Sunday 18 January 2015

Weight loss update 2

Two new milestones today:
  • I have now lost 15 kg since 1 January (top graph)
  • I am now (just, barely) lighter than I have been at any point in the past 24 months (bottom graph). (Probably, anyway. I didn't weigh myself at all during the course of 2013, but I'm lighter than I was at my last data point for 2012, and it seems very unlikely that I could have lost weight unintentionally between then and the next data point in January 2014).


Divisions on both graphs represent 5-kg intervals.

A special mention here to the Highcharts Cloud tool — I really like the look of their easy-to-make yet highly customisable charts. The tool has social media sharing built-in too. Nice!


Saturday 10 January 2015

Weight loss update 1

Just a quick update today to note passing two milestones of which I'm proud:
  • The first 10 kg lost (10.2 kg, top graph)
  • That I'm now (just, barely) lighter than I have been at any point in the past 12 months (by 0.4 kg, bottom graph)


In both graphs, the divisions on the vertical axis represent 5 kg intervals.

Friday 9 January 2015

2015 project -- Lose (a lot of) weight


This year, my project is to lose a lot of weight. Specifically, I want to lose about a third of my body weight. My motivation is, over-ridingly, vanity, and I'm not ashamed to say so. I'm very unhappy with the way I look, and I mean to fix that. Of course, I know that there are many other benefits to me and my family if I lose weight, but as important as I think these benefits are, they are intellectual beliefs that I find more difficult to translate into motivation and action than ridding myself of a bad feeling: my embarrassment at the way I look.

This is a battle I've been having, on and off, for decades, ever since I was that fat nerdy kid at school who got bullied a lot, much of it targeted at my weight. The essential problem has two aspects to it:
  • The foods I love most have a very high energy density. I love sweet things, I love oily things. I also love convenience, which leads me to highly processed foods.
  • I have yet to discover the sport or form of physical recreation that appeals to me in the slightest. All of my favourite ways to relax or have fun are entirely sedentary. If I could be wired up to sufficient sources of information, I think that being a brain in a jar might be pretty cool.
So, my approach is to fight both these natural inclinations and to boost my physical activity and decrease my energy intake. As usual for me, I'm pursuing this very aggressively. The factors in my favour include that I can be very  stubborn, and that I don't get bored with routine. Another important weapon I have is that I am easily able to ignore feelings of hunger. Against me is the fact that because I don't actually enjoy what I'm doing here, I rely entirely on routine to keep me going. The upshot of that reliance is that if the routine is disturbed or disrupted in any way, the whole thing falls apart.

Physical activity:

To address the first part, I'm going to the gym every day to do 40 minutes of cardio (on treadmill and elliptical machine) and 20 minutes of resistance training on various upper-body machines. Because I'm so reliant on routine, I need to make sure I do this at a time of day where I'm never going to be disturbed, so I'm waking at 3:00AM to be at the gym from 3:30AM to 4:30AM and home by 5:00AM. To accommodate this, I'm getting to bed earlier. I aim for 9:00PM, but in practice it's usually somewhere between 10:00PM and 11:00PM.

Past experience shows me that this has to be daily, or the routine doesn't stick. I use a gym because, although I've had good results from just walking for an hour or two a day, if rain disrupts the routine for a couple of days, it's gone. Similarly, when I've worked with exercise physiologists in the past, they've assured me that I would get better fitness results from not doing resistance training every day, or from varying my exercise routine from day to day. I'm sure they're right. But I'm equally sure that the question is academic if it ends up with me not doing anything at all. It seems that I can form a pattern more easily around "I'm here at the gym; these are the five machines I must use" than around "I'm here at the gym; these are the three machines I must use because it's Tuesday."

Reducing intake:

On the other side, I'm reducing my calorie intake to practically nothing. By "practically nothing", I mean around 300 calories per day, which should be about what I'm burning in the gym session. Just enough to take in a few nutrients and to keep my gastro-intestinal apparatus running.

Again, to capitalise on the power of routine, I just eat practically the same thing every day. I have one meal a day, in the evening, which consists of a piece of flat bread wrapped around some salad and some ham or salmon.

An entire day's food intake for me in 2015 looks like:


I've had my resting metabolic rate measured in the past, so I know it to be close enough to 2500 calories/day to make the maths neat. With a net calorie intake of about zero and one pound of body fat equal to about 3500 calories, I'd expect to lose around 2½kg per week like this. (I know that weight loss doesn't work to as simple a formula as this. It's a ballpark number.)

I'm also conscious that food does have an important social function too! And so I will occasionally allow myself a treat at a social gathering (as I did last Sunday). My goal in those cases will still be to keep net energy intake for the whole day below 1000 calories. Tonight is games night, so I'll be treating myself to a few sushi rolls in place of my wrap. Yay!

Weight loss at the start of a diet is very rapid due to losing a lot of water. In the first week of 2015, I lost 8.1kg with the method described above. Now, I don't for a minute expect this rate to continue, but it is certainly a very pleasing start! :)

Physically, I already feel a difference in the fit of my clothes, in my posture, and in the flexibility of my joints. Psychologically, as in the past when I've been on extremely restrictive diets, I am experiencing a heightened sense of alertness. I also seem to notice smells more. (Past experience shows me that beyond this lies a kind of euphoria and a kind of floaty, out-of-body feeling, but I'm not there yet).

And as for the long term? I know I can't exercise like this and eat like this indefinitely. This regime isn't designed or intended for that. I also know from repeated past experience that when I come off an extreme diet, I very quickly revert to my sedentary lifestyle and mostly indiscriminate eating. This is a graph of my weight between late September 2010 and today:




A few key features:
  • The lines along the vertical axis represent around 10kg, so over the last four years, my weight has varied by about 30kg, and I'm presently close to the top of that range. Indeed, on 1 January 2015, I weighed more than I've ever recorded in my life. Note however, that there's four years along the horizontal axis, so it's not like I can gain or drop 10kg overnight. (That might take weeks!)
  • The long, featureless, upward slopes between late 2013 and mid 2014 are times when I was paying no attention to my weight at all, so no weigh-ins and no data. 
  • The instances of jagged upward drift were me trying to adhere to "sensible, healthy, everything-in-moderation" eating. I haven't been able to get this to work for me.
  • The slow downward slope through much of 2014 was me experimenting with a 5:2 diet that seemed to work for me for weight maintenance or very gradual weight loss. 
  • The big spike at the end of 2014 was when the 5:2 diet went away completely during the festive season of eating whatever I wanted. I can put on a lot of weight very quickly! (but then again, I can also take it off quickly).


So, it seems likely to me that even if I succeed in reaching my target with these extreme measures, the upward trend will set in again almost immediately. I don't really know what I'll do at that point, but it seems to me that the long-term strategy might be to shorten the cycles of weight gain and loss, so that I embark on these extreme measures sooner, at a lower threshold weight. Anyway, that's for the future.

I'll post updates to this blog to document how this attempt goes.


This blog post uses a mix of English and SI units. "Calories" here are "dietary calories" which are really "kilo-calories". People who want kilojoules, just multiply the numbers by four. Americans and Liberians who want pounds instead of kilogrammes, multiply those numbers by two. In both cases, you'll be "close enough" for the precision expressed in the numbers.




Thursday 1 January 2015

My favourites and least favourites of 2014

Here’s a round-up of the things I liked and the things I didn’t in 2014:

Books

Per Goodreads, here’s a list of what I read in 2014. I only got through 41 out of the 50 books that I had challenged myself to. Among them were three books that I absolutely loved: Dahlgren, The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Of these, I was amazed by the first two books as much as anything that I’ve ever read, and being so very different, I find it impossible to chose a favourite between them. Dahlgren is a long piece of surrealist paranoia that is experienced as much as it is read. My Goodreads review of it here. I found it to be one of those books that stretched my understanding of what an author could do with a text. The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory is a work of memoir that touches one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also explores really complex ideas of memorialisation and of ownership of the past. I haven’t read many books that I have found both emotionally wrenching and intellectually stimulating. This is such a book; my Goodreads review is here.

The book I enjoyed least was Insites: The Book, which I didn’t even finish reading (very rare for me). I found it utterly vapid: my review is here. Other books from which I derived no pleasure this year were David Vann’s Goat Mountain [review] and, astonishingly to me, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger [review].

Live music

I didn’t get out much in 2014, and so I don’t have much to discuss here. I think I only made it to two performances! I enjoyed both of them: The Audreys touring their new album, ’Til My Tears Roll Away, and Early Music Queensland’s programme of late baroque music, Musicalischer Circul. Obviously two very different shows! However, the Audreys performed with a polish absent in the other show, and I enjoyed theirs more.

Albums


I didn't listen to much new music in 2014 either, but I liked ’Til My Tears Roll Away more than anything else I heard. It does fall squarely into the “more of the same” category from The Audreys rather than explore anything new, but because I happen to like the sound of their previous albums so much, I’m perfectly OK with that!

The big disappointment for me was Ella Hooper’s solo debut, In Tongues. This was a surprise, since I liked Killing Heidi and The Verses so much. It was a shock to discover that there wasn’t a single track on this album I could connect with. 

Theatre

I only saw two plays in 2014: Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s The Tempest, and La Boite’s production of Kathryn Marquet’s Pale Blue Dot. I find it impossible to choose between these: one is my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, performed with the tremendous energy and enthusiasm that QSE always brings to their work, and the other was a delightfully nutty yet thoughtful piece superficially about alien abduction, but really more about belief and trust. Both were outstanding.

Movies

The eight movies I watched in 2014 make it perhaps the leanest year for film for me in decades. This was mostly through not having easy access to Apple TV for a large chunk of the year, my main movie- and TV-watching platform these days. Out of what I saw, the highlight was very definitely The Cabin in the Woods, which I enjoyed for its cleverness and Whedon’s evident love of his material. This latter element is something I find lacking in so much mainstream film and is one of the things that draws me to low-budget, amateur film so much. My review is on IMDb.

The film I liked least in 2014 was Interstellar. To explain why, I’ll just recycle the summary I wrote for my IMDb review: I found it to be a film of interesting images, breathtaking visuals, and little consistency or sense.

TV

Early in the year, I heard a lot of buzz around True Detective, and although it very much sounded like not my thing at all, I gave it a try and loved it! Partly, I was drawn to the show’s brooding intensity and bleakness, but there was another element that elevated it to becoming one of my favourite pieces of TV ever. That element is a major spoiler, so I won’t discuss it here, but will instead direct curious readers to my review on IMDb. I'll also mention Broadchurch as another show that defied and grossly exceeded my expectations (and to which I also gave a ten-star rating on IMDb).

In 2014, I continued to sample a wide range of TV in search of new things to enjoy from the last 20 years or so that I’ve been mostly tuned-out to television. Predictably, this turns up a lot more misses than hits. The low-tide mark for my enjoyment of a show during the year was that time I sampled two excruciating episodes of Bob’s Burgers. I have absolutely no idea why so many people find this funny.

Computer games

I played only two computer games in 2014: Papers, Please, and Qwirkle. I really liked the idea and implementation of Papers, Please and could imagine myself getting quite addicted to it, given the opportunity. I haven’t invested the time to discover if that’s actually true though. Qwirkle is a computer implementation of an award-winning boardgame, but I’ll mention it here because I’ve only sampled the computer version. I like it a lot and am definitely addicted. Like most of the board games I enjoy, its mechanics make it appear deceptively simple, but there’s deep strategy to the game that I am very much still learning.

Role-playing games

After a long time, I liked the opportunity of trying out a couple of new games this year. My favourite (of a field of two!) was definitely the new, 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. (Note that “editions” of D&D are largely new games with fundamentally different and incompatible sets of rules.) I documented my initial reactions to the game elsewhere in this blog, and I’m glad to report that my positive impressions have persisted as I’ve continued to play it. I like this better than any edition of D&D since 2nd ed in 1989.

I’m less sold on Trail of Cthulhu. This game features a computer-game-like mechanic of ensuring that before leaving a scene in the story, the player-characters always receive the clue that will advance the plot to the next scene. I understand (and relate to!) the problem that this mechanic is designed to address, but the end result feels a bit too much like a “ghost train” to me. That said, I’d still choose to play Trail of Cthulhu ahead of many other games.

Things that I didn’t do in 2014

Things I normally enjoy but didn’t get to do in 2014 include:
  • see a dance performance
  • go to the opera
  • play board games
Hopefully, I’ll get to do more of those in the new year :)