Changes

I have been forging ahead with my comparably spartan diet the last few weeks.  I've made a complete overhaul of my eating habits and so far it seems to be going well.
 
The first big change is not eating lunch at fast food chains or the China Buffet for lunch.  This is actually a pretty big deal, I'm sure if you think about all the stuff in a Chinese restaurant, hardly any of it would fall under the label of healthy.  I kind of miss it since I would often take a book with me and read while I munched on fried and sweetly sauced chicken bits.  I was even thinking the really super friendly lady who works there and always wants to know what my new book is about might be worried about me.  Instead I pack a few things, and read at the office or take a walk around the dump.

The second, is that most nights I would end up going to Wendy's or McDonald's since both of them are within walking distance of my house.  Of course I never walked to them, but the mere existence of the possibility that I could have walked somehow lessened the mental liability of ordering a grease burger and fries with a bonus junior-sized bacon cheeseburger as a snack for later.  You also often find that you need a box of nuggets for the ride home, as short as it may be.  So right there, avoiding all of that mess, I'm sure my intestines and arteries have become much happier.

Thirdly,  I have started a log of my caloric intake.  It's pretty simple and pretty much I just come up with a daily total.  There are plenty of websites that you can use to figure out your basel metabolic rate (BMR), i.e. how many calories your body uses each day.   I looked at quite a few and they all give back slightly different numbers, and everyone's bodies will be different so at the very best these can only be a guideline anyway.  The point however is that if you eat less calories than your BMR your body will make up the difference by consuming your calorie stores, i.e. your gross fat.  Of course you don't want to go too far, if you reduce your caloric intake too drastically your body will think you are starving and will adjust your BMR to compensate and may even take the calories from the places where you might want a bit of heft, like your muscles.

The math looks something like this:  a pound of fat weights, well a pound, but in that pound is stored about 3500 calories of energy.  So basically you have to create a 3500 caloric deficit in your diet to lose that pound bulging out around your belly.   Visually it is apparent that I have had an enormous surplus and have been slowly storing those calories away for a harsh winter like a blubbery skinned bear preparing for a long hibernation.  And if you really think about it you really don't have to over eat much to gain a lot of weight over the years.  A spoonful of peanut butter is about 200 calories.  If you ate just that extra spoonful of peanut butter a day more than your body really needed after a month you would be inching up on being 2 pounds fatter than you started the month.  Over a year...  yeah, it's pretty scary.

In practice keeping the log helps keep me aware of what I'm eating and encourages me to make better choices.  For example, if I want a snack, I could eat a bag of chips and not really be full, or have a banana.  The banana having something like 125 calories and some vitamins and dietary fiber compared to the chips having 600 calories and being nutritionally worthless.

  There are the days where I might still go out to eat for the sake of a hot date, so the appearance of a shrimp curry, or a chicken burrito might appear on the list still.  The cool thing is that researching those types of things leads you to start making different choices. If you happen to go back to you favorite overly giant burrito place to eat you might do things differently.  I learned that a burrito in the wheat shell with grilled chicken has a few hundred calories less than the blackened version in a flour wrap, not something you would normally think about, but over a month those calories are going somewhere.


An Awesome side effect is that I'm rediscovering my love of cooking.  I think it has something to do with the correlation between the kitchen and the lab of the mad scientist.  There are bubbling liquids, strange powders and extracts, formulas and recipes, the mixing of ingredients and the use of really cool gadgets.  Hopefully in the kitchen one never ends up yelling, "It's alive, it's alive!"   Seriously though, there is something relaxing and satisfying about eying your pantry and creating something tasty and healthy from it's contents.

Let The Rice One In

I've been doing some research into what types of food one should have stocked in their pantry, or in my case one of my tiny cabinets.  You can do a pretty good search using the internet to find various we lists of well stocked pantries, from pretty basic ten item lists to more classy high brow lists peppered with items like clam juice and red and white wines.

Doing a second search looking more for the cheap, but healthy foods, you can find a pretty big number of lists as well.  No clam juice on these lists though.  There are a couple of things that are at the top of almost every one of these lists if you do a cross reference and statistical analysis.  The first is rice and the second is beans.  So one of the healthiest and cheapest things you can keep around is rice and beans.

Taken together these two items can form a nearly complete diet with a good number of our daily needs accounted for and all of the essential amino acids one needs according to a number of articles I found about rice.  With the variety of rices and types of beans you can have plenty of variety even if eaten with almost every meal, from the red beans and rice of Sir Mix-A-Lot's big bottomed girls to the spicy curried dishes of East Indian cooking. 

Me and rice have been becoming friends, I bought a rice cooker.  You can get a pretty basic model that cooks the rice then keeps it warm till you want to eat it.  Or you can get a model with as many features as an Ipod.  They have models that you can put the rice in before going to work and it will be done and waiting in warming mode for you when you get home.  I opted for a smaller 3 cup model that has one button.   I found it for only $16 at target and it came with a steaming try if I ever want to use it to steam veggies.

One trick you have to learn though is a rice cooker cup is not the same as the cups most of us are use for baking .  Rice cookers use a cup, as defined by the International Rice Association.  A secretive group no doubt in line with the Illuminant and shadowy grain cabals of the world.   The cup that comes with the rice cooker is pretty important if you want to use the measuring lines inscribed in the rice cooker.  A Rice Association cup will give you about  3/4 of the rice a standard cup would give you, using the standard cup would leave your rice more than a bit dry and uncooked compared to what you would expect.

Do the rice thing.

The Heat of Fat.

I've discovered that much like an arctic seal, I have a layer of insulating fat covering my body.  Most people do, that's one of the evolutionary benefits of adipose tissue, it stores the energy we need and  helps our body retain its core temperature. The problem is that I often feel as though I'm cooking in my own skin like a baked in the bag turkey.   I have become like a man wearing too many coats, despite the weather.
 
Recently I was in a technology training class where the women were shivering and the sound of teeth chattering could be heard above even the sounds of typing.  They were putting on sweaters and wrapping their arms around their bodies, huddling for warmth.  Meanwhile I was  trying to wipe the sweat from my brow without drawing attention to the fact that I was starting to look like a damp hog glistening in the white glow of the computer monitors.

I started to feel my shirt sticking to my skin, and the cloth of my pants become irritating as the sweat from my body soaked into the fabric.  I longed for a cube of ice to press to my wrists and cool the overheated blood flowing through the arteries just beneath the skin's surface.  The air around me was beginning to feel thick and humid as my body pumped water vapor into the air in a pitiful attempt to cool my body through evaporative cooling.  It may have been my imagination, but I would have sworn that I could feel sweat pooling in my seat soaking my crotch.

It was then that the training instructor called for a fifteen minute break.  I walked as briskly as possible to the bathroom, ran the faucets over my hands and splashed cool water into my face.   Sweet relief at last.  Looking into the mirror I stared into the depths of my own eyes and thought of how long the day ahead would be if this was only the 10 a.m. break.  I thought to myself that I really need to stop the twice daily indulgence of grease burgers and fried nuggets and do something for my health.

My own face stared back at me and nodded, yes, yes you disgusting beast, start taking better care of yourself.  That night, after a long day of discomfort, I went home and weighed myself, 246 lbs.  Nearly an 8th of a ton, the heaviest I have been in my life.   I either need to lose weight or move closer to the poles.