Music: The Wooden Birds - Magnolia

It's like the American Analog Set playing an analog set (in America)! ;)



Also check out 'Sugar'.

Food, vitamins, nutrients, measurements

Wow, two months since my last post, huh? What a nice break. Enjoyed the good weather, saw a concert or two, explored my home country, worked in the garden, tried to live a healthier life the geek way :)

When last I mentioned I had quit smoking and tried to get some more exercise, I was using a spreadsheet to record what I stuffed into my mouth and made a stab at guessing how much calories, proteins, carbs, and fats were in there. This went reasonably well, but after I found the USDA food database I became interested in tracking more data, like amount of vitamins/minerals gained from foods vs. the dietary reference intake (DRI). Trying to do this in a spreadsheet by hand would be bothersome.

So I was very happy to find cron-o-matic, a free Java program which uses the USDA food database and which will give you clear feedback on how you are doing nutrient-wise and which allows you to plan ahead as well.

The program is very friendly but takes a bit of fiddling to set up - one of the java methods it uses in setting up the basic dietary requirements is deprecated and replaced, so to get optimal use you'll have to run an older JVM.

Once it is set up it is really easy to use, there are shortcut keys for nearly everything, many measurements (teaspoon, cup, stalk etc) already preprogrammed where appropriate, it is dead easy to combine ingredients and so make custom 'recipes' for items you frequently consume. It will even create nifty little nutrient reports for any given period of time.

Of course, you have to recognise and understand the limits of software like this. For instance, it is known that vitamine D is heavily underreported in the database. In fact, there are a couple of uncertainty factors:
a) database errors (under/overreporting, typos)
b) natural differences in foodstuffs (dependent on growing conditions, available nutrition, genetics, storage time, etc)
d) measuring errors (yours truly)

However, you know you are on the right path when your weight gain/loss corresponds with your self-reported energy intake:
Blue line/left axis is weight in kg, red line/right axis is energy intake in kcal. As you can see a spike in energy leads to a spike in weight one or two days later. The relationship is not 1:1 as other factors (like physical activity, water intake, etc.) weigh in as well. Those huge energy peaks? Social events, BBQs, parties. Even moderation should be done in moderation. If you can't have a little fun once in a while, what's the point?

But waaaaait a minute, I hear you say, weren't you trying to lose weight? I don't really see that in the graph! True, this 2-month graph shows very little weight loss. I want this weight loss to be sustainable. If I starve my body and then start eating normally again I expect a jo-jo effect. And I want to get all the proper vitamins and minerals, without using supplements, so my daily energy intake is very near to 'normal intake'. As I approach my 'ideal weight' I expect it to go even slower. At the same time I am also working out so I am replacing fatty tissue with muscle. But perhaps this chart showing progress since January works better:
Yeah, that is more like it! (the absence of measurements between ~12/2 and 12/3 are due to lots of business travel and very little opportunity to weigh). Also, I can't believe I had let my weight slip to 98 kg or so.

All this data you are gathering in the CRON-o-meter software is saved as XML. You can grab this data and plug it into Excel or other spreadsheet software to see how you are doing in the long-term:
I've used conditional formatting to color it by how close to or over the RDI/target I was - light green is under, dark green is in range, yellow is too much. As you can see I'm hitting most targets most of the time in the vitamins and mineral sector, without any supplements. Since I had this spreadsheet and was tracking daily data anyway, I also started tracking other things, ranging from hours of sleep to subjective mood during a day to far more, um, intimate things. Because as it turns out, tracking stuff is fun! (for geeks like me, I suppose).

For instance, check this chart highlighting the relationship between hours of sleep and subjective mood:
Fun, what? Of course this chart is a little funky in that (a) I tend to sleep in more during weekends and (b) I generally feel happier in weekends as I don't have to contend with all that work malarky. But still there is a clear correlation. More sleep means less murder.

On hold

It's springtime, dontchaknow?

Further evidence this t-shirt fetish is getting slightly out of hand

I can stop whenever I want to, dammit! I scored a couple of sweet shirts from the Diesel Sweeties store, including these terrific ones: electric sheep, monkeys are good people, and 'cherry pi'. Yay, globalization! Had I lived in the USA I would have totally bought this "we prefer to be called 'buccaneer-Americans'" shirt too. That is just great.
Yeah, that wasn't so bad in and of itself, but then I also ordered these from threadless:


"A simple plan", "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", and "you say tomato, I say Lycopersicon esculentum". I had to. The shirts commanded me!

Health(ier) Life: Wii Fit, Stopped Smoking, Weight Watching

In January I bought a Wii Fit board. I haven't written about it earlier because I wanted to give it a good 6 months before a review, however, some other developments cause me to mention it now. When I first turned on the Wii Fit it told me quite bluntly that for my age and height I was a little into overweight territory. How annoying. But true - I never was much into physical activity and my sedentary lifestyle coupled with the frequent travel and accompanying "travel junk food" has taken its toll over the years. To get back into the upper range of "ideal weight" I only needed to lose a little weight, to hit the middle of the ideal range I needed to lose an additional 10 Kg. So I set a short-term target to get away from the "overweight" moniker, and a 6 month long-term target to get back to the middle of the "ideal" zone.

Hitting the Nintendo gym

Wii Fit is divided into 4 areas: aerobics, strength, yoga, and balance with a set of games for each, some of which are locked. As you progress, more and more games get unlocked (the unlocking goes rather quickly). Most of these games are very low-impact meaning you won't break a sweat. But I suspect this is not the goal of Wii Fit anyway. The aerobics games are good for a warm-up. Some of the strength games are good for building muscle (like the push-ups and the jackknifes). The balance games are for the most part good fun and when played with multiple people can lead to fierce competition. But for me the yoga part was the biggest discovery; I never imagined that stretching could be so good for you.

When I say "yoga" I really mean the poses; because Wii Fit strips yoga of any fluffy new agey connotation and simply offers some of the simpler poses and in some cases parts of poses. Which suits me fine because people blathering on about chakras and other new age nonsense annoy me. Stretching muscles is just that: stretching muscles. Good for you. Very good, even - my back hasn't felt this good in years. I hit my short-term target without much issues and am now working towards my long-term target and making good progress.

The end of smoking

Exactly one week ago I quit smoking cold turkey after 19 years of smoking rolling tobacco like a chimney. This in itself is only partly related to the Wii Fit - I mainly quit for health reasons, but costs and convenience also played a part. Being treated like a second-class citizen and herded into remote corners to get your fill of gray air isn't fun. The quitting itself was less hard than I thought - I haven't had a moment of weakness since my initial decision, my resolve is strong, and the benefits are immediate and obvious: my sense of smell and taste have improved, I get winded less easily, I feel more energetic, and I am saving massive amounts of time and money.

Now people who quit smoking often gain some weight, perhaps due to sped-up metabolism and/or extra snacking. I wanted to avoid this since I was already a little over my 'optimal' weight, so we move on to...

Calorie counting

So how do you know when you are snacking too much? Well, you'll have to start tracking what you eat, when you eat it, and how many calories it has. Surprisingly, this can be rather fun (for statistics geeks) and makes a good substitute activity for the smoking itself. The USDA has a huge searchable database - it is even available for download. The Dutch government is less advanced in this matter, you can request their database on paper (!) or they can send you a CD but you have to qualify for that in some way. That said, there are two excellent Dutch sites where you can do online lookups: here and here.

So grab an spreadsheet program and record what you stuff in your mouth, then in the evening quickly work out how much calories each item is (ballpark figure). The results may surprise you, I know they surprised me. The biggest surprise was how easy it is to ingest way too many calories. All these supposedly healthy foods and snacks - many of them are like calorie-bombs.
So I made some adjustments - crossed some items of my shopping lists, substituted other items with lighter products. With just a few changes and no sacrifice at all I've improved my diet and this in turn will hopefully lead to me hitting my Wii Fit targets.