Fat Loss Progress
Back in October I talked about my fat loss plan, which boiled down to this: exercise 30 minutes a week and live a 1.5 lb-per-week feedback diet.
Here's a snapshot of the graph on the sidebar:
The red dots are my daily weigh-in, the blue dots are my water jug body fat measurement (aka the days I go swimming). The green and blue lines are trend lines. I've lost about 25 pounds. There are some notable features here.
First, notice how my body fat was plummeting compared to my weight when I was actively swimming and doing some minimal strength training. I got out of the habit, and haven't really reestablished it yet. Also, note that the body fat measurement is consistently lower than the BMI number.
Second, notice that my trend is most consistent when I was swimming regularly. Seems like that exercise thing is a good thing to do.
Third, and you'll have to take my word for it on this, when I was following my feedback diet it worked flawlessly. The humps are when I got rebellious and didn't follow the diet even though the feedback said I should.
Let's review the diet. It's really really easy. Get a piece of graph paper and mark today's weight. Draw a line that goes down 1 lb every 5 days (this is the rate I chose, you may want to choose 1 lb per 7 days or whatever). Now, if your weight is over the line, you eat smaller portions, drink more water, and skip dessert. If it's under the line, you don't fret it. Eat what you want (without gorging yourself).
Ok, this works really good, but there's bound to be hiccups. You're only human. So when you get a hiccup like I had in January/February, the feedback system breaks down. It only takes a week or so of disobedience for you to be completely unable to get back down to the line you charted without a sharp dive. But a sharp dive is exactly the thing you are not prepared to do. So you continue to float too high. Maybe you start a new chart (a wholly demoralizing thing to have to do), and then another hiccup begins and you lose heart even sooner. What I'm getting at is that line is just too rigid. The whole point is a sustainable rate of loss.
So I modified the mechanism slightly, and hence this blog post (no, it's not so I can brag about losing 25 pounds—that comes when I get to my target weight).
Take a piece of graph paper and draw a line with the slope you want as before, starting in the corner. Now, that line starts 5 lb or so above where you are now. This is to emphasize that the line is only a slope reference, not the actual line. Now mark your weight every day, and then decide if it's a diet day or not. Do this by estimating with your pencil, finger, or just your eyes, what the slope of the line that best fits the last 5 measurements is. If it's pointing down as much or more than your reference slope, it's not a diet day. If it's flatter (or pointing up), then it is a diet day.
I've been trying this new system for a few weeks and I have found it much more adaptive and encouraging. If you have a bad couple of days, you can be back on track within a few days, no problem. You don't need to make a new graph. You can see the progress of the past and recognize that while it's not a perfect line it's still very good progress. All the good kinds of feedback.
So go give it a try. It can fit in with whatever other exercise/diet plan you have. It can work if you are just maintaining your perfect weight, or even if you're trying to gain weight. It's easy (just a piece of graph paper on the fridge). You've got nothing to lose. At least, nothing you don't want to lose.
The Hacker's Diet
I came across this blog post while googling an unrelated gnuplot problem, of all things. The post talks about The Hacker's Diet. Duly intrigued, I whipped out my razor and plowed through the book. I like it.
The book is well-written, doesn't take itself too seriously, takes the subject matter seriously, and takes the audience seriously, i.e. you aren't expected to be Superman—the program is very down-to-earth and achievable. It is slightly aged (he mentions at one point that you need a color monitor to really appreciate the color graphs), but this isn't a problem.
The best part about the book (besides being free) is that he takes the problem of weight loss and attacks it as an engineering problem. He comes up with an understanding and a plan and implements it, and loses some 70 pounds. This book definitely appeals to every inner geek.
The worst part about the book is that his solution involves calorie counting. That makes me sick on so many levels, but I'll just rant on two of them. First of all, a calorie is not a calorie. I don't know if this is new knowledge or not, but we see it in all the latest fad diets. Atkins, GI, etc. are all based on the fact that a calorie is not a calorie. Second, I am not going to spend my life counting calories, thank you very much. I'd rather drink oil.
Speaking of drinking oil, this book has a very interesting parallel to the Shangri-La diet. They both use the thermostat analogy, but Shangri-La aims to adjust your off-kilter internal thermostat and this book aims to replace your broken thermostat with record keeping and conscious decision. Certainly, one could apply both at the same time.
In spite of me not wanting to count calories, I do intend to put a modified version of this plan into practice. Since I don't want to count calories, I am going to have to rely on some other feedback. Since most of us eat a relatively manageable variety of foods, we should be able to get an instinctive feel for "how much" we are consuming on a meal-by-meal and/or day-by-day basis. Indeed, he talks about getting to this point, by accident. I intend to get there much sooner, on purpose. By keeping a food log and comparing it to weight loss/gain over the period of a month or two or three, and studying it in hindsight, I should be able to get a feel for three "thermostat settings": lose weight, maintain weight, gain weight. It may be a bang-bang approach, but there's also the minute automatic adjustments and body's metabolism adjustment working in your favor while trying to stay stable.
I have adjusted my weight graph to include a trend plot as described in the book. While I was at it, I added the plot for measured body fat percentage (which I need to start doing more frequently). BMI is a linear relationship with weight, so the kg on the left correspond with the BMI on the right. So, by graphing measured body fat percentage you can see whether I am above/below the BMI for my given weight, plus see that otherwise invisble chasm between losing fat and losing weight. If you'd like to set up your own such graphs, I'm happy to share my code with you. Just drop me a line.
Shangri La
Once upon a time, I blogged about the Shangri La "diet". I suppose I owe it to all 4 of my readers to summarize my experience. So here's the summary: it worked and I have no idea if it was placebo effect.
Look at this graph:
The period between about 6/5 and 8/2 is when I was following the procedure, with about 80% fidelity. I lost 10 pounds in short order. I was less hungry. My wife got mad because I ate less than her almost all the time.
Then I got lazy and stopped taking my swigs. You do get used to swigging olive oil, but it's never actually fun. The second time around I saw the same results as before, but I was even less faithful. If I ever got organized enough to do it 100% I might lose even more weight.
I noticed that even after stopping I naturally ate less for quite some time. I still eat less than I used to, though not as much less as last August and September.
Now, was it the placebo effect? No clue. But if it is, is there anything so wrong with harmlessly tricking your body and mind into eating more healthily? Is it a failure? No, I think it was a success for me. I just didn't give it enough priority to continue in the face of vacations and so on. Would I go back to it? Sure, I'd rather drink a little olive oil between meals than do almost any other diet.
But really it was mostly an experiment. I know as well as you that just losing weight is almost absurd. Being fit is more important than how much I weigh, and I'm terrible at being fit. So that's where I need to focus my efforts.
Being honest with myself, here are the obstacles to being fit, in decreasing order: time, effort, and a love of swimming.
Time is one of the things I most treasure. Giving up 200-300 perfectly good hours a year to some mindless excercise is frankly apalling. I need to convince myself that it would be worth it, or make it something I want to do.
It takes effort to get up and excercise, and I won't deny that it's easier to sit there programming or researching. My mind is already in shape and it's much easier to work my mind than my body.
Now love of swimming might seem like a silly factor, but it's at least partially true. I love to swim, and I hate to run/walk/etc. If I'm going to excercise you better believe I'm going to be swimming, not running/walking/etc. But getting to the pool is more than just effort, it's logistics. Money, car, parking, being all wet, chlorine... It's not an insurmountable obstacle, it will just take some planning.
I mention all that because soon you will see a post about how my new swimming habit is going. I got a book that promises to make lap swimming enjoyable, and from what I've read I believe them. The pool is closed this week but I've got all the plane laid out on how to adjust my routine, and next wednesday I'll start my new life. I'll reset my graph in the sidebar and we'll see how swimming compares to swigging olive oil.