The CodeMash staff posted my recorded lightning talk on Personal Journaling.
It’s the same subject as my earlier post – the exciting difference is that it was a much bigger stage with a bigger audience that was sipping beer and whisky.
The CodeMash staff posted my recorded lightning talk on Personal Journaling.
It’s the same subject as my earlier post – the exciting difference is that it was a much bigger stage with a bigger audience that was sipping beer and whisky.
The screencast of my Stir Trek 2019 talk.
Official conference videos will follow, with live speaker action as well as screen recording. However, I had a glitchy radio microphone, so the audio quality of this presentation is likely to be better.
Body weight measurements from Feb 2019 to April 2019. 5 day moving average with +/- 1 sigma channels to estimate measurement error.
I had a “goal weight” of 190 lbs, and I crossed that milestone recently, as the plot above shows.
My revised goal is to reach 12% body fat. The challenge with a body fat goal is that it’s a much harder measurement to perform at home. Of course, the real goal of most people who want to “lose weight” is to preferentially burn body fat and build (or maintain) muscle.
Body weight is what we can measure, at least cheaply and easily, but body fat is what we want to measure. Yes, technically, we can measure body fat as well, but not as cheaply or easily.
With all that said, I no longer care about the number on the scale. The main goals are to:
I place the most emphasis on the first point: getting physically stronger as measured objectively in the size of the weights I can lift and move around. If this increases body weight by adding muscle, that’s great.
One of the great things for a person eating a low-carb / high-fat (LCHF) diet is that there’s no subjective experience of deprivation or hunger. Within certain specific constraints, you eat what you want, when you want, without counting calories.
It really feels like eating this way works in alignment with what we know about science and biochemistry, rather than against it. The “traditional” weight-loss diet – at least “traditional” since the 1970s – consists of minimal fat, lots of carbohydrates, and calorie restriction. This kind of weight-loss diet always seems to have people counting “points” or calories permanently, and always feeling hungry. It also seems to keep people coming back for more when the first attempt stops working – first Weight Watchers, then Jenny Craig, then NutriSystem. I have no idea whether these are all still a thing, but I remember that they were popular when I was a kid – TV advertising, etc [1].
Some subjective anecdotes:
[1] Update: apparently they still exist. At a client site the other day, they have TVs in the cafeteria. I saw both a Jenny Craig and NutriSystem ad during lunch.
[2] Some sources suggest that a relatively small reduction in the protein fraction of the American diet, from 14% to 12%, may have created the obesity epidemic. Hence, protein leverage. References: Obesity: the protein leverage hypothesis; Testing the Protein Leverage Hypothesis in a free-living human population.
[3] Roughly speaking, metabolism of pure dietary fat causes no insulin response, pure protein causes a moderate insulin response, and pure carbohydrate causes a high insulin response. All natural foods are a blend of fat, protein, and carb, and this makes things more complex.
DogFoodCon (DFC) is a popular conference that draws speakers and attendees from the Great Lakes region and across the nation. DFC has experienced sustained growth and popularity since the inaugural conference back in 2008.
Taking place in Columbus, Ohio on the weekend of October 3-4, 2019, DFC is a two-day event that covers a broad range of topics of interest to programmers, technology managers, business analysts, and other technology workers. Presentation topics include: personal and career development, Ruby, Python, Adobe Creative Suite, C#, UX, Office 365, System Administration for Linux and Windows, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, R, Azure, Java, MS Teams, PostrgeSQL, JavaScript, PowerBI, SQL, Security, Blockchain and GitHub.
No matter where you are on or off the tech stack, we know that you’ll meet some great people and learn something new!
I’m delighted to be involved with DFC this year, as the track owner for dynamic languages (Ruby and Python).
If the above sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to submit a talk (or several): DFC Call for Presentations (Sessionize link)
For the first time in quite a while – since April, 2018 – my body weight has dropped below 200 lbs. I’m pleased with this milestone and wanted to make a note about what techniques appear to be working:
When I talk and write about this subject, I get pedantic and specific about terminology. In particular, I avoid using the term “weight loss” for two main reasons:
Therefore, instead of the common, but misguided, term weight loss, I use the preferred and more specific term body fat reduction.
In the morning, right after waking up drink this:
Drink it before coffee or anything else.
I’ve accumulated a lot of body fat over the past 15-20 months. I am aiming to get back to a healthier body shape (lower body fat percentage, more muscle).
I’m thinking about what the optimal diet, or range of diets, would be:
This list is inspired by various other approaches, many of which have significant overlap with each other: the Paleo diet, the ketogenic diet, the Perfect Health Diet, and Whole30.