13 Weeks: Week 10 — In Which We Scheme

My mother, on what turned out to be her last birthday, with my sister-in-law Tawney.

Great news — for me at least, we report you decide — the 13 Weeks series has been renewed for another 13 weeks. (You can follow it day to day on the associated Facebook page.)

It’s actually kind of fitting that I’m announcing this now: today as I type this is the 11th of January, and the one year anniversary of my mother’s death. It will be published on Saturday 12 January, and Sunday 13 January would have been her 78th birthday.

As I said when I started this:

A sense of mortality struck me on my birthday, 57 this year; arithmetic started showing up for me. My father died in 1994, at 69. That’s only 12 years older than I am now. Mom at 77, only 20 years older than I am now.

Now, my Dad weighed in the neighborhood of 450 lbs when he died, and he smoked. My Mom, around 200 lbs and she’d smoked heavily, drunk heavily, and generally been rode hard and put up wet nearly her whole life. I’ve got some advantages, since I don’t drink or smoke; on the other hand, I’ve been struggling with my weight since I was literally 6 years old. You can hear a lot of bad diet advice in 50 years.

The long and short of it is that I want to change this and need to change this, and there’s relatively new science that suggests there are better, faster, more efficient ways to change this. So I’m doing an experiment: for 13 weeks, which I plan to start a week from today, 4 November 2012, I’m going to start an experiment where I’ll be keeping a very low carb, more or less “paleo” diet, and doing “high intensity interval training” and “high intensity strength training” two sessions a week. This scheme has good reasons behind it, biochemically and otherwise.

Then I’m writing about it, and I’m going very public with it, so, frankly, it’ll be too embarrassing to quit.

Well, it appears to have worked. At 271.5 today, I’m down 30 pounds from my October high of 301.5, and down 18 pounds from my official start date of November 4. My A1c is down from 7.5 percent to 6.2 percent, making me officially post-diabetic, and I’ve got hopes that by the time this thirteen weeks is done I’ll actually have my A1c into the normal non-diabetic range. That is to say, remission.

Academy Award Nominations Announced, Set New Record

I had to scan down to “Best Cinematography” before I got to a movie I’d even seen. (Best Cinematography, for “Skyfall”, and I have to admit it was gorgeous.)

Fox News magazine (?) has the whole list, and some history of Emma Stone in dresses, here.

Buddhism Is Not What You Think

I suppose a lot of people who follow PJ already know I’m a Buddhist, and have been for almost 50 years — a “devout Buddhist” if you like. I’ve written about it occasionally on PJ, going back to my first or second piece, when PJ was still in its pajamas. I’ve also written quite a lot about Buddhism on my moribund personal blog, Explorations.

Over the holidays, I decided to collect some of that writing, and add to it to put together a book on Buddhism with the working title Undecorated Buddha (or maybe Undocumented Buddha — I’m open to suggestions.) As I did with my 13 Weeks experiment, I’ve set up a Facebook page where people are invited to come and keep me honest.

At about the same time, Dave Swindle co-incidentally (or was it? Insert Twilight Zone music here) mentioned to me that he wanted more stuff on Eastern spirituality in PJ Lifestyle. We rapidly agreed on my writing a weekly Undecorated Buddha piece.

I hope you’re feeling better, Dave; I didn’t mean to trample you like that.

Now, you might ask “who the hell are you to write about Buddhism?” After all, I don’t have “Transmission”, no accredited teacher has given me the certificate.

About two thousand years ago, an Emperor of China asked the same question of an Indian guy we call Bodhidharma.

13 Weeks: Week Nine — In Which We See Results

Starting on November 4th 2012, I began a 13 week experiment in changing my eating and exercise habits, for the best of all reasons: I didn’t want to die. I was chronically ill with stomach troubles, I was sleeping badly, and my average blood glucose was in the neighborhood of 150 mg/dL — well into the range of type II diabetes mellitus.  For the experiment,  I’ve cut my daily consumption of carbohydrates to a net of 30 grams a day and cut wheat out entirely, and I’ve added exercise following a Tabata Protocol, along with yoga, kettlebells, and (too rarely) weight lifting. I report my results here at PJ Media Lifestyle, and also on my 13 Weeks Facebook page.

If you’re been reading 13 Weeks since I started, you’ll remember that I had realized on about October 15 that I was 100 lbs or so overweight at 301.5; I was in chronic ill health with both gastric reflux disease and irritable bowel syndrome; and I had moved from pre-diabetic to flat-out diabetic in the span of about a year. At 57, I realized I was only 12 years younger than my father when he died, and only 20 years younger than my mother was when she died on January 11, 2012. Twenty years wasn’t enough, and twelve years was for damn sure not enough; something had to be done.

Now, after Week Nine, the effects of what I’ve done are starting to really show up. Here’s the chart I’ve been keeping to plot my progress.  The plus signs are my weight in pounds, the x’s are my blood glucose as measured with a drugstore glucometer, and the lines are the linear best fit line to the data.

As you can see, the lines are headed down — which is the good direction. On Wednesday I went to the doctor, and got weight and my bloods done again. My weight’s down 30 lbs since October 19, 19 lbs since I started this November 4th. But I swore I wasn’t paying attention to the weight (gloat). Even if I lost a lot. (Gloat.) One of the blood tests I did was the glycosylated haemoglobin HbA1c test, which is a diabetes test. I’ll tell you my results below; before I do, however, I want to explain the test and why it’s important.

With diabetes, of course, we’re primarily concerned with the blood glucose level. When I was a kid, my “second mom” Julia Medina took care of us; Mrs. Medina was diabetic and dependent on insulin, but home glucometers weren’t available; the only real test diabetics had was to watch their urine for ketones using test strips, and the only real measure they had for control of diabetes was whether you tended to fall into a coma, either from low blood sugar, or from high. If your blood sugar stayed too high, you risked blindness, advancing neuropathy and pain, and kidney disease, hearth disease, or — worst of all from my point of view — creeping necrosis of the extremities. (Your fingers and toes die and become gangrenous; they’re amputated. The stumps become gangrenous; they’re amputated a little higher. Eventually you run out of pieces and you die. Don’t even google “diabetic necrosis”, you don’t want to look at those pictures.)

Luckily, Mrs. Medina was well-controlled; she lived a long life. A whole lot of diabetics didn’t. Three things, put together, improved the chances of a diabetic living a long life over the last 20-30 years. The first was inexpensive direct tests for blood glucose levels; the second was bio-engineered human insulin (before then, insulin extracted from the pancreases of hogs was used, but it doesn’t exactly match human insulin. It was better than nothing but still had problems.) The third was the wide availability of the glycosylated haemoglobin HbA1c test (which we’re going to just call the A1c from now on.) What the A1c let doctors do is infer what your average glucose had been over about the last three months.

As a red blood cell passes from erythropoiesis (birth) to eryptosis (death and recycling), the hemoglobin sometimes binds with glucose, a process called glycosylation.

Here’s how it works. Hemoglobin, the chemical component of the blood that carries oxygen and makes the blood red, can bind to glucose, forming glucose-bearing (or glycosylated) hemoglobin. The rate at which it binds is proportional to the concentration of glucose in the blood. It binds fairly slowly, so your hemoglobin doesn’t just suck up all the sugar right away. Instead, over the life of a red blood cell (an erythrocyte), which is about 100 days in the normal human, a fairly small percentage of the hemoglobin will glycosylate. At the end of the average 100-day lifespan of the red blood cell, it’s broken down by the body and it’s components recycled; part of that process separates iron from the hemoglobin, which also liberates the glucose.

Remember, though, that the rate at which the glucose binds is dependent on the concentration – the more glucose, the more it binds to the hemoglobin, and once bound it stays bound until the red blood cell dies. The result is that the percentage of cells with glycolated hemoglobin in the blood is proportional to the average blood glucose level for the last several weeks.

Still with me? We’re getting to the payoff. From my blood glucose readings, I’d known things were improving.

In October, A1c was 7.5 percent. You can compute the equivalent average blood glucose, which comes out to be about 170 mg/dL. An A1c of 6.5 percent or more is diabetes.

Yesterday, my A1c was 6.2 percent, or an average of around 130 mg/dL. An A1c of between 5.7 percent and 6.4 percent is considered enough for a diagnosis of pre-diabetes.

Or, in my case, post-diabetes. By blood sugar is controlled now, down to healthy levels — and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the life span of red blood cells that were new when I started this; I can expect the A1c to go down. If it keeps declining at the rate it has been, it might be as low as 5.5 percent by the end of this 13 weeks.

That would be normal.

One more thing I want to mention. A dear young friend of mine has decided she wants to enter the military, but to do so she needs to lose ten pounds, and wants to get in better shape. As a result, she’s started a blog of her own, 14 Weeks for Freedom, where she’s making her own open commitment to some life changes.

I am extremely proud of her; please drop over to the blog and give her your support.

For the New Year

From Rob Brezsny’s Facebook and his book Pronoia:

My old philosophy professor Norman O. Brown would periodically interrupt his lectures, tilt his head upward as if tuning in to the whisper of some heavenly voice, and announce in a puckish tone, “It’s time for your irregular reminder: We’re already living after the end of the world. No need to fret anymore.”

The implication was that the worst had already happened. We had lost much of the cultural riches that had given humans meaning for centuries. All that was going to be taken from us had already been taken.

On the bright side, that meant we were utterly free to reinvent ourselves. Living amidst the emptiness, we had nowhere to go but up. What remained was alienating, but it was also fresh.

Working from the hypothesis that you’re living after the end of the world, what are you free to do that you weren’t able to do before? Who are you free to be?

It’s been a rough year. I think we can all use a little pronoia.

13 Weeks: Week Eight — Plateaus and Diets and Goals, Oh My!

Episode VIII: A NEW HOPE. It is a period of gluttony and excess. The Taubes rebellion, striking back from a hidden base of scientific papers, anecdotal stories, and statistics, has managed to win its first high-intensity battle against body fat and blood glucose, only to find itself stymied by the holiday season, plateauing weight, and coffee cake. Follow Our Hero at PJ Lifestyle and Facebook  as he enters the eighth week of his thirteen week experiment.

Yeah, okay, it’s a little cheesy, but it sure worked for Lucas. So this is Week Eight, and you remember all that stuff about plateaus for the last two weeks? Well, you can forget about it. This morning’s weight was 272 pounds, which is 5 pounds or more off in the last week and within a hair of 30 pounds off since I first had my mortality wake-up call in October. Blood glucose has a bigger variance, so since day numbers aren’t as useful, but my average morning fasting blood glucose for the first week of the experiment was 142; for the last 7 days, it has been 122. This is progress.

Twelve-steppers are told to “trust the process” and it’s good advice, but it sure is a helluva sight easier to trust the process when it’s actually visibly working.

Now that I’m well past the halfway point, however, and the end of this experiment starts to be something foreseeable, people are starting to ask me what my next goals will be. This goes along with the people who ask you what your New Year’s Resolution will be?

My New Year’s Resolution is not to make any New Year’s Resolutions.

As I’ve said a couple of times, the physiology of this whole low-carb eating plan is interesting, but the longer I go into the experiment, the more the psychology of “dieting” and weight loss, and socially-conditioned feelings about diets and weight, and my own personal baggage (two steamer trunks, three suitcases, and an extensive scrapbook) involving all of this has become the most interesting part.

This week, in addition to the sudden weight loss itself, I had what I think has to be described as a therapeutic insight about my weight and that baggage. How I came to that realization would be a long, extraordinarily geeky but eventually boring story involving, of all things, MMORPG computer games, but the upshot is that I realized that in my day-to-day life, when I’m interacting in person with other people, I’ve always — always — had a subconscious awareness that I was fat, and that being fat was disgusting, so therefore I was disgusting.

I suspect this may have had some impact on my confidence in social situations.

13 Weeks: Week Seven, In Which We Whine

Yeah, I’m doing a Taubes-inspired low-carb diet and high-intensity training, and this week I’m not particularly happy about it. So there. Follow me here at PJ Lifestyle or at the 13 Weeks Facebook page and see if “bah, humbug” is a weight-loss strategy.

So, it’s week seven, past the half-way mark in my 13 week experiment. Let’s hit the objective data first: my weight loss continues. I hit 275 this week for the first time in quite a while, and I’m settling down to very exactly 1.33 pounds a week. My glucose also continues to improve with a linear best-fit trend of about 1.5 mg/dL per week — which means, practically, that my glucose is often near normal even early in the morning when it seems to be highest. I could wish the weight loss was a little faster, but honestly the eating plan I’m on has really been very benign, very easy to do. In general, but I wasn’t going to whine until the next paragraph.

Okay, it’s the next paragraph. As you may recall, I was set to have a colonoscopy last Monday, and yes, thank you, everything came out all right. I don’t have to do another one for ten years. Starting back on Friday or Saturday, though, my big toe started to hurt. Right in the metatarsophalangeal joint, which is to say, where it meets the foot. It got inflamed and swollen, with a distinct red patch right over the joint. Monday, did the procedure; toe was still hurting, but I was, how you say, impaired. Finally thought about it, looked it up and decided I was having a gout attack, my first. Started taking the official jungle medicine cure for all things orthopedic: 800mg of ibuprofen 4× daily. And called the doc because, after all, I’m not a real doctor.

Went to the doctor, told him my history, said I thought it was gout, and how I was treating it.

He said, “you’re right. Fifty dollars, please.”

If it keeps recurring, there’s more stuff to do, but a lot of times it doesn’t. Gout basically is caused by uric acid precipitating out in a joint, and I’ve been on a high protein — and therefore high uric acid — diet, plus I was dehydrated from the prep. (When I said “everything came out all right”, I meant everything.) Still, it’s Friday night and my foot is basically healed.

13 Weeks: Week Six — Surprise, It’s Saturday!

These are the adventures of Charlie Martin, his 13-week mission to follow a Taubes-inspired low-carb eating plan with high-intensity training, to find out what the hell happens and hopefully lose some weight and improve his health besides.  Follow me here on PJ Lifestyle, and on the 13 Weeks Facebook page.

Yeah, it’s Saturday. I forgot to mention last Sunday that to fit in with the new weekly schedule for Lifestyle health-related posts, we’re moving to Saturday. So strictly, this is really sort of week 5 1/2, but roll with it.

This really has gotten to be sort of the boring middle — my blood sugar continues its slow decline, and I’m still more or less plateaued: my weight hovered at 278.2 exactly for 6 days before breaking below that this morning. Except, maybe it’s not a real plateau: my weight is still fitting a trend line of about 1 pound every four days. We’ll see on Sunday.

In the mean time, though, there’s been one thing I’ve noticed: I’ve been letting the exercise slide. There are several reasons, or excuses, for this — I really did feel bad right after Thanksgiving, and last week was a terror, with one all-nighter programming and a cold. But still, I’ve been back to my old habit of the most exercise I get being the trip from the parking lot to my desk at the office, and I’ve been parking closer to the door than usual.

And that nonsense has got to stop. Starting today, I’ll be carefully recording the exercise on Lose It! and I’ll be announcing it in my morning updates on Facebook. Every time. Days with no exercise I’ll also mention in my morning updates. That’ll keep me honest.

I did notice one interesting thing this week. Here’s my Physics Diet chart from the start of the experiment:

The line along the bottom is daily weight; the straight line is the linear-fit trend line and the blue line is a exponentially weighted moving average. What’s interesting is the way it seems there’s almost a pattern to it — a bump up, a plateau, then a sudden decline. I don’t know what to make of that. In any case, the current plateau is going to be challenged quite a bit this weekend; I’m having a little procedure done this Monday, so I’ll be on clear liquids for the weekend.

What? What procedure? Just a procedure.

Oh, all right: it’s a colonoscopy. Happy now? Another of the joys of  middle age.

13 Weeks: Week Five — In Which We Slog

In Our Last Episode: Our Hero – having dived into a 13 Week Experiment with a high-protein, high-fat, low carb di… eating plan inspired by Gary Taubes, and high-intensity training inspired by Tabata Izumi’s Tabata Protocol and the high intensity weight-lifting described in The Power of Ten and Body by Science — was confronted by the Thanksgiving Monster on the Weight-Loss Plateau. Now, we find him crossing the Slough of Despond pursued by ghosts from his past and burdened by excessive baggage.

Yeah, I’m not having as good a time.

It’s predictable: any time you do something like this, there’s initial excitement and enthusiasm, but eventually you’re in the middle of it and the excitement abates. This week the excitement has definitely abated. A lot of that has to do with things outside of the experiment itself: as we said in grad school, life is something that happens when you’re just trying to do your damned research. I had a programming project with a hard deadline for a demo; it wasn’t working and I got stubborn, resulting in my working from 9:30AM on Wednesday to 11:30AM on Thursday — 26 hours straight. And I can tell you, I’m getting too old for this crap. Adding insult to injury, I’d hit 276 pounds on Wednesday morning, and was back up to 278 when I got home on Thursday, even though I’d actually not had much to eat over that 26 hours. I then had some unhappy news on another issue that was stressing me when I got to work on Friday morning.

By Friday afternoon I was not a happy man.  (This, by the way, is a cliffhanger to remind you to follow to the next page.)

13 Weeks: Week 4 — In Which We Plateau

The continuing saga of my experiment with a Taubes-inspired change in diet, and high intensity training. Follow me here on PJ Lifestyle, and follow it day to day by liking my 13 Weeks Facebook page.

Okay, last week was on Thanksgiving survival; this week is the aftermath, and then I’ll talk about high intensity training. But first the aftermath.

Basically, I gained about 6 pounds directly after Thanksgiving. Now, as I said last week, there was no way that was “real” weight gain — that would have implied I’d eaten 21,000 kcals over what I need to keep my weight level in the span of a couple of days, when in fact by my food diary I’d eaten 7,700 kcals under. And as I’ve said all along, this is an experiment to see what happens, especially to my blood sugar, not about weight.

Well, I talk a big game, but the fact is that with 50 years of baggage, I can’t help but pay attention to the weight loss, and I was pretty unhappy about the whole thing. Not unhappy enough that I was tempted off my eating plan, mind you. I was really uncomfortable the weekend after Thanksgiving. If I ever ramp up the carbs, it’ll be very carefully.

The first 4 pounds came back off in a couple of days, and then I plateaued — I hit 281 or thereabouts and bounced along for five days. Five freaking days. Now, 280 has been a hard level for me for several years — I could lose down to there but hard to break through.  (To end the suspense, yes I did finally — I’m back to 279.)

Here’s what the weights would have looked like if I only weighed on Sunday, just as I only do measurements on Sunday:

Matching the scale etc, the Thanksgiving weight gain is a very small alteration; the trend line is still down. In fact, since the long plateau isn’t included, the slope of the trend line is rather greater — 0.27 pounds a day versus 0.21. Once again, I think the lesson is that normally, maybe weighing yourself every week is enough, if you can stand it. (I couldn’t: I’d have to throw away my scale or hire someone to bring it over once a week.) Now, let’s get to what I’ve promised for a couple weeks, and talk about the training routines I’ve followed. That will start right below the fold, so follow this on to the next page.

13 Weeks: Week 3 — The Consequences of Turkey Stuffing

(The continuing saga of my experiment with a Taubes-inspired change in diet, and high intensity training. Follow me here on PJ Lifestyle, and follow it day to day by liking my 13 Week Facebook page.)

So, Thanksgiving is over, and I’ve got to add to that “thank God” because the whole thing has turned into what a therapist friend of mind called an “AFOG” — “Another, (Freaking) Opportunity for Growth.” (No, he doesn’t actually say “freaking”.) On Thanksgiving, I had 60g of carbs, and then Friday I had 80g at our traditional day-after-Thanksgiving leftovers feast. A little bit of mashed potatoes and stuffing, a sliver of cheesecake for dessert Thursday, and a half-piece of apple pie on Friday were the main culprits. So, I had, actually, quite small amounts of two things I’d nearly completely avoided: refined sugars, and wheat.

But I only had a little turkey! (Actually a picture I took of the presentation after carving.)

On Saturday morning I’d gained nearly six pounds. I also felt like hell — my GERD was back, I was achy and headachy. Back to the eating plan.

Thank God I’m back to a normal light diet breakfast.

Naturally, my first dark thoughts were ones of panic. But here’s the advantage of keeping a careful food diary: looking at the diary, in which I’m pretty diligent, I still had a net calorie deficit for the week of about 2700 kcal. An actual enduring weight gain of 6 pounds would require an excess of 21,000 kcals (using the conventional 3,500 kcal/lb). Didn’t happen. (I wrote, middle of the week, about some deductions from my first weeks of data. Basically, my actual weight loss is hard to account for by the “calorie is a calorie” thermodynamic model — either I’m losing weight 3 tiems faster than the observed calorie deficit can account for, or my metabolism has stepped up by 40 percent or more.)

Back in my teens, when I was trying the Stillman Diet and didn’t know much chemistry, physiology, or frankly much of anything else except that I was still hurting from being teased and insulted at Baptist Church Camp, I took a one-day vacation from the Stillman diet for my birthday, had biscuits at breakfast and potatoes at dinner, and gained seven pounds overnight. And I was hysterical: was I going to have to eat nothing but boiled chicken and boiled eggs for the rest of my life? Luckily, schooll starts shortly after my birthday; I went back to glory and acclaim — I’d lost about 50 lbs — and the girls were suddenly paying attention to me. The seven pounds didn’t make as much difference then.

13 Weeks Extra: In Which We Do Arithmetic

I’m doing a low carb Gary-Taubes-like diet and adding high intensity training for 13 weeks to see how it works. This 13 Weeks series is my diary of the experiment; you can also follow me day to day at my Facebook page.

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not Sunday, But I noticed something so interesting I decided to do an extra post; I’m still planning to talk about high intensity training this Sunday. I’ve been doing a food diary at LoseIt!, and tracking my weight in a spreadsheet and at Physics Diet. So I’ve got a pretty solid diary of what I’m eating and its nutritional contents. Now, Physics Diet is pretty solidly devoted to the traditional thermodynamic “a calorie is a calorie” model of weight loss. When you enter your weights, it computes some interesting statistics and charts them; it also computes how many calories you have been under (or over) your needs based on the rate of change in your weight. So, without further adieu, here are some charts.

First, a chart from Excel showing my weight and fasting blood sugar, both taken immediately after awakening every day. (Click to enlarge the charts.)

Weight and Glucose including linear best-fit trend lines

Notice that both trend lines are going down quite nicely.

Now, here are my charts from Physics Diet. First, here’s a chart for the whole time since I started watching carbs on 19 October.

Now comes the arithmetic. Nominally, a pound of weight is 3500 kcal; you have to cut out 3500 kcal to lose a pound, and if you eat 3500 kcal too much, you gain a pound. As of today, I weighed 278.6; I’ve lost roughly 23 lbs since 19 October, when I weighed 301.5. That means by the “calories are calories” model, I had to have cut 80,500 kcal over that month and a day, or about 15,000 kcal a week — 2515 kcal a day — under my metabolic needs in order to get an average weight loss of 4.25 pounds per week. Honestly, that seemed unlikely.

But then if we look at the chart for just the time I’ve been really running the experiment, it gets even more interesting.

13 Weeks: Week 2, In Which We Eat

Backstory: In October I realized that if I didn’t lose weight and get my blood sugar under control, I was going to die.  I didn’t like that. I decided to try a 13 week experiment: cut out carbs and add  a small amount of high intensity exercise and see what happened. This is the continuing story of that experiment. Follow it every week here at PJ Lifestyle — including some sort of embarrassing “before” pictures — and follow my 13 Weeks Facebook page.  I’ll report more on results next week, but right now, I’ve lost 21 pounds since 19 October and my blood sugar is down from 157 mg/dL to 119.

I started worrying about my weight — and being teased about it — by the time I was six or seven. At twelve or so I was an experienced dieter, and my experience was pretty much uniformly negative: I’d try dieting and maybe lose a little weight. Then the weight loss would stop. This would be doubly traumatic, as on a “balanced healthy diet”. I felt horrible, I was hungry all the time, and my pediatrician would yell at me that I had to be cheating, no one could not lose weight on that diet.

I could lose weight on the Stillman Quick Weight Loss Diet — nothing but lean meats boiled or broiled, cottage cheese, and poached or boiled eggs — but then I got yelled at by my pediatrician, my gym coach, and random people who happened to hear about it because it wasn’t a balanced diet. Also, after five or six weeks, it got a little boring: I remember breaking into tears one night when presented with another skinless, boiled half-chicken.

So my feelings about “going on a diet” have a lot of baggage. Skipping about 40 years, I read Gary Taubes first New York Times article, “What Really Makes Us Fat“, which said some things I knew from personal experience but had been told real science disputed. Like “all calories are not created equal,” and “what you eat is more important than how much you eat.” I bought Taubes’ books, Good Calories Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat and read the primary literature, which makes a strong case that the underlying culprit is refined carbs.  Sure enough, cutting out refined carbs helped me lose weight. This time around, I’ve lost 21 pounds since the 19th of October, and my blood sugar is also down a good bit.

But what about the boredom?

What I’m eating now is, thankfully, far more interesting than boiled chicken and cottage cheese. I thought today I’d tell you about some of them.

Breakfast

Most mornings, I’m up at 6AM and about to write. I feed the cats, and stumble about waiting for the coffee — the worst part about getting your first cup  in the morning is needing to make it before you’ve had it — and I’m not up to doing anything complicated, so I zap bacon in the microwave, take cold boiled eggs out of the refrigerator, and have

Charlie’s “Diet” Breakfast

• 3 boiled eggs, sliced with an egg slicer and drizzled with about a tablespoon of mayonnaise
• 4 strips of bacon

Except some mornings I have 4 eggs and 8 strips of bacon. I slice the hard boiled eggs because otherwise they last about two bites, and I add the mayonnaise because it tastes good.

Lunch

I  usually go out for something because someone who can’t cope with cooking eggs in the morning isn’t going to handle making lunch very well either. There are really lots of options — a diner where I can get bacon or ham or pork chops and eggs, a buffet restaurant where I get salad and roast chicken, or MAD Greens, where I make up a salad with lots of protein:

MAD Greens Salad Example

• baby spinach
• feta cheese
• Oil-marinated tuna
• Red wine vinaigrette

Mad Greens actually has a calorie and nutrient calculator on their web site, which scores this out as 41 grams of protein and 6 grams net carbs (9 grams – 3 grams fiber),

Another thing I’ve done is make a big bowl of tuna salad.  One variant is my Mediterranean Tuna Salad, based on something I used to get at a sprouthead restaurant in Durham, NC 20 years ago.

13 Weeks: Week One — Endorphins Are Our Friends

Our Story So Far:

I’m 57 years old, and in the words of my doc, I’m “massively deconditioned.”  On October 19 2012 I weighed 301.5 pounds, my average blood sugar was around 150 mg/dL — in other words, I’m type II diabetic — and I got out of breath climbing a flight of stairs quickly.  I’ve always — literally since I was 6 years old — fought my weight, never with a lot of success.  I’ve tried all the diets, and drugs, and I’ve considered gastric banding or bypass.

Last year, however, my mother had a heart attack, and declined, and died about 3 months later, two days before her 77th birthday.  Then I had my 57th birthday.  My father had died at 69, weighing over 400 lbs.  

Very little advanced math leads us to  the realization that 69 minus 57 is only 12 years; 77 minus 57 is only 20.

I’m too young to die.

*     *     *

So, I’ve just completed the first week of my 13 week experiment, and to cut to the chase, I’ve lost around 6 lbs, although I insist that weight loss isn’t the primary goal.  In fact, I’ve decided the primary goal is to do this for 13 weeks and tell the tale. We’ll see what else happens. So far, there hasn’t been much change in any measurements. Here are some observations.

Eating Plan

So far, it’s been easy.  In fact, the eating part is ridiculously easy — you can see the plan below, but basically I’ve found it generally difficult to eat as much as the plan demands. To see why, let’s look at what was not a normal day, but my big eating day of the week, in which I actually consumed over 300g of protein and 206g of fat, but still only had 27g of net carbs:

Breakfast

• 2 eggs, hard boiled
• 4 strips bacon
• 3 oz hard salami

Lunch

• 8 oz turkey breast, roasted
• 1 cup roasted Brussels sprouts
• 1 cup broccoli with bacon and pine nuts

Second Lunch

• 3 cups baby spinach
• 8 oz tuna marinated in olive oil
• 4 oz feta cheese
• red wine vinaigrette (olive oil base)

Dinner

• 2 pork chops
• 4 eggs over easy

That was Friday. As I write this on Saturday, I’ve only eaten about one third of that, because frankly I haven’t been hungry.

That’s a whole damn lot of food, but net against the day’s exercise only about 2600 calories. (But see below for why calories are not a primary measure in this plan.) And mind you, that was a day when I was really striving to eat “enough”; most days this week I ate much less, without feeling at all deprived.

The same day, I did both interval training and strength training.

Exercise

Both high intensity interval training and high intensity strength training are hard, but they don’t take very much time.

The weights were done with exercises that use large muscles and compound motions, mainly, with enough weight that a 20 second repetition leads to muscle failure in 5-6 repts. So, for example, I do leg presses with 400 pounds, pressing the weight out to a slow count of ten, then letting it back to a slow count of ten, until I simply cannot move the weight any more. Then I hold the weight for another slow count of 20.

When you do this, you may have to hold on to something for a little bit before you can really stand.

Here’s the interesting observation: after doing this, I felt great. I mean great.

When stressed, the body produces chemicals called “endorphins”, which just means “chemicals like opiates made by the body.” They’re the cause of the runner’s high, they’re probably why people in combat don’t notice wounds, and they may be why we like hot peppers.  From my experience, I deduce that this kind of work-to-failure weightlifting is very effective at bringing about the release of endorphins.  Whatever it is, I may, late in life, become a gym rat. This was almost as good as sex, and maybe even almost as good as chocolate.

GERD and Irritable Bowel

One of the other problems I’ve had for my whole life, or at least since I was diagnosed with a “nervous stomach” at 5, is gastric reflux and irritable bowel. Since I was restricting carbs, especially refined carbs, it was easy to also cut out wheat entirely, as suggested by William Davis MD in his book Wheat Belly.

I really kind of hate to admit it, since it’s so trendy this year to say you’re allergic to wheat or gluten, but I’ve got to say: I haven’t had any wheat products in about 10 days, and about Thursday I realized I also hadn’t needed an additional antacid in days either.

“Atkins flu”

It’s been known for years that many people in the first few days of a carb-restricted diet feel bad — achy and cranky and a couple of other dwarves. It certainly hit me, but getting extra water and salt seems to help. The usual suggestion is to drink boullion, but honestly it was such a busy week I never got around to getting any boullion, and within a few days it resolved itself.

Summing Up

So there you have it. Certainly so far, honestly, this has been so little disturbance to my normal life, and has made me feel so much better, that whether I am losing weight doesn’t much matter.

13 Weeks: Starting Gate

So, today, November 4th, is the first day of my 13 Weeks project.

I dunno, I’ve been on the diet all day, and did 6 super-slow squats, and nothing has happened yet.

Of course I’m being silly: actually, lots has happened since last week.  I’ve had my doctor visit and I’m approved to do the whole thing.  I’ve had some “before” pictures taken, and yes, I am wearing gym shorts, so calm down. So far today, I’ve eaten: 6 eggs, 3 hard boiled and 3 scrambled; 16 oz of Black Forest ham (not a great choice as it’s got some sugar in the cure, but it turns out to have been my sole source of carbs for the day); about 2 oz of sausage and 4 strips of bacon; and some cheddar cheese. That’s around 1600 kcal and 24 g. of carbs from the ham. I may eat some cottage cheese before bed — I can have a cup (200 kcal) and not violate my 30 g carbs target. But then I may not — I’m not actually feeling very hungry.

And I’ve noticed some things already. I started using Lose It! to track eating — it’s easy to use from any of my iPod Touch, my Kindle Fire, or from a browser — and I noticed on several days I was rather below the 2177 kcal Lose It! predicted I needed for a 1-2 lbs per week weight loss. (Note: “kcal” is the same as a Calorie in the US; I just think using “Calorie” for 1000 “calories” is silly and confusing. When you see “kcal” think of the calories you normally use with food.) This didn’t surprise me, but then I flashed back on a time when I was about 12 or so, and once again on a diet, put there by my pediatrician. It was an “exchange” diet — you can have one bread, two proteins, one salad, and so on — and I’d been very diligent. I was eating 1200 kcal per day or less, and I wasn’t losing weight. I was, however, depressed, cranky, and irritable. And depressed. I was in the doctor’s office, and he was berating me for cheating on the diet; I was in tears because I wasn’t, and no one would believe me….

So, next week I will have more on my high intensity training plan. For now, you can follow me at the 13 Weeks Facebook page. If you’re a Facebooker, come “Like” my page — the more people who watch me, the harder it’ll be to give up early.

Here’s the before pictures.

Fat boy: Front

Fat boy: Side.

Guess.

The traditional Facebook mirror picture. No duckface, but a cat.

Thirteen Weeks: A Fat Nerd Does Diet

It struck me just a couple weeks ago. I’m 57, weigh 300 pounds, massively deconditioned, verging on type II diabetes if not actually there, and I don’t want to die.

It’d been a hard year. A year ago this week, my mother had a heart attack, and over the ensuring months failed and died, passing away on 11 January, two days before her 77th birthday. Following that, I had a succession of illnesses that put me in the hospital for a day, four times between January and August. One of those times was with pneumonia, and as my friends all insisted on reminding me, “you can die from that!”

A sense of mortality struck me on my birthday, 57 this year; arithmetic started showing up for me. My father died in 1994, at 69. That’s only 12 years older than I am now. Mom at 77, only 20 years older than I am now.

Now, my Dad weighed in the neighborhood of 450 lbs when he died, and he smoked. My Mom, around 200 lbs and she’d smoked heavily, drunk heavily, and generally been rode hard and put up wet nearly her whole life. I’ve got some advantages, since I don’t drink or smoke; on the other hand, I’ve been struggling with my weight since I was literally 6 years old. You can hear a lot of bad diet advice in 50 years.

The long and short of it is that I want to change this and need to change this, and there’s relatively new science that suggests there are better, faster, more efficient ways to change this. So I’m doing an experiment: for 13 weeks, which I plan to start a week from today, 4 November 2012, I’m going to start an experiment where I’ll be keeping a very low carb, more or less “paleo” diet, and doing “high intensity interval training” and “high intensity strength training” two sessions a week. This scheme has good reasons behind it, biochemically and otherwise.

Then I’m writing about it, and I’m going very public with it, so, frankly, it’ll be too embarrassing to quit.

I plan to update here on PJ Lifestyle every Sunday, but I’m keeping a diary and accumulating notes at a Facebook page, 13 Weeks

The Manolo’s Eighth Blogiversary! And We Missed It!

A thousand apologies, my friend! Congratulations and many many more! Go wish him Encore!

***

And See posts from The Manolo here at PJ Lifestyle:

Financial Times: Fashion Bloggers Should be Registered

Tom Cruise’s Pimp Hand Was Strong

Scientia Omnia Vincit! Shoes Say Things About the Wearers!

Sylvia Kristel est Décédée

She wasn’t the world’s greatest actress, she was never nominated for an Oscar, but for males of my generation she was the embodiment of a thousand fantasies. Born in Utrecht in 1952, she moved to Amsterdam where she worked as a waitress, then a model, before becoming an actress. She was cast as the title character in Emmanuelle, based on the novels of Emmanuelle Arsan, one of the first purposefully erotic mainstream films. It was a hit, spawned several sequels with Kristel and a cottage industry of “hard R” erotic films with Emmanuelle in the title and essentially no other connection to the original. She had fought cancer since 2000, and was hospitalized in July following a stroke. She died in her sleep.

Singer Andy Williams, Dead at 84

Andy Williams, whose corn-fed good looks, easygoing charm and smooth rendition of “Moon River” propelled him to the heights of music stardom in the early ’60s, died Tuesday at his home in Branson, Mo., following a battle with bladder cancer, his family announced.

He was 84, and 2012 had marked his 75th year in showbiz. Williams is survived by his wife Debbie and his three children, Robert, Noelle and Christian.

With 17 gold and three platinum records to his name, Williams enjoyed his golden years playing golf and dividing his time between La Quinta, Calif., and Branson, where he appeared at his Andy Williams Moon River Theater since 1992.

It was on the stage of that theater, in November 2011, Williams announced he had bladder cancer. At the time, he assured fans the disease was no longer a death sentence and that he had every intention of being a survivor.

I grew up in music — family had a music store, my father and two of my siblings played professionally, I roadied a bit (for example for Roger Miller the country singer, among others) and, after setting the World Indoor Record for Number of Years In a First Year Piano Book, rather late discovered I could sing and did a little bit of that professionally, or at least for money.  Like most really musical people, my family listened to everything, from Medieval music to Classical to “easy listening” to jazz and rock. In particular, we religiously watched Andy Williams’s TV  variety show. and played his Christmas album at least 500 times between Thanksgiving and New Years Day.

The show always included duets with guest stars, and on many occasions, these turned into examples in music theory lessons from the other people who worked at our music store — I learned about chord changes, improvising as a singer, and how you can often get away with an improvised harmony by just picking one note from the chord and singing it while the guest takes the lead.  This was something Williams did regularly, and if you think of it, it’s a pretty generous thing to do.

He hasn’t been signing and performing much in recent years, but thanks to the wonders of technology, you can still listen to him at his prime.  Clean your ears of the “easy listening” bias and give it a try. That’s the best way to commemorate Andy.

***

More Music at PJ Lifestyle:

Jazz and Cocktails

Classic Rock and Jack Daniels: The ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Leads to the Kennedy Center Gala

Are Total Recall-Style Fake Memory Implants Coming Soon?

Those crazy kids at Gizmodo had a story today called “Scientists Invent Method to Create Memories in Brains” that got a lot of attention.

It sounds like a Philip K. Dick story. Sadly Gizmodo is about as reliable on science reporting as their corporate sibling Gawker is on politics, but the actual report is interesting, and even pretty hopeful.

The real paper is ”Mnemonic Representations of Transient Stimuli and Temporal Sequences in Rodent Hippocampus In Vitro,” and it describes an interesting experiment: the researchers at Case Western, Ben W. Strowbridge and Robert A. Hyde, dissected out little fragments of a structure in a rat’s brain called the hippocampus, put them on glass, and stimulated them.  They were able to show that the little bits of hippocampus changed their activity in a way that was similar to what happened in rat hippocampus in live rats who were exposed to some simple stimulus.  (I picked up a nice picture fron an NIH publication that shows where the hippocampus is.)

Here's a picture for context: a rat's brain and a human brain, both with the hippocampus in brown.

Impromptu Neil Armstrong Memorial at Jet Propulsion Laboratory

A friend, Todd Sharp, passes along this snapshot he took as he passed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory exit today:

Curiosity on Mars: A Busy Robot With a Big Job

The Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory hasn’t gotten as much press attention as it deserves, what with random elections and such going on.  It’s a little quiet now, as it undergoes a “brain transplant” — its landing software is being replaced remotely with a new version. (And you thought installing Mountain Lion was a big job.)

In the mean time, let’s look at some of the most interesting images.  This one, taken by the HiRES camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is my favorite so far:

That is a picture of the lander, on its parachute, taken from the MRO around 200 miles above the Martian surface, as it passed over at about a mile per second.  Not a bad snapshot, eh?

Here’s an enhanced version of the picture:

Of course, we are more interested in the view from the Curiosity lander itself.  Here’s a low-resolution video of the actual landing:

There will be a high-resolution version eventually — it takes a long time to transmit the pictures back.

(Oh, and I saw some people complaining that NASA used cheap low-res cameras — with a particular plaintive cry that they should have just taped an iPhone to it.  The technical term for this complaint is “dumb.”  The first pictures are meant to give quick feedback, ensure things are working, and confirm the landing.  They’re purposefully low resolution, because it takes much less time to transmit.  They’re literally thumbnails of the better resolution pictures to come.)

Finally, just before starting the “brain transplant”, Curiosity transmitted a full-color, high-resolution panorama.  Here’s a glimpse, but you’re better off following the link to the whole panorama, as it doesn’t fit into PJ’s format well.

Video: Taking the Velociraptor Out for a Walk.

VIDEO: 7 Minutes of Terror