http://latenightcoder.livejournal.com/51107.html

Yesterday was the last of the 30 day extension on the dieting I had been doing.  I weighed in this morning at 217.4 pounds, but I am a belt size slimmer.  Because about half of my exercise is weight training, it isn't hard for me to accept that my increasing weight is muscle mass.  Looking in a mirror, I believe I can distinguish a distinct increase in upper body musculature.

I started the 30 day diet with 9 tokens (read previous entries for "token" definition), and ended with 15.  This round was distinctly more difficult than the previous diet incarnation, but I think I could struggle through it indefinitely if desired.

Notes:

1. 90 minutes of game time per token seemed disproportionately short because I could go through six or so tokens on a relaxing Saturday but it would take me several days to accumulate that many.  Part of the issue is that there is a fairly solid limit to the amount of exercise a body can do before risking injury or food that can be consumed, but a much higher limit on the amount of 90 minute increments for computer games.  I'd recommend increasing the exchange from 90 minutes to 120 minutes.

2. I went to the shooting range a lot, as one of the ways that I could earn tokens after I'd exhausted the more physical exercises.  Range time could be between 2 and 4 hours so it is a significant way to earn tokens to later exchange for video games.  All of this range time has significantly improved my marksmanship, one of the anticipated effects of having added it to the plan in the first place.

3. I found that I rarely ate dinner anymore.  When the original 60 day diet started I'd have dinner every two or three nights, but for this recent trial I've had dinner maybe five times in thirty days.  Most of my tokens were spent on video games over the weekend.


I'm not going to immediately jump into another cycle of dieting, but I am going to maintain a semblance of it until I can decide on the rules for the next iteration.  I think I need to separate out the exercising and food from the game play and firearms, reduce the "meal" size for very unhealthy foods (ice cream, cookies, etc.) by half, and add a weekly "tax" to force exercising even when skipping dinner.  I also think I'll add programming time as a way to earn tokens for gameplay, though I haven't settled on the specifics.


In parallel, I plan for two more experiments.

1. I recently bought a pull-up bar and found that I couldn't do one proper pull-up.  Apparently, of all the muscle groups I've been exercising none of them were the primaries for pull-ups.  I want to be able to do 10 full form (all the way down and all the way up) pull-ups, but haven't thought of the conditions of this experiment (i.e. how to pressure myself to do it).

2. I want to be able to do 100 push-ups.  I don't know what conditions to place on this experiment either.


The results of these most recent experiments have been enlightening.  By adding some slight pressures to my daily routine I was able to influence my behavior with a very noticeable outcome.  I never felt overwhelmed, nor did I feel the time was dragging on.  Behavioral evolution, a slow but significant adaptation to subtle pressures.  I think my personal programming projects have fallen behind and I think modifying my pressures to incorporate them will lead to important results.


-LateNightCoder

After a two week trip where I ate whatever I wanted without concern for health, I weighed in this morning at 215 pounds.  While the unfettered eating was certainly enjoyable, five pounds in two weeks feels like a pretty big hit given how long it took me to lose it.  I don't think I've pushed myself very hard with the previous diet so I'm going to try it again, this time with the modification that I need to sacrifice tokens for video game time.  I'm going to start with a rate of 1 token (i.e. a five mile run) in exchange for 90 minutes of play time.  This should help me not only lose weight but also become more productive.  I'll try this for a period of 30 days and carry over the 10 tokens from my last diet experiment.  Once I get a good measure of how this works out I might try another period of 60 days.  Also, I'm easing the restriction on soda consumption to allowing it one day a week.

I might have mentioned that I can eat potatoes again because I broke the 210 pound self imposed boundary.  French fries were a long lost joy and I found them to be as tasty as I had remembered.  I had put a similar restriction on myself to not eat fast food, but I never set a breaking condition.  I've decided that if I can make it down to 190 pounds then I can eat fast food again.  I don't really expect to make it to 190 pounds, but I never expected to make it to 210 pounds either.


-LNC

Experiment: http://latenightcoder.livejournal.com/49705.html

Yesterday was the last day of my experimental diet, and I'm pleased to report that I managed to stay within the parameters easily.  I weighed in this morning at 209 pounds, compared to my starting weight of 220 pounds on 4/8.  11 pounds lost in 60 days isn't bad.  I didn't find it difficult to stick to the diet, though it might have been difficult had I been travelling more and not had access to a comfortable exercise environment.

Notes:

1. 3 cups of food per meal is a good amount given my size and appetite.  1.5 cups (half meal) with a vitamin served as my breakfast for most days.  If meal size was smaller then the half meal breakfast may not have been enough to tide me over until feeding time, as I already tended to get hungry under the current conditions.  Also, restaurant meals can be easily broken down into meal sized portions, with entree and sides usually equalling two meals.

2. I consumed 19 cans of slimfast over the course of the 60 days, almost never more than 1 per day, and usually in the evenings in place of a token purchased meal.  I had 9 tokens remaining after the end of the experiment.  The slimfast clause was a good one to have because some evenings after a busy day I didn't have time to exercise but was very hungry.  Without the slimfast clause, this experiment might have affected my sleeping patterns which might have affected my work.

3. I averaged about 2 meals per feeding period between 1100 and 1700 hours and had a token purchased meal for dinner about 30 days out of the 60 of the experiment.  I consumed on average about 3 meals a day (0.5 meal breakfast, 2 meal feeding period, 0.5 meal dinner average).  In comparison to my normal eating habits before the experiment, I cut my intake by about 40%.

4. The exercise to token system worked well at the established rates.  A token's worth of exercise could be done on most evenings without disrupting other plans.  Increasing the requirements for tokens might negatively affect normal scheduling.

5 The no chocolate and no soda clauses were generally inconsequential, though for a few days they played a part.  Though the experiment is over I feel no overwhelming desire to consume chocolate and soda again.


Thoughts:

1. I ended the experiment with 9 tokens remaining, meaning I could push harder if I wanted to.  Meal size and exercise to token rates were good so I could either change the feeding time period or add some kind of weekly token tax, say -1 token per week.  Or I could apply the token cost to more things, such as time spent playing video games.  I think this last option is the best and 1 token per hour seems like a good rate, though it would have meant I needed to exercise more over the course of the 60 day experiment.

2. There were some afternoons that I felt like a pig because I'd have three meals over the course of the feeding period and feel stuffed.  There were some evenings where I went to bed hungry because I didn't have the tokens to purchase a meal or the time to exercise for one.  Overall I think the diet is sustainable.


While I'm not going to immediately decide to continue the diet, I am going to maintain its approximation until I decide how I want to modify it and if I want to continue it at all.  I haven't weighed 209 since high school and being 17 pounds lighter (and two belt sizes slimmer) than six months ago feels really good.  The weight lifting has also increased my muscle mass and definition and it feels pretty good to look at myself in a mirror.


-LateNightCoder

There is a challenge going around where you try to describe all of your relationships with a single sentence each.  I thought it would be interesting to try, and included both romantic and non-romantic relationships.  They were thought up in a certain order, but have been shuffled before being posted here.


I don't understand you, why you do so little with so much that's been handed to you, or why I find you so interesting.

You showed me how wonderful life could be if I let it, but you never understood sincerity, or how important it was to me.

You were closer than family, but so much has changed and now I don't know what to think, and deep inside I'm afraid that getting to know you again will only lead me to face what I've lost.

I idolized you, your abundance of strength and intelligence, your balance of warm charisma and cold logic; I thought with effort I could be like you, only to find that you were more than I had imagined, and I couldn't measure up if I worked the rest of my life at it.

Your strength pulled me back from a monstrous precipice of unforgivable action, and every day since I lost you I've wanted to die fighting that which I almost became.

I don't think I could have been what I'd wanted to be for you, but I'd have tried, and I'd have devoted my life to you to apologize for my failure.


Sometimes the hunt finds us in our own crosshairs, good luck to you when it does,
LateNightCoder

I've managed to keep to my experimental diet, and weighed in this morning at 213 pounds.  That is 7 pounds down from my April 8th weigh in.  If I can keep at this for the remaining period (about a month) I have a good chance of breaking another restriction I'd placed on myself.

Probably about two years ago I wanted to see if I could stop eating french fries.  I happen to enjoy potatoes very much, and deep fried potatoes even more, so I thought it would be a good test of will power.  The full restriction was "no fried potatoes" and I sealed the restriction with the clause "until I lose 15 pounds".  Since I hadn't changed weight in more than 5 years prior to that I thought that clause would end up a life sentence.  I was about 225 pounds then; at 210 the restriction will be lifted.  I'm going to call it at 210 if I can keep that weight or lower for a week; no quick loss in water weight to squeak by.  I miss eating french fries so much...


-LNC

So my last experiment was living for an extend period on a very limited budget.  It was a success in that I was able to stay within the budget, despite the increase in difficulty for even day-to-day activities that resulted.  It wasn't fun, but it was informative and I was able to prove to myself that my limits lie beyond that threshold.

My next experiment is a kind of dieting plan.  One of the things I learned in the budget experiment is that it isn't easy (for me) to maintain a healthy diet on $3 a day.  When you eat rice every day for months that $1.25 box of twinkies (containing 6 packs of 2 each!) looks like a fantastic ocean of flavor.  I ended up exercising less (because I was tired often) and I don't think I lost any weight (I think I actually gained a few pounds).

To date, I have never successfully maintained a diet for an extended period, though I have tried to varying degrees on four or five occasions.  Given that data, one could make the argument that I CANNOT maintain a diet for an extended period.  So this new experiment is to see if that really is where my limit lies, or if I'm a stronger person than previous data suggests.


So here are the new experiment guidelines:

/***/

-All meals not between 1100 and 1700 hours cost 1 token.  No token, no meal.
-All meals between 1100 and 1700 cost no tokens, but must be eaten at least 1 hour apart (end of last meal to beginning of next).
-A meal is defined as 3 cups of any food. (I have a 3 cup container for sizing)

5 mi run = 1 token
15 min weight training = 1 mi
20 min firearm training = 1 mi

Each token is a slip of paper with the exercises recorded on it.
Tokens are torn in half when they are used.
All fractions rounded down.

No chocolate (except slimfast drinks).
No soda, except when out with others.
Slimfast and fruit juice acceptable, doesn't count as a meal.

One half meal with vitamin supplement per day, any time.

Start: 4/8/2009
End:  6/6/2009 (60 days)

/***/

This is essentially an exercise for food program.

The soda exception is because I still intend to head out with friends and I drink soda instead of alcohol.
The slimfast and fruit juice exception is because of the high level of vitamins.
Chocolate slimfast also has the same nutrition and calories as the vanilla kind, but tastes less like chalk.
The half meal with vitamin exception is also there to get me to take my vitamins with greater regularity.

The experiment started this morning.  As it was the start of the experiment I didn't have any tokens so my breakfast was the half meal with vitamin.  I had two meals during the lunch period.  I've just finished my fifth mile so I have my first token and I'm going to spend it on dinner tonight.

I had an elliptical machine that I did much of my exercising on but it broke.  I bought a replacement today but it is a different model.  The old one had a very natural stride and tracked distance in miles.  This new one is cheaper, has a circular stride, and tracks rotations.  It is more like walking stairs than jogging.  Based on time and calories burned, I'm equating 500 rotations to 1 mile.

Like my previous experiments, there are no breaks in between the start and end dates.  Slipping even once constitutes a failed experiment, no exceptions.  That means I'll probably be trying to earn some extra tokens for when I'm out with others or for big holiday meals.

I also bought a bathroom scale.  I weighed in at around 220, 6 pounds down from about two months ago (I've been exercising regularly) and about 4 pounds down from my plateau weight (what I've weighed since graduating high school).  This is the strictest diet I've ever been on and I'm curious as to what it will do to my body.


Good luck and good hunting,
LateNightCoder

So, it's about 2 AM, and I awake to hear a loud slam.  I live in an apartment building with a front "security" door that is on a spring and tends to slam if people don't purposefully close it quietly.  I hear the noise again shortly after, and then a few more times at odd intervals.  Without hearing any other types of commotion, I assume someone is going in and out, maybe drunkenly.  It's loud enough to keep me up, but I expect the person will head back to bed after long.

But then the cops arrive.  A regular squad car, and then they start knocking on an upstairs neighbor's door.  Hammering more than knocking, shouting things like, "open up or I'm kicking it in."  Kinda makes me wonder what is going on... at 2AM.  I've seen cops in the area before, but always at other apartment buildings and never the one in which I reside.  You could say it isn't the best of neighborhoods.

I like cops and these ones seem nice enough (I overheard them trying to get the management's phone number so stepped into the hall to give them a business card I had from their office).  I guess I'm not even irked at the 2-in-the-morning part, seeing as they are just doing their job.  I just can't get back to sleep until they finish so here I am typing.

...

2:20

From what I've overheard, it sounds like they found a phone and broken glass outside.  I think maybe they think my neighbor fell out of his window upstairs and drunkenly wandered off, so now they are doing a "wellness" check to see if he is still alive and in his apartment.  It doesn't sound to me like they intend to arrest him or anything, but if he's drunk he might not get that same impression and decide to try and wait them out (or maybe he really is wandering around outside somewhere).

I was never really fond of that neighbor.  Always very loud and vulgar on his phone, often slamming doors.  At this point the people I feel sorry for are the cops.  It can't be fun to have to deal with drunken people, to have to disturb people in the middle of the night and probably get angry glances because of it, to get called into situations with little information and be vaguely told to "sort things out", to be forced by your position to care about people whom otherwise you might despise.  It reaffirms a general sentiment I have that cops should get paid more.


-LNC

The Dow closed today at 6,594.  Low, but by itself not panic worthy.

However, today I read a report by a man I've followed for some time who I've always considered intelligent, calm, and well informed, and yet today the panic was plainly evident in his writing.  I was watching closely when Bear Stearns went down.  Also for Lehman Brothers.  There was a lot of panic on the trading floors and in the boardrooms at those times, but nothing like what I'm hearing from a normally steady source.  The news is typical dooms day stuff; it is the source and the manner in which it is delivered that unnerves me.  I'll need more time to digest what I'm hearing.


-LNC

Main computer down (suspect failed motherboard).  Primary backup down (suspect failed hard drive).  Secondary backup online, but very old and not fit to do much with (but emails, news, and blogging I suppose).  Replacement ordered (Alienware!).

Also, Dow Jones closed today at 7,114.  Read somewhere that it is a 12 year low.  News keeps rolling in concerning layoffs and bankrupt enterprises.  My company had a hiring and pay freeze announced some time ago.  The housing market here hasn't really crashed and I still see lots of "help wanted" signs in fast food type businesses so I'm not worried on a personal scale, though I worry on a national one.

Oh, and bad assets in the European Union banking books could be worth something like 25 Trillion US dollars less than originally paid for/thought.  The United States is pretty badly in debt but Europe seems nearly an order of magnitude worse.  That, plus they have all of the added complications of currency fluctuations within the union with one failing nation's currency dragging down its neighbors.

While we run at deficits, China is still running at significant surpluses.  It is their money that is supporting our bailouts, which seems all good and well for a while but I've heard rumors that they may unload some of these treasury bonds to buy up American land and energy businesses at rock bottom prices.  I'm not against foreign investors, I'm just saying that the profit from the rebound will go towards the Chinese economy and not the US one.  The United States has enjoyed top dog status for a while because our economy allowed us to throw massive amounts of money at problems.  I think China will be taking our place within my lifetime because of the investments they are making now and the natural resources they are gaining access to in Africa.

I think it coincidentally (and darkly) humorous that China is clawing its way to the top on pure capitalism, on slave wages adjusted to the abundance of labor and not set by some arbitrary union mandate.  Economics is largely a zero sum game, meaning that the profit of one side is proportional to the loss of the other.  In short, people must suffer for the system to remain competative, and any system that is not competative will be driven out by another system that is.  Communist China didn't do so well, but capitalist China looks ready to take the global lead.

Apparently the American system isn't competative enough because they're kicking our teeth in.

-LNC

"Colds never just go away, they depreciate exponentially until you don't notice them anymore."

The casual use of geeky vocabulary is one of the many joys of working at my office.

-LNC