Jason's Notes About Stuff

Here is the update to my post last month entitled " Losing weight is hard ". Through a program of restricted eating and intense exercise, I was able to lose most of my December "Christmas baking" weight: I'm back down to around 160lbs and about 13.5% body fat. Surprisingly, this is still on the high end of normal! Mid-range for my height should be about 155lbs and 12.5% body fat. That will be my goal after we return from the wedding. Even 130lbs would still be in the "healthy" range. I can actually remember quite well when I was 130lbs. It would have been in high school, where admittedly, I was a bit of a beanpole :-) Another interesting chart is my one-year plot (missing the period when the scale was being shipped ): When I look back and see how I was up over 170, that seems so high, but meanwhile it had become the "new normal." It's important to keep things in perspective, and I've found that our Internet scale ...

As part of my goal to be in the best shape of my life  prior to our wedding, I've vowed to lose all my "Christmas baking" weight before we leave on April 10th. Our Withings scale shows the damage and poor results so far: I was very near my goal weight of 160 at the beginning of December, but a month of eating cookies and sweets pushed me to almost 170. This approached the outside limit of a "healthy" BMI. So for the next 30 days, I'll be following a diet modeled on the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Body diet (aka "Slow Carb"). It is similar to Atkins and South Beach and encourages high protein intake . The diet focuses on elimination of sugars and simple carbs that metabolize quickly. I made a chart to post on our fridge to show what we can and cannot eat: This is a tough diet to follow, but if you stick with it, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose weight, and more importantly, lose fat. We're combining the diet with the Insanity...

Interesting North American stats from the McGill online nutrition course I'm taking. On average, compared to 1970, we eat 11% more food by weight: 18.2lbs up from 16.4lbs. On top of that, our consumption of grains has increased 42% -- mostly wheat and corn flour. Perhaps most disturbing is the 59% increase in fat consumption -- mostly cheap cooking oils like canola and soybean. Could this possibly have something to do with the obesity epidemic? Seems more than likely.

If you want to eat healthy, you need to make your inherent laziness an advantage. Today I was busy programming and started craving a sweet, sugary snack. I mean really, really craving. So much so that I decided to walk to the store and buy something. Walking to the store is necessary since we have been good about not keeping any junk food in the house . I started to get ready to go out, but caught myself asking, "Wait, do I actually need this? Is it really worth the effort?" If there had been any type of sweet snacks in the cupboard or fridge, I would have wolfed them down long before any such consideration. So instead, I went to the fridge and got a few grapes -- even though they're not really my favorite food. That satisfied the craving and I was able to get back to work. So if you want to eat healthy, it's simple: Keep only healthy food in your house Use your laziness to your advantage :-)