How to lose weight - 10 pounds down edition

Or rather, how to make me lose weight. I have no idea whether what I'm doing would work for anyone else, but it's interesting and peculiar enough to work for me.

So here's the idea. The way you lose weight is simple. You take in fewer calories than you use, (I don't use the term burn calories because it seems like incorrect usage to me. I think calories are what's produced when you burn something else, but maybe that's just chemistry talk). All the various kinds of diet stuff are just different ways of making that happen. The low carb thing is both perfectly sensible and nonsense. The reason to go low carb is that your body digests carbs faster than anything else, which can set off processes that make you hungry sooner than protein and fat calories. Fiber helps too because fiber is stuff that doesn't get digested but still takes energy for you body to process.

When I was doing research on losing weight, one thing that came up repeatedly is that people who kept what they call food diaries (Dear diary, I walked through the cafeteria today and food was there. If only food knew how much I love it...) tended to lose weight pretty efficiently. I had no intention of keeping a diary, but I figured that what it meant was that if you really pay attention to what you're eating, then you can better control your intake. So I started paying attention, which turned into near-obsessive portion controlling.

For example, my favorite snack is potato chips. They are, by most accounts, not very good for you and have lots of calories. Well that may be so, but if you only have what they call a serving of them, which is an ounce, it's about 150 calories. One ounce is about a handful, which seems about right.

On the opposite end is light or reduced fat ice cream. Only 140 calories per serving! Wow! So, how much is a serving? What does that look like? Would you believe that a serving of ice cream is a quarter cup (63 grams)? That's around 2 ounces, which is about one scoop. So if you're having what you'd think was a normal serving of 2 scoops, that's 300 calories, not 140. That's also what a soft serve cone of light ice cream is, regular's more like 450. Add a cone and you're at 500.

How do I know all this? I have a small scale that I keep on the kitchen counter and I freaking weigh everything. At least until I know how much of what is what.

I was going to take you through the specifics of the diet, but it was TMBI (B for boring), so I'll just do breakfast.

Breakfast is on 1/4 cup (dry) serving of McCann's Irish Oatmeal. This is the kind in the can that looks like it's just chopped oat grains, because that's what it is. It won an award at the 1896 Worlds Fair for "regularity of granulation." Bet you never won anything like that. The grains absorb tons of water so 1/4 cup dry makes a full bowl of very filling cereal.

It takes a half hour to cook, but my wife bought me a rice cooker with a "porridge" setting on which you can set a timer to tell it when you want the oatmeal to be ready. The rice cooker is both exciting and kind of frightening as an appliance and will get its own column. 

I eat this with a bit of milk and sprinkled with granulated maple sugar, along with coffee and fresh squeezed orange juice.

So 10 pounds down, 2 to go.

Now more concentrated

My main priority this summer was to lose weight. My weight has very slowly increased over the years, I mean like 10 pounds in 25 years. After I got hurt this winter I get up over 182 pounds, the most I'd ever been, so I've been very much focused on getting back to where I'd been in days of yore, around 170 pounds. This required diet and exercise components. I'll write about the diet shortly, but the exercise has been mostly riding my bike.

I've always liked riding a bike. I went on AYH cycling trips when I was in high school and rode pretty regularly for a while. I guess I stopped around when I got married, more because we moved to the mountains outside LA than anything else, and by the time we got back east I was out of the habit. But my parents got me a bike for my birthday around 10 years ago and I've been back with it since.

Biking is a really fun way to exercise because most kinds of exercise don't have moments when you can say "Whee!" I used to be a pretty serious runner and I've done circuit training and used all kinds of equipment, and there's nothing in a session on a Stairmaster that makes you say "Whee!"

I was talking with a neighbor who I know rides a lot, and was surprised to hear that, even though he often rides his bike to work, he always rides on the sidewalk, never in the street. This seems ludicrous to me, because streets are not just for cars. But the thing with riding around an urban area is that you need a combination of caution and fearlessness. It comes to me fairly naturally, because I'm a city kid, used to negotiating traffic by feel rather than by such annoyances as traffic signs and signals.

You need to be careful and cautious about what kinds of situations you put yourself in and hyper vigilant, knowing where everything is in every direction (including the road surface and resident junk). But once you're in the moment, you can't freak out if a truck buzzes past you with 6 inches of clearance, like happened to me yesterday on the bridge across the river to Conshohocken, because if you do you will die.

With a schedule that allows me to ride 125-150 miles a week and a diet that, like me, is silly and practical at the same time, I've been able to lose 9 pounds in 2 months, which is not bad for a semi-old guy.

So I've managed to lose 5% of my total body weight, so either I'm in new, improved, more concentrated form or I've lost 5% of my soul to compensate. It only remains to be seen which.

Hit the mute button! No, change channels!

Having spent much of my adult life in and around the advertising business, I typically find the whole thing about best and worst commercials kind of boring. I see a commercial, understand what they're trying to communicate, decide if they did a good job or not, laugh if there's something funny, and move on.

I do, however, feel the need to call out one of the Chevy ads than ran repeatedly during the Olympics (and is now running on the execrable Gas Station TV which is why I even thought about it), which was so stupid and offensive that it requires noting.

It's the one where the man and woman are in the sales guy's office and in a purposely meaningful-sounding voice he says some thing like, "I'm going to pass you a number that's what I'm willing to pay." And he passes the price tag over to the sales guy, who notes that this is everyone's price and eventually they agree.

What's so offensive? OK, where do I start? I understand the point is to drive home the point that Chevy has what is commonly known as "no-haggle pricing," where the price offered is the actual selling price. This has been a slow-moving trend in the auto business for a while, as online car shopping services have eroded dealers' ability to fool some customers into paying more than others. I'm glad Chevy's on board with this trend, though I'm sure they were dragged into it kicking a screaming. It's not necessary for them to mention the kicking and screaming part in the commercial.

So the question is, which character in the commercial is the most offensive? The oblivious/incompetent husband/father character has been ubiquitous on TV in sitcoms and commercials for as long as I can remember. It makes for cheap laughs, which is sometimes the goal. But this is beyond oblivious. This is just plain stupid and whatever cleverness is contained in the concept is drowned by the heavyhandedness of the execution. He just sounds like a moron and there's no way I'm buying the same car as that moron.

But what really makes my skin crawl is the adoring wife/girlfriend/mistress/love slave sitting next to the guy and gazing adoringly at him as he humiliates himself. Guys can be dumb, and I mean really dumb. Women, however, are supposed to have a hint of common sense about them. So not only is the guy a moron but the partner think's he's awesome? And actual awe-inspiring awesome, not girls' gymnastics awesome.

When the sales manager accepts the offer of his own offer, she smiles blissfully and says "good job honey." Maybe she's really thinking that the guy is a complete loser who can only manage his life if he can pay the listed price for Chevy. And somehow his getting the Chevy is the culmination of her plan to eliminate him and escape their miserable lives, because Chevys are so boring and anonymous that when she severs his head and limbs and stuffs him in the trunk and leaves the car somewhere, nobody will notice a Chevy sitting there with body parts in the trunk until she's on the beach on the Cayman Islands with the money she got from selling the other 12 Chevys that he'd bought in the same fashion earlier that day.

But probably not. Probably she's the dumb wife or parodying the dumb wife so ineffectively that we don't know it's a parody. And I'm sure the guys who did the commercial would say they were just poking fun at the whole thing. But guys? Next time you try that, try adding some fun because in it's current form it's nothing but repeated poking.

Old School School, Making the Class part 2

I'm not entirely sure why, but today when I sat down to try to flesh out my initial outline for the Math for Entrepreneurs class, I did so with a spiral notebook and a pen, not a computer. It's a completely different kind of thing than I'd ever done before. Not only am I making it out of nothing (or out of my head anyway, which is as close to nothing as you're gonna get around here), but I don't even know who is going to be in the class and how good at math they are.

This obviously poses some difficulty in creating a curriculum, but fortunately, I had the chance this past weekend to chat with my father, who is an honest-to-goodness rags-to-riches story who built a huge company out of nothing, and get his insights on just what sorts of math would be most helpful for the budding entrepreneur. His answer was pretty illuminating, in that all he said was, essentially, arithmetic.

Yep, my dad, with his PhD in economics and 50 years of business experience says that being able to add up a column of numbers and calculate a few rates and ratios is about all you need.

Honestly, I think he wasn't fully immersing himself in my query, but he did help me come up with the correct answer (at least I think it is) by stressing the simplicity of the underlying math skills necessary. Like most things, the base skill isn't nearly so important as knowing what to do with it.

There's always that undercurrent of "when am I ever going to use this?" in math class. I don't know why in math in particular, since you're never going to "use" history or French, at least not for anything important (yes I know these things are good to study, but exactly what important things happen in French these days?). In any event, it's a silly question and I usually answer it by saying "Never," because nobody's ever going to ask you to find the vertex of a quadratic equation.  Shoot, I'm a math teacher and nobody's ever asked me except in class. But people might ask you to find maximum profit or a minimum cost or how high will something go and I'll be darned, that's what a vertex is.

So for the purposes of this class, you will absolutely have to be able to do arithmetic accurately, but what's important is that you know what you're adding up. That's the part my dad left unsaid. The math is one of the underlying skills you need to be successful, but it doesn't get used in isolation. It gets used to answer questions, like are our sales growing or shrinking and at what rate, are our costs in line with our competitors, and are we making or losing money?

So I'm okay with an old school approach to outlining the class because I think it's going to be about that age-old question, "What the heck are we doing?"

Unidentified sources

Well now that Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings (I hope their kids don't get married because that would be a hyphenator's nightmare) have redeemed themselves for not winning any Olympic medals in the last 4 years, it's time to get it out in the open. I've heard that for all their public lovey-dovey posturing they're actually the Kaiser Soze's of the volleyball world, and they win all their matches because the other teams are terrified that something awful will happen to them or their families.

The same source, by the way, told me that Mitt Romney actually paid LOTS of taxes in the past 10 years- so much so that he won't release the returns to avoid embarrassing himself in front of his rich, tax-evading friends.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

There are two words that make me look forward to the end of the Olympics. One is "awesome," which I won't go into in great detail because Louis CK covers the same ground perfectly in "Hilarious." There have been two things that have inspired awe in me this Olympics- Maroney's vault in the team competition of women's gymnastics, and the entire USA-Canada women's soccer game. Nothing else. Lots of exciting things, lots of drama, but awe?

But awesome is one of those words that's overused all the time. For this particular period, nothing sets my teeth on edge like the word "redemption." After hearing it endlessly repeated on TV, I guess what put me over the edge (at least today) was a headline in the sports section that said something like "Redemption for Raisman." I like Aly Raisman. She's an excellent gymnast and she's in the tribe, which I'm thinking is maybe almost as rare as African American gymnasts.

But I'm having difficulty coming up with someone less in need of redemption than gold-medal-team-member Aly Raisman. Redemption from what? Finishing 4th in all-round on a tie-breaker? Really? She needs to redeem herself for that? I suspect that even making the all-round final in the first place was beyond her expectations. If you're going to go to a hackneyed phrase, icing on the cake is more appropriate than redemption.

It might be more bearable if it didn't seem like the folks who decided what the overall theme would be had said, "Aha! Redemption! That's it!" and then instructed all the announcers that they would be summarily fired if they did not use that word at least once in describing anyone who at some point in the near or distant past had not had everything go right for them. This means even Michael Phelps, who was by most measures pretty successful last Olympics, needed redemption for not practicing so hard for the past 4 years. If you're willing to bend the word's meaning so that it applies to everything short of 100% perfection, you're going to have it at your disposal always.

Come to think of it, I am seeking redemption this school year, for not keeping my desk neat and organized last year. I'm seeking redemption this summer for not finishing everything I meant to do last summer. I'm seeking redemption this morning for not doing dishes last night. And of course I'm seeking redemption for spending so much time watching the Olympics (and the Tour de France before that) that I've not gotten nearly as far creating my new class as I'd like to have done.

Will I get all the redemption I seek? Inconceivable!


(the section I referred to starts around 1:50) Parental discretion advised.

Cue the music

I'm writing about the Olympics here so I have the fanfare of the Olympic march ringing inside my head. I've never been quite sure if that's actually the Olympic march or just some TV theme music, but it's never mattered enough for me to actually find out. As opposed to, for example, the Bongo Cam music at Citizens Bank Park, about which I will not rest until I learn its secret source.

The Olympics have been both constant entertainment and a complete distraction from anything and everything I've wanted/been supposed to do. Good thing I was productive at the beginning of the summer, because I am finding that you simply cannot get much done if you spend 10 hours a day watching TV, no matter how gripping the spectacle.

My impression of the Olympics so far has been very positive. I know there is a fair amount of grumbling about the NBC streaming, to which I can only respond with a raspberry. Anybody want to pay for this stuff out of pocket? If not, then shut up already. Yeah, NBC was overly ambitious and the most popular events freeze up in some places at some times. Is this a surprise? Anyone ever try anything this extensive with this size audience before? The answer is simply no. There was no way this was going off without a hitch.

And I'm fine with them having all the major events on in prime time. It would seem like the only tweak that's needed is the policy of streaming everything live but then not making the prime time stuff available until after it's aired. That's tough to pull off if the streaming is not 100% reliable.

Anyway, I've been limiting my viewing pretty much to what's on TV. With the exception of the women's gymnastics all-round, I've avoided hearing who won virtually anything (NBC's research says that people are more likely, not less, to watch something whose result they know). I've stopped looking at news sites throughout the day, which is so refreshing that I might keep it up. So it's worked pretty well. I like Bob Costas, who early on looked at the camera and said, "We're back, but I guess that's obvious."

As for the events themselves, I guess I have to group them into categories. There are sports that I'm always interested in watching, like basketball and soccer (women especially) and gymnastics, those that I would watch if they were there in front of me, like cycling or swimming or track, and those that I care not a whit about but watch because it's the Olympics, like, well, everything else. Water polo, diving, table tennis, equestrian, fencing, crew, archery (team archery?), etc. Of those, by the way, the table tennis for me is the most fun. Those men and especially women who play are incredibly quick and agile.

And by the way, what the hell is that handball game? It's like someone looked at all the goal sports, like soccer, lacrosse and the hockeys, and said, yeah, but we need a version for people who aren't coordinated enough to use their feet or sticks. Let's let them run around and try to throw the ball into a net. It reminds me of when they were working up to teaching us volleyball in elementary school. First we play catch ball, where you throw it over the net and then catch it. Then you hit the ball over the net and then catch it, and only then do you attempt something volleyballlike. This is the Catch Ball of goal sports. So we dropped baseball and softball and kept this?

Okay, so I'll get on to the individual stuff in another posts. Time to watch some asynchronous diving. If you want some professional writing about which is the more awesome Olympic sport, swimming or gymnastics, I suggest you look here.