts that much more accurate.
It also allows you to enter in weight measurements which it tracks and graphs much like the calorie measurements. I like Meal Diary better than it's replacement because of the calorie entry method, it is much simpler than a slider which I cannot easily get to the right number, or having to look up each individual food item to add to my meal. The thing I really like about Meal Diary is how simple it is to track my calorie intake on the go. I can quickly and easily enter in a decent approximation of what I'm eating, and that works well enough for my needs right now. Tracking my calories is my current plan for helping manage my weight, if I can balance my calories in with my calories out, and manage the in appropriately, it should help with my weight. I'm aware that it's slightly less simple than just calories in vs calories out, but the subtleties there are something I'll save for a later date.
So let's look at the scale for this week. 217.4, down 3.8 pounds since last week, 65 since I started. Only about 10 pounds away from my next big milestone. I've come a long way, and my life has been made all the better for it. Even still, I've got a ways to go before I'm at a place I'm really happy with, so I'll see you all next week with an update.
Been feeling the urge for salad the past couple days, an urge I make a point of sating whenever it comes up for two reasons, if my I'm getting a craving for something I generally consider there to be only a couple reasons, my body is trying to tell me I need that, or that it thinks it needs it. Since I fail to see myself as a salad addict, I'm going with a legitimate need. Secondly, I actually like salad.
I've been doing falling down a bit on my fruits and veggies of late, which probably accounts somewhat for the salad craving, but I've been doing better with my calories most of the time. Now, last week I hinted that there was a reason I put all the calorie information for various dishes that went into my pocket index into excel, and this week I'd like to share that reason. An iPhone app called Meal Diary. Meal Diary has been deprecated in favor of another app, but I prefer Meal Diary for a few reasons I'll detail below.
The reason I put together the excel chart is because using that I was able to have the system calculate an average and standard deviation, which I used as the Small, Medium, and Large sizes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack on Meal Diary. I like the way it handles calorie entry for meals because I can either enter an exact number if I know it, or just pick if it's Small, Medium, or Large if I don't know the exact number. Once it's entered in the app takes care of charting the data, and provides charts for the past couple weeks for calories in. It also can track calories burned from exercise and etc. so that helps keep my calorie counts that much more accurate.
It also allows you to enter in weight measurements which it tracks and graphs much like the calorie measurements. I like Meal Diary better than it's replacement because of the calorie entry method, it is much simpler than a slider which I cannot easily get to the right number, or having to look up each individual food item to add to my meal. The thing I really like about Meal Diary is how simple it is to track my calorie intake on the go. I can quickly and easily enter in a decent approximation of what I'm eating, and that works well enough for my needs right now. Tracking my calories is my current plan for helping manage my weight, if I can balance my calories in with my calories out, and manage the in appropriately, it should help with my weight. I'm aware that it's slightly less simple than just calories in vs calories out, but the subtleties there are something I'll save for a later date.
So let's look at the scale for this week. 217.4, down 3.8 pounds since last week, 65 since I started. Only about 10 pounds away from my next big milestone. I've come a long way, and my life has been made all the better for it. Even still, I've got a ways to go before I'm at a place I'm really happy with, so I'll see you all next week with an update.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
A Life without Flash
A rare midweek post from me today.
It's struck me recently, in part due to a post from Daring Fireball in turn from Ars Technica, that Flash is a huge resource hog. I've known this for quite some time, hell I've got not one but 2 programs running on my system at all times whose only purpose is to keep Flash from running away with my system resources. But today I finally asked myself a question. Why? Why do I still have flash installed if I go to the trouble of blocking it from loading on the majority of all webpages? Why do I want to have something that requires to programs simply to keep it from eating my system? Why would I have something that decreases battery time by as much as a third when left unchecked, and that's just browsing normal websites, imagine what that would be like if you were on flash intensive sites. Why not simplify everything and just get rid of it? So I did. I uninstalled Flash Player, and will be browsing the web without it for the foreseeable future. At the very least for the next week I will not be installing Flash, hopefully ever again. I'll try and remember to post updates on this but I'm not going to promise anything.
It's struck me recently, in part due to a post from Daring Fireball in turn from Ars Technica, that Flash is a huge resource hog. I've known this for quite some time, hell I've got not one but 2 programs running on my system at all times whose only purpose is to keep Flash from running away with my system resources. But today I finally asked myself a question. Why? Why do I still have flash installed if I go to the trouble of blocking it from loading on the majority of all webpages? Why do I want to have something that requires to programs simply to keep it from eating my system? Why would I have something that decreases battery time by as much as a third when left unchecked, and that's just browsing normal websites, imagine what that would be like if you were on flash intensive sites. Why not simplify everything and just get rid of it? So I did. I uninstalled Flash Player, and will be browsing the web without it for the foreseeable future. At the very least for the next week I will not be installing Flash, hopefully ever again. I'll try and remember to post updates on this but I'm not going to promise anything.
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