Weight Loss for Geeks Part Five: Money

One side effect of losing a lot of weight: It can be a little expensive. I've lost eight inches from my waist size, closing in on ten. I started out wearing a 42" waistband, but by the time I hit a 38" waist, trying to keep my old pants on was somewhat comic. I bought several new pairs with a 38" waist, but they were soon pretty baggy, and 36" inch waists fit much better. Now, I'm in 34" and they're already loose. My 38" waistbands have already gone to charity, practically new, and my 36ers will likely be there before long.

I've also invested in relatively expensive hiking boots, running shoes, and general purpose sneakers. Not that I'm losing weight in my feet, but once I routinely began hiking long distances, I found out the importance of really good shoes. Six months ago, I would have been skeptical that a hundred dollar pair of running shoes offered any real advantage over a pair from Walmart, but now that I've started jogging, I can tell you that the right shoes do make a difference. So do knee braces and, of all things, compression shorts and shirts.

Other costs: One of those little arm band thingies to hold my phone. A used treadmill. I'm also looking at buying a new bike.

But, some costs it turned out I didn't have to spend money on: A gym membership. Walking, jogging, and hiking are all great calorie burners, and they're all free. Once you get committed, bad weather doesn't deter you that much. Cheryl and I have gone hiking during a snowstorm. We went walking during the rain a few weeks ago. Last week, we were caught in a cloudburst while biking. It was refreshing. We aren't Baum witches. We don't melt.

We save a ton of money by eating out less. And, when we do eat out, water is pretty much all we drink. A lot of restaurants are charging $2.50 for sodas these days, so our bills are usually $5 less than they used to be. Also, we often just order one entree and split it these days. Restaurant proportions are ridiculously oversized in most cases.

For daily eating, Aldi is our best friend. I drink a lot of selzter water. I can get a case at aldi for about $7. Food Lion wants 99 cents a bottle. Also, we eat a crazy amount of fiber bars. My routine breakfast is a V8 and an oatmeal bar. The bars can be five bucks a most grocery stores, but at Aldi they're less than two.

Aside from the fiber bars, we eat mostly food we cook ourselves. This involves frequent trips to the farmer's market. We've bought a freezer (oh yeah, another expense) so we can buy meat from Sam's Club and freeze it rather than buying smaller portions at Food Lion. We usually build our meals around a lean protean.

The biggest investment turns out not to be money, but time. We have to travel a bit more to get our groceries, since we don't just live on frozen pizzas from Food Lion any more. And, it takes a lot of planning to have all the meats and veggies ready to go for each night's dinner, and then more time and attention to preparing them than eating prepackaged dinners. And this time is hard to squeeze in, given that we're also walking an hour most evenings.

We watch less TV than we used to. I've managed to find time for writing books, but have less time to blog than I once did. Also, and this is a little embarrassing, I no longer have much fodder for the old political rants I used to post, because I no longer have a lot of time to devote to following the news of the day. I'm not as focused on externalities as I once was, but also not as distracted.

Today, Cheryl and I are going to visit a couple of farmer's markets, then bike 24 miles on the tobacco trail. There won't be time for sitting around on the computer reading the news.

Honestly, I don't miss it.

Weight Loss for Geeks Part 4: Bodies in Motion Remain in Motion

Exercise. This is the part of weight loss that has most tripped me up in the past. Because, bluntly, exercise bores me. I've got other stuff to do. I work a full time job, write novels in the evenings, and would like to spend my weekends enjoying the company of friends and family instead of being trapped in some gym. I'm already running out of hours in the day before I run out of stuff I gotta do. When I do have a few minutes each day to unwind, I'd rather read a book or mess around on the internet for a little while. Where the hell am I supposed to find time to exercise?

It wasn't always this way, of course. When I was a kid, my love of reading went meshed nicely with keeping myself active. Since I was a bookish kid, it was only natural I knew the location of the nearby libraries. The closest one was a couple of miles from my house, but, fortunately, I had a bike. So, during summers, it was almost a daily thing for me to make the trek from my house to the library. I often joke that, if I'd kept up that link between reading and exercising, I'd be as skinny as an adult as I was as a kid.

Well, I'm happy to report that I've been able to harness the geeky parts of my brain into a willing ally in my quest to burn calories.

First, as a geek, I love gadgets. It's almost sad how much pleasure I take out of finding new stuff to do with my smartphone. I mentioned in my last post that I record everything I eat in an app called MyFitnessPal. When I walk, jog, hike, or bike, I use an app called Endomondo that uses GPS to track my movements and record  my distance, speed, and calories burned. Once I started using Endomondo, the gaming geek part of my brain kicked in and I started wanting to improve my stats. If I averaged walking a mile in 20 minutes, could I get that time down to 18? When I hit that goal, could I get my time under 16? To beat that time, I had to start jogging. I'm down to just over 13 minutes, which is a snail's pace compared to most jogger's speeds, but a pretty amazing accomplishment for me. I'm already working to get that down to 12, then down to 10. In addition to speed, I also push for distance. I used to be happy walking five miles a week. Now, if I don't get in ten, I feel like a slacker. And, I know if I'm slacking off, because Endomondo helpfully shows me records of all my activity, and I can see quickly if my numbers are going the wrong way.

Of course, getting out and walking for two or three hours at a stretch still presents the old obstacle of boredom. Like many modern citizens, I've trained my brain to have a short attention span by clicking links every twenty seconds. It's almost torture to spend an hour without checking the internet. But, is that hyper need for constant stimulation actually good for my brain? Or has it transformed me into a more shallow person, unable to think as deeply as I once did? Fortunately, exercise has helped me reconnect with the amazing power of boredom. As a writer, I need time to daydream. For a long time, I've daydreamed in short chunks, like when I'm driving, or when I'm in the shower. The very worst time of all for daydreaming is when I'm sitting at a computer... and, thanks to having the internet on my phone, I can always be at a computer. But, I can't hike and look at my phone at the same time. Getting out in the woods for an hour or so gives my mind time to wander. Yesterday I took a 50 minute walk in Duke Forest and spent most of the time figuring out the complete life history of a major supporting character in my next novel. Even though my exercise time keeps me away from Microsoft Word, when I do sit down to type, I find that I've got more developed material in my imagination buffer.

Still, I confess I do frequently distract myself when I'm walking. On about half my walks, I listen to audio books. I use the Librivox app (another thing I can do with my smart phone!), which has a library of thousands of public domain classics. I download the print version to my kindle, read at night, then pickup where I left off in the audio version the next time I go walking. So far this year, I've read/listened to Pride and Prejudice, Tarzan of the Apes, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Time Machine, The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, Walden, Beyond Good and Evil, and am now working on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This encourages me to take long walks, so I can get in more chapters. And, I find it creates really pleasant links between the places I walk and the books I've read. There's a bridge on the American Tobacco Trail that, every time I walk over it, I think about the scene in Dracula where vampire Lucy is confronted by van Helsing. There's a steep hill on one of the Eno River trails where I always remember the animal men chanting, "Are we not men?" Every time I walk around Occanneechee Mountain, I recall Heathcliff's passionate declarations of his undying love.

I used to think I couldn't find time to exercise. Now, my exercise time is my geeky brain time, away from the shallow distraction television and facebook, back to the deeper brain activity of literature.

At least, when I walk alone. Because, there's one other aspect of my current exercise regime that's vital to my current success. Cheryl has become just as avid about exercise as I have. Getting out on long hikes and bike rides is something we do together. We connect more walking up mountain trails even if we're fifty feet apart than we do sitting on a couch two feet from each other watching television. Exercise improves my brain and my most important relationship. The fact I also lose a lot of weight is just a pleasant side effect.

Weight Loss for Geeks Part 3: Eating Smart

I used to eat like an idiot. I have only myself to blame, because, looking back, my mother did a very good job of feeding us healthy food. Part of this was because we were dirt poor. We just didn't have the money to eat out at fast food restaurants or pizza joints. We also couldn't splurge on junk food like potato chips or snack cakes. We did what we could to stretch meat. In recent years, I've gone to steak houses and ordered 20 ounce steaks to eat by myself. In my youth, a single 1 pound steak would get divided up between my parents and all the children... which, it turns out, is a lot closer to a healthy serving size. We ate a lot of beans and vegetables grown from both our own small garden and my great-grandfather's farm. We would can tomatoes, green beans, and freeze corn and blackberries to eat on year round. We drank sodas very rarely. It was a special occasion to get your own 12oz bottle of RC.

Then I went to college and the cafeteria was all you could eat. And, man, did I eat! I wolfed down food like I'd never seen it before. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner I drank Coke. Around the same time, my father got a better job, and junk food started appearing at my parent's house. Little Debbie snack cakes. Cases of soda stacked on the porch. More bags of potato chips than you could quickly count. My father went from a rail thin man into a rather portly gentleman in the span of a few years. I was spared the effects of my overeating by my youthful metabolism and the fact that for most of college I didn't have a car and had to walk everywhere. (And, later, when I did have a car, I had no money for gas, so I was still walking.)

Eventually though, my financial prospects improved enough that I could drive everywhere. And, my frequent destinations were fast food joints. I knew the location of every pizza buffet within fifty miles. "All-you-can-eat" was my favorite restaurant catchphrase. Which is how, between my sophomore year of college and my 47th birthday, I doubled my weight.

Intellectually, I knew one shouldn't drink 2 liters of sugary soft drinks each day. Intellectually, I knew the proper serving size for pizza wasn't "buffet til you bulge." I suspected all these things might be bad for me. But, they were bad for me in small increments. It's not like I ever got on a scale and found myself 50 pounds heavier than when I last checked. Instead, it was 1 or 2 or 5 pounds, over months, accumulating over years and decades. My head might have known that my diet needed improving, but my stomach didn't see what the problem was. What was the point of being thin if I had to give up eating what by body craved?

I'm happy to report that, once I finally decided to change my diet, my body stopped craving the things that were bad for me. I no longer drink any soda and don't miss it at all. A few weeks ago, before setting out on a long hike, I decided I'd pay a return visit to a Pizza Hut buffet. It was like eating heavily salted cardboard that had soaked in bacon grease. Thank heavens they also have a salad bar.

I no longer eat at any fast food restaurants except for Subway, and I'm careful about what I eat there, avoiding cheese and mayonnaise and sticking to the lean meats like turkey and ham.

When my wife and I go out to eat at real restaurants, we research the menu beforehand. Most chain restaurants will have nutritional information available, so we know which dishes are calorie bombs and which dishes we can stuff ourselves with guilt free. And it's not always the dishes you suspect. We went to one bar known for their burgers and thought we'd just order the veggie burger, but by looking up the calories beforehand, we found the veggie burger had more calories than the beef one!

However, despite the veggie burger being laden with calories, the number one rule of eating smart would have to be, "Eat your vegetables." Eat the starchy stuff like potatoes and rice sparingly, but go to town on leafy greens like spinach and kale. Cauliflower is a stunningly versatile and delicious food once you learn what to do with it. One wonderful thing about vegetables is that you have so many choices these days. Every week, it seems like we're trying a food we've never eaten before; kohlrabi, endive, sunchokes, jimica, parsnips, rutabagas, and rainbow chard have all been added to our menu. Before we started our diet, we ate sweet potatoes twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now, we go through a bag every other week, sometimes using them as savory foods (they're great paired with flakes of chili), sometimes as sweet (sprinkled with cinnamon and a touch of brown sugar). We eat lentils and chickpeas and bulgar wheat, quinoa and farro and flax seed.

We don't avoid meat, but we do eat much smaller portions. 3-6 ounces of steak are more than enough if you are eating a good helping of vegetables with it.

I don't believe in "don'ts." I think if you go into a diet swearing you'll absolutely, never ever eat certain foods you'll probably fail. That said, eating a reasonable amount of some foods means eating a small amount. You shouldn't load up with a big bowl of ice cream. The "correct" serving size is about half a cup. Pasta's laden with calories, so I only eat it once or twice a month. I still eat candy... but I record every single ounce, and treat it as a treat rather than a staple food.

Ah, yes, recording every single ounce. It's old diet advice, but it's what worked for us. Cheryl and I downloaded the "My Fitness Pal" ap to our phones and started tracking everything we ate. It's a great tool for educating yourself as to just where your big sources of less healthy calories are coming from, and also a great way of training yourself to think before you eat, so you can avoid snacking out of boredom or habit. And, as a geek, it's really turned into a game for me to see if I can stay under my calorie goals. It turns my daily diet into a puzzle that I get to solve. It's kind of like real life Tetris. Through the day, foods keep falling my way. There are donuts in the break room. Candy bars at the project managers station. It's some one's birthday, have some cake! I get to decide what foods and how much of them are going to fit into my calorie slots.

I know it's possible to go too far down the path of obsessing over food. Eating is one of your fundamental biological functions. You shouldn't approach it with dread or shame. Still, being mindful of what you put into your body make sense. In my case, I have good results to show for it, at least when combined with my improved exercise habits. Which will be the topic of my next essay.

Weight Loss for Geeks: Part Two: It's Just Math!

First, let me say that I know a fair share of skinny geniuses and I've met plenty of fat people who are dumber than stumps. But, one thing I notice going to a half dozen science fiction conventions each year is that there are also a very high percentage of really smart geeks who are obese. If Big Bang Theory reflected the reality of my personal experience, among it's core group of geniuses (Sheldon, Leonard, Amy, Raj, Penny, and Wolowitz), at least three of them would be weigh over three hundred pounds. Of course, this is pretty much true of all television. While some shows do have one or two token fat characters, 95% of people on television are skinny, despite the fact that two thirds of Americans are overweight, and over a third are obese. Even though there's more to see of fat people, for some reason Hollywood pretends we're invisible. As someone with at least a little understanding of statistics, this nags at me.

While I do know a few literary-minded geeks whose eyes glaze over when you start talking about math, most geeks I know tend to be really good with numbers. Some are even downright obsessive about them. In a previous approach, I mentioned treating my own body statistics like they were the statistics of a character in a role-playing game. I once saw a gamer friend of mine sitting with a sheet of paper in front of him. As I got near, I saw the whole page was covered in equations. I asked what the heck he was working on, and he started talking about a computer game he was playing where he'd just found a new pair of gloves that enhanced his speed stat, but lowered his strength stat. He was working out whether, over time, being able to attack 2% more often would offset the decrease in damage he was inflicting. He'd concluded that it wouldn't, but then he also had to take into effect that the increased speed improved his dodging ability. He was avoiding some slight percentage of damage in each fight, so he finally worked out the numbers showing that the gloves allowed him to spend more time attacking with fewer pauses to heal himself and that gave him something like .025% more killing power over the course of a gaming session.

He's not an aberration. Old-school AD&D players will remember that the early Dungeon Master's Guide opened with a section on bell-curves and mathematical probabilities. There were charts showing the bonuses and penalties of different kinds of weapons against different kinds of armor, and every gamer I knew was obsessed with getting every single modifier he could manage into an attack. (Remember, as an elf, I get +1 with a long bow!) We once videotaped one of our D&D games, because, you know, we thought that shit was interesting as hell. When I watched it a few years later, I couldn't help but notice that we spent half our time arguing over math. A character would want to jump from a window of a tavern, grab a tree branch, and land in the saddle of his horse, and we'd spend twenty minutes debating the odds of that until we agreed on what number he'd need to roll on what combination of dice.

Yet, all the time we were debating this math, I was sitting there drinking straight out of a two liter bottle of Coke while going through multiple slices of pizza and half a bag of potato chips. For all the math I was worried about in my imaginary world, I was stunningly oblivious to the math of my real life.

Weight loss and weight gain really aren't complicated. If you take in more calories than you burn, you gain weight. Burn more than you take in, and you lose weight. I credit my success in weight loss to finally paying attention to these numbers. Using a smart phone app called MyFitnessPal, I began to record every single calorie I ate. Whenever I exercised, I recorded the number of calories burned. Of course, you burn calories even if you spend all day in bed reading; this is your basal metabolic rate. There are a dozen websites you can look up to calculate you BMR. Once you know it, the rule is pretty simple: Eat fewer calories than your BMR and you'll lose weight over time. At present, my BMR is around 2100 calories. It's certainly not impossible to stay under 2100 calories a day. But, in my old diet, it was really easy to go over that number. I used to go through at least two liters of soda a day. That's over 800 calories. I used to frequently eat pizza for lunch. Calories vary by the size of a slice of course, but most pizza slices are going to be in the range of 300 calories. It wasn't unusual for me to eat four slices, so, there's another 1200 calories. I'd be peckish after work, so I'd swing through a drive through and grab a burger and fries. There goes another 1000 calories.

Of course, even once you start keeping track of your calorie intake, you'll probably find that low calories alone aren't going to make the pounds fall off. And, there are times when you're still going to want a few slices of pizza, or some birthday cake, or some Halloween candy. Fortunately, your BMR is just your base number. You can burn more calories just by adding in a little exercise. I have plenty of days when I still eat over 3000 calories; but, I also have days when I hike five miles to buy these extras calories.

It's not healthy to get too obsessive over these numbers. You don't want to wind up with an eating disorder, of stop enjoying eating because you're so afraid of sugars and fats that you're paranoid about putting butter on your sweet potato. But, it's definitely healthy to be aware of these numbers. Once you start tracking your numbers, you'll quickly start to see where your excess calories were coming from. Cheryl and I have gotten really good at estimating how many calories are on any given plate of food we encounter. We've learned to correctly judge proportion sizes by putting almost every piece of meat we cook onto a kitchen scale. Even though I can now mentally keep track of my calories, I still use My Fitness Pal to record my numbers, but at this point that's turned into another stat. The program keeps telling me when I hit milestones of how many days I've logged in, and I don't want to mess things up by skipping a day. It will be the same thrill I used to get moving up a level playing Diablo 2. Watching a character creep from 32nd level to 33rd level released a little surge of adrenaline, and I felt the same way when MyFitnessPal told me I'd logged on for 200 days in a row. I imagine having it tell me I've hit 365 days will be nearly orgasmic.

Lord, I'm a geek.

Weight Loss for Geeks: Step One: See a Doctor!

How many times have you read diet advice that begins, "see a doctor?" (Or, more pretentiously, "consult with your physician?") I hate that advice. For several reasons, I'm skeptical of our medical system. About fifteen years ago I had a doctor who seemed to want to prescribe a pill for everything. I never left his office without a grab bag of pharmaceuticals. He didn't seem so much an actual doctor as a salesman for drugs.

So, I changed doctors, and my new doctor suggested I might have a food allergy that would explain my persistent allergies and said he'd order some blood work. He didn't tell me that the blood work would cost SIX-THOUSAND DOLLARS! It seems like, I dunno, the kind of thing you might mention. The blood work came back telling me I was "sensitive" to pretty much every food on earth, wheat, onions, tomatoes, radishes, and a long list of stuff I can't remember. I started reading up on food "sensitivities" and came away feeling like the whole thing was a scam. Obviously, there are legitimate food allergies, but the sensitivity stuff felt like pseudoscience designed to give doctors an excuse to issue bills for six grand.

After that, I went a decade without seeing a doctor. It was only a few years ago when I started drifting to sleep while I was driving home at 3pm that I thought, you know, maybe it's time I see a doctor about my never ending drowsiness.

It took about thirty minutes and an inexpensive blood test to diagnose me with a thyroid deficiency. The thyroid medication is dirt cheap, and my energy levels were boosted at least 200% once we got the dose right. But, I was still having to take naps in the afternoon. So, my doctor recommended a sleep study, saying I probably had sleep apnea. I suspected this was true, since I often woke up to discover I was sitting upright in bed, since I would stop breathing when I was laying down. I was really worried about using a CPAP machine when I first got it, but now using it is no hassle at all. I get great, deep sleep, and make it through my days without needing a nap. Heck, I even miss my afternoon naps and sometimes try to sneak one in and find I can't fall asleep because I'm not tired enough.

It's possible that I might have been able to lose weight if I'd cut calories and upped my exercise while I still had my thyroid deficiency, but it's doubtful. My metabolism just couldn't burn the calories I ate efficiently. It's also possible that I could have cured my sleep apnea by losing a significant amount of body weight. But, I didn't have the energy to do this until I started getting good nights of sleep by using the CPAP machine. I also couldn't have broken my addiction to soft drinks without CPAP. I used to require bottle after bottle of Mountain Dew to get me through a day. Now, I genuinely can't remember the last time I had a soda.

Even if you don't have an underlying health problem causing your obesity, if you are obese, it's likely that you're developing health problems. I was on the borderline of high blood pressure and flirting with diabetes before I changed my lifestyle. My latest blood work had all these numbers pulling back well into the safe zones.

Information is power, if you have the wisdom to use it. Your doctor has information you need. Get it.

Final Weigh In: 225.

Today was the final weigh in of the weight loss contest where I work. In this second round, my final weigh in was 225, or 19 pounds down since the end of January. My weigh in at the start of the first round of the contest last September was 284, so I've lost 59 pounds since getting serious about changing my diet and exercise habits. This is the before and after of what that looks like:

I'm not done! Not reaching 224 nags at me. I'd rather say I've lost 60 pounds than 59. I'm definitely going to continue moving forward with the goal target of being below 220 by the time of my next convention, ConCarolina's in early June. But, I fear these next five pounds are going to take more effort than the first 50. In the last week, I walked over 30 miles and biked another 13, and came in well below my calorie goals on all but one day, and still only lost 3 pounds for the week. My body is very efficient at moving me across long distances. When Cheryl and I first went biking on the American Tobacco Trail three years ago, we were wiped out after biking 7 miles. One one trip, five miles left me so tired I had to walk my bike up the final hill, and we're not talking a real hill here, just a very mild grade of a few degrees. This time, we did the first seven miles on Saturday barely breaking a sweat. Even after 13 miles, we weren't completely spent. I think we could have easily managed another couple of miles if we'd had time.

Back in September, I wore pants with a 42 inch waistband. Now, my best fit is a 36" waist, and I'd probably be buying a 35" waist if they sold men's pants in odd sizes. I tried on a 34" waist yesterday and was able to get it on, but it wasn't comfortable. I'm highly doubtful I can get below a 34" waist, since I think that's what I wore in college when I was skinny as a rail.

In the coming days, I plan to do a few posts about my weight loss strategies. I have a very geeky approach; basically, I treat my body like a characer in an RPG game and constantly work to improve my stats. I used to spend five hours sitting at a computer hunting through virtual dungeons in hopes of getting my character to go up a level. Now, I spend five hours a week exercising to get my weight stat to tick down another notch. And, like an RPG, the further you go, the tougher it gets.

Week 13: 228

Up a pound this week, on the pentultimate weigh in. But, I'm eating vegetarian up to the final weigh in, and over the next two days I'm doing a marathon distance, walking 27 miles over the course of two days, basically covering all of the American Tobacco Trail from Herndon park down to 64. My target is to reach 224 by next Monday so I can finish with a nice round 20 pound loss for this latest contest, and a sixty pound loss since September.

Last week, on a whim I tried on a pair of 36" waist jeans in the store to see how much more weight I'd need to lose to get into the smaller waist band. (In September I was a 42" waist.) To my shock, I not only got them on, they were actually a little loose! Yay! Except, groan, I already spent a ton of money on new clothes at the beginning of the year. Now, it's shopping time again. Sigh. But, I guess that buying new wardrobes is the literal price you pay for losing weight. Weighed against potentially lengthening my life and avoiding the diabetes that was almost certainly on the horizon for me given my family history, it seems like a worthwhile trade.

Week 12: 227!

I broke through my plateau of 231 finally and made it to 227 this week! Woohoo! When I started my new eating and exercise habits back in September, I weighed 284, so I've now lost 20% of my old body weight.

One reason I got through the plateau was the return of better weather for walking. And jogging. I still can't jog very long, but I'm definitely getting faster. For the first time ever, I did a mile in under 15 minutes, clocking in at 13:45. My knees aren't giving me any trouble at all since I started wrapping them. I'm looking forward to building up my endurance.

I've got two more weeks left in the competition. This week, I'm going to do a couple of medium sized hikes in the five mile range. The following week, I plan to shoot for some real distance. The furthest hike I've yet made is 11 miles, and I want to beat that by a good margin. After how hard it was to break through my last plateau, I'm not as positive that I can hit 224, which would be 20 pounds down in this latest competition. But, I'm damn sure going to try.

Week 11: 231

Back to 231 this week. Still on my plateau, even with an 8 mile hike at Pilot Mountain on Saturday. My goal of getting into the 220s by the end of April is still plausible, but much more daunting than it looked to me a month ago. My real milestone will be 227... if I hit that number, I'll have lost 20% of my body weight since starting my fitness project last September. However, when I hit 230, I'll have lost 20% of my body weight since my checkup last March that led to my sleep apnea treatment. I weighted 288 then, so there's big difference between how I looked then and how I looked now. Even though my weight has plateaued, I'm definitely seeing my waistline continue to shrink. The new clothes I bought in December are now pretty loose. I tried on some shorts the other day that were a 36" waist and they weren't tight at all. I wore 42" pants back in September. Progress!

Weeks 8, 9, 10: 232

Sigh. I know it's usually called a plateau, but it sure feels like a rut. It's frustrating because my weight at home has frequently been dipping into the 220s during the morning. Last Wednesday, I got as low as 227. But, for some reason, on Mondays at work, I'm just stuck at the same number.

We've had a couple of weeks of terrible weather that's kept me from making any long hikes. This week, I'm going to be too busy on my novel to carve out time for three or four hour hike, which are the exercise that really moves the numbers for me. I have been working in jogging when I get out, but the three mile sessions I have put in just haven't been enough, apparently. Oh well. It's a long term game. I'll keep going.

Week 7: 231

Since wrapping my knee worked so well at relieving my knee pain while hiking, I actually tried jogging this week. But, I'm either a fast walker or a slow jogger. My best pace jogging was only 15 minutes per mile. But, I can walk on the American Tobacco Trail which is flat and paved at 16 minutes per mile. I'm not sure that the time saving is worth it, but I'll probably keep working it into my routine to see if I get faster. My knees okay this morning, but I could definitely feel the impact of jogging while I was actually doing it.

I'm very close to 229. I actually saw that weight on my home scale last night after jogging, so I'm really hopeful I can reach it at work next Monday. It was roughly a year ago I first went to the doctor for my sleep apnea and weighed in at 288. So, if I get to 228 before the end of March, I'll be 60 pounds lighter than I was a year ago. This is a very motivating goal. Onward!

Week 6: 234

Back down to 234. I got in a six mile hike on Saturday that I think did the trick. If I hadn't stuffed myself on Sunday night, I might have been even lower. But, with the nice weather, we had some friends over for a cookout, and one of the guests brought a chocolate cake, and it would have been rude not to eat a piece or two.

Mr. Cavin advised me to wrap my knee before hiking to help with the knee pain and, wow, it worked great! I had zero pain during the hike, and no significant stiffness the following morning. I would have been happy if it had helped reduce the pain, oh, fifty percent. I didn't expect it to remove the knee pain completely. We'll see if the results hold up this week, which has a lot more walking slated due to the longer daylight hours thanks to last weekend's time change.

Weeks 4&5: 237

Last week, I bumped back up to 237 from 234. I wasn't too suprised. Like most people, my weight fluctuates in a range from day to day, and 234 was definitely a lower number than I expected, on the lowest end of my daily weight shifts. Last week's weigh in also followed by weekend at Mysticon, so I'd had three days of no real excercise and eating out leading into that weigh in. But, this week, I have no excuse. I'd walked over ten miles the previous week and had been under my calorie goals all but one day. Oh well. I'm trying to console myself that I'm still down seven pounds for this contest, better than a pound a week, which doesn't suck.

This week also brought a milestone. I track my calories using a program called "My Fitness Pal" and yesterday it informed me that I'd logged on for 180 days in a row. Six months of continuous weight loss isn't a bad milestone, and helps me to remember to keep a long term perspective. The real achievement won't be the weight I'm at the end of this contest. It will be if I'm still keeping the pounds off a year from now.

Still, I do wonder just how to get past this plateau. The days are getting long enough to get in walks in the evening, but I have a finite amount of time in my days, and I'm not sure I can carve out that many more hours. Plus, I don't know if my knees can take it. My knees feel fine when I'm walking, but after I rest a while, my left knee aches enough that I limp. The stiffness and pain go away once I walk for a while, but I'm taking the pain as a warning that pushing much more might lead to real injury. Haven't tried biking yet this season. I wonder if that will hurt my knee?

Week 3: 234

I'm a little stunned by the number, but I weighed in this morning at work at 234. I've lost 10 pounds since the new contest began, and I'm now down 50 pounds since the first contest started in September.

Ironically, this week was my least active week since the contest began. I did manage to sneak in some hiking, including a two mile trek on Saturday in the snow with Cheryl. But, even with the reduced pace, I've still logged over 30 miles in the past three weeks.

It's starting to show, too. This morning I added another notch on my belt. I've easily lost five inches of waistline since September, and now the new pants I bought near the end of that contest are starting to feel a little loose.

This coming week, more lousy weather is lined up for my days off, and over the weekend I'm going to Roanoke for Mysticon. It's hard to watch my diet when I'm eating out three days straight. But, a week of slacking off might prove useful. People are always asking me if I feel better now that I've lost this much weight. Really...no! I'm worn out from walking all the time! I bought my walking shoes new in October and have already worn the tread smooth. The only walking I want to do this week is to go shoe shopping.

Week 2: 238

Probably for the first time since I was in my early thirties, my weight is finally under 240. Last week I walked over 13 miles, and Cheryl and I did nothing but vegetarian dinners at home. I finally prepared tofu in a way she enjoyed it, so now we can start working it into our rotation more often. Really, except for a rather sad attempt of turning cauliflower into a pizza crust, our veggie dinners were all pretty kick ass. Still, tonight, I'm definitely sinking my teeth into some sort of meet product.

The coming week looks pretty soggy. I'll be interested in seeing what kind of numbers I post next week without the hiking I've been doing.

Week 1: 240

Today was the weigh in after the first week of the weight loss competition at work. I've lost 4 pounds, putting me at 240 even. That means that, from the start of the last contest in September, I've lost a total of 44  pounds. It's also the first significant weight loss I've had in weeks. I was pretty firmly resting on a plateau of weights in the mid 240s. To get off the plateau, I literally walked my ass off. I logged over 17 miles of walking last week, with over 12 of that hiking along the Eno. 

The forecast is for good weather this Tuesday and Wednesday, so I'll get in some good distance those days too. This week is also going to be a night of all vegetarian dinners. So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a good weigh in next week. I didn't lose the most weight this week at work, but I know I've already lost the easy pounds. My only hope of taking this is to keep on plan, keep watching my calories, and keep walking. 

New Weight Loss Competition: Weigh In: 244

We're starting a new weight loss competition at work. I won the last three month cycle by losing 37 pounds. Since then, my weight has been mostly stable, fluctuating in a range between 250 and 245. (My final weigh in weight last time was 247.) I weighed in yesterday at 244.

My goal is to wind up with my weight in the 220s. The upper end of that range is only 15 pounds away. Some weight calculators I use tell me that my ideal weight should be 195, which still seems like an improbable goal for me. I suspect I'll lose a lot of my motivation once I hit the 220s. But, who knows? Cheryl and I have maintained better diet and excercise habits since September, and together we've lost over 70 pounds. There are some bad habits I feel confident I won't go back to, like drinking sugary sodas, or eating fast food a half dozen times a week. Perhaps a year from now, 195 won't look like such an absurd number.

But, for now, my real goal is stay a step ahead of everyone at work. Last time, my exercize goal was 4 hours of walking each week, about 5 miles a week. This time, I'm doubling that to 8 hours and 10 miles a week. Unlike the last weight loss competition, there are no big food holidays on the calendar, and no big personal milestones that require me to eat cake, the way my one year anniversary did. 15 pounds should be the minimum I can achieve.

Now... off to hiking!

Bitterwood is now even freer!

Last week, I announced that I had made Bitterwood free on Smashwords. Now, I'm pleased to announce that Amazon has price matched and the novel is now a free download for Kindle! You can get your copy here! Anything you can do to help spread the word will be greatly appreciated. Blog, facebook, twitter, or just tell a friend. I want to really build some buzz about this series before releasing the fourth novel of the series, "Empire of Angels," as part of "The Complete Bitterwood" next month. That should lay the groundwork nicely for the Bitterwood audiobook, coming in March!

Nook readers, don't despair! I'm confident B&N will price match before long. And, don't forget, the Nook compatible epub is already available for free at Smashwords. Since I don't have an Ipad or Iphone, I can't check the Apple store, but if anyone reading this has one of these devices, I'd love it if you'd check to see if it's been price matched there and let me know. Thanks!

Are E-Books Environmentally Friendly?

At Illogicon over the weekend I was on a panel discussing the likely date when books printed on paper would shift from the most common way to distribute long narrative prose to just another object of interest to collectors. I have no doubts books will be printed a century from now. Vinyl records are still being made, and there are still people who manufacture saddles a century after the automobile pushed horses from the roads. But, the lower cost, ease of purchase, and vast possibilities of choice all but guarantee that e-books are going to be what people mean when they say “book” a few decades from now.


One benefit mentioned on the panel was the notion that e-books are better for the environment. One of the panelists, Tony Daniels, scoffed at this notion and said that all the energy needed to store and distribute e-books had an environmental cost. I was incredulous that he believed that that cost was greater than the cost of manufacturing and distributing books. But, the more I’ve thought about the matter, the more I suspect he might be right.

First, the costs of paper books: It takes energy to produce and distribute them. Shipping cases of books around the country (and even internationally) uses up a lot of fuel. Storing the books in climate controlled warehouses also burns up energy. Since I work in the printing industry, I can assure you that printing them requires equipment that sucks down electricity, and the main component of books, paper, is also rough on the environment, as anyone who has ever lived near a paper mill will attest.

Compare this to the tiny bits of electricity need to send an e-book across a network to your Nook, and it’s hard to think that an e-book isn’t better for the environment.

And, for the short term, it might be. But, what about the cost over decades, or even centuries? One nice thing about books is that, with care, they can last a very long time. A book printed today can sit on your library shelf for twenty years and then be read without adding anything to that book’s environmental cost. Lots of books do just this… sit around on shelves. They aren’t often simply thrown away. As a commodity, they are heavily recycled, passing from user to user, and when they do finally hit the end of their useful lives, they can be pulped to make more paper.

Your e-books, on the other hand, are read on electronic devices that are designed to be obsolete after two years. Suppose you have a book you read all the time—let’s just use the Bible as an example. A printed Bible can last a person many years. Let’s say that one has a useful life of twenty years of frequent use before it falls completely apart. An e-book version of the Bible over that same twenty years is going to probably live on a dozen different electronic devices. Every time you want to read it, it will drain a bit of power from your battery, power that will have to be replaced from the electrical grid. All the dead and obsolete electronic devices discarded over that twenty year span are going to have batteries made of toxic metals that are terrible things to put into landfills. The environmental cost of the total waste generated by obsolete electronic devices over the course of a decade is almost certainly greater than the environmental cost of obsolete books.

Finally, if you are worried about CO2 in the atmosphere, most paper is made from trees grown especially for pulp. This means that these trees suck CO2 out of the air, where it gets locked into paper and removed from the atmosphere for many, many years.

Someone a bit more dedicated to doing the actual data gathering on the environmental costs might come to a different conclusion, but, I think Tony Daniels was right. E-books aren’t better for the environment, especially over a long span of time. If you want to save the world run out and buy all the physical books you can get your hands on. I don’t have the hard evidence to prove it, but I think that books with dragons on the cover are especially good to purchase if you care about the planet.

Weight loss update

The second half of December was a challenge, given all the holiday meals and events we attended, not to mention that everywhere we turned we were being offered candies and cookies. Still, Cheryl and I at least stayed stable during the month.My final weigh in at work on 12-31 was 246, though all the snacking I did at my New Year's Eve party probably ensures I went into 2013 a bit heavier than that.

There's talk of doing another weight loss competition at work. I'm all for it, since the competition helps keep me motivated. But, even if not, I still plan to keep on track. I have a few modest targets that I can aim for to build momentum. I just need to hit 244 to have lost 40 pounds since I started, then 240 is another nice milestone right behind that. After that, it will probably be a long slog through the 230s. Hopefully we'll have at least a few nice days this month where I can get out and do a major hike. Eating right is useful for keeping the weight off, but to really lose weight, nothing beats a hike that lasts for several hours.