Category: Uncategorized

 

Snow day today.

No need to shovel it, is my guess.  Rain and above-freezing temps should take care of it in short order.  Streets are already clear, as shown.

This, in contrast to the last one, where the snow and ice hung around owing to the much colder weather.

It’s shaping up to be just a short-lived covering of the snow-sleet-rain-freezing rain-drizzle delight that is  “wintry mix”.

It’ll soon be gone.  Let it be.  Plus, I don’t much feel like shoveling.

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Part 1:  Fire

Wood.  Think of it as natural gas’s costlier, stinkier, noisier, whinier cousin. Just in case you were thinking how lovely it might be to heat with wood.

Sure, wood is a perfectly usable home heating fuel, if you’ve got an appliance to burn it in.  Which I do, in the form of a modern fireplace insert.

But I thought over the pros and cons, and in my situation, I decided against burning wood for home heating.  For a lot of reasons.

But now I’m back to burning firewood, to heat a part of my house.  In the burbs.

When, in theory, the same part of my house could be heated quite nicely with gas-fired hot-water baseboard heat.  Run off a 95% efficient boiler, yet.

Heating with wood, in the circumstances as described, is every bit as dumb as it sounds, from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to cost, outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, convenience, noise level, waste disposal, required routine maintenance, and so on.

In this context, wood has maybe three saving graces.  The big visible fire in a modern glass-fronted wood stove looks nice.  As a fuel, it has lower carbon footprint than natural gas or (in my area) electricity. (The wood I burn was atmospheric C02 just 10 years ago, on average, based on a typical 30-year-old tree limb or trunk in my firewood.  But due consideration must be given to the (very large, very brief) atmospheric warming effects of the resulting soot emissions.) And, third, it’s robust emergency heat. 

I’m burning wood because my gas-fired baseboard heating system is busted.  And that system, alone (no heat pumps) heats the ground-level (den) of the house.  A pipe in that hot-water baseboard heating system froze and burst, during the recent cold snap.  Not the first time this particular pipe has done so.  But until I feel like peeling the siding off that corner of the house to get to it, that system is going to stay broken.

In any case, the fire inside a modern glass-fronted wood stove is a practical thing of beauty.  Looks nice, and your toes can get toasty in front of it.  But all things considered, out here in the ‘burbs, I think it’s best to treat it as an occasional luxury.  And, rarely, use it as true emergency heat.

Or, as I’m using it now,  heat when you have no reasonable alternative.

Wood heat is both a chore and a health burden on you and others.  Burning it all day, every day, makes little sense in my circumstances.

 

 

Part 2:  Fat.  A brief essay an aerobic exercise after significant healthy weight loss, for a 66-year-old guy.

Thanks to 80 pounds of weight loss, I can now do some aerobic exercises “like a younger me”, so to speak.

This has a tinge of the surreal to it, because I still feel like an old man.  Practically speaking, the only way in which I feel lighter is when going up and down stairs.  Arguably, my joints hurt less now (than they did when I was obese).  And my feet.  But in general, the whole apparatus — my muscoloskeletal system — still creaks and cracks and groans and aches.  As does, metaphorically, the rest of me.

The upshot is that you kind of turn back the clock …

… but only on your level of fitness.

The jalopy runs faster after a tune-up.  But it remains a jalopy.

Objectively — and not exactly a high bar — for any sort of aerobic or strength-to-weight exercise, I’m a lot more fit now than I have been for decades.  But I still feel like an old man.

Never dealt with that combination before.  I can’t find any one word that quite describes the experience.

 

And I can choose an end point?

Really?

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Shouldn’t a successful end-of-diet be, at most, a once-in-a-lifetime experience?

I’ve never had a diet succeed before, so how I am supposed to know what success looks like?  Metrics.  I need some metrics.  Am I there yet?

Or, more gently, it appears I’ve never given this whole end-of-diet thing much thought.

Which, again, is entirely reasonable.  A chronically overweight individual might experience dieting” or “diets” repeatedly, but, ideally, any one such individual would only need to experience successful end-of-diet once in a lifetime.

Put another way, if the weight loss is sustainable, then, by definition, it’s not something you need to do twice in a lifetime.

But, beyond the obvious — the dietary changes must be permanent — I guess I hadn’t really thought about it much.

It, being, effectively, the dietary hereafter.

I am unprepared to state a good end point for my diet, for at least two reasons.

First, and most obviously, I never thought I’d get to this point.  That, based on a life-long history of failed diets.

Second, in the heat of battle, you’re not focused on the ensuing peace.  To be losing weight at a steady clip is enough.  Where to stop?  Beyond my planning horizon.

In any case, if you start off fat enough, as far as weight is concerned, down is good.  Subject to not trashing yourself.  So things are simple.

But the idea that I might be able to choose and keep the end point?   Pick a weight/body type, within reason?  That really hasn’t quite registered yet.

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Is big-boned a myth?

Let’s just stop right there.

Can I choose?   To what extent can I choose?

Can I actually, within some range, choose a body-type (for want of better term) at which I end up, with this diet?

Or, by contrast, aren’t some people just sort of naturally fat?

BMI aside:

To clarify, I’m not talking about the well-known discrepancy between BMI and body fat for (e.g.) body builders.  Let me just grant that some people are “big boned”, defined as low body fat despite high BMI. 

But.

But, first, that doesn’t mean that I was big-boned.  Though that was always a comforting way to dismiss some of my life-long excess weight.  But it’s the rare person that would be the significant exception. 

Body builders are well aware of the issue.  But hoi polloi rarely have the heavy musculature (or, I guess, big bones) that would put them far outside normal BMI guidelines.

 

Or maybe your fat is like an ice cube.

I always thought I was kind of naturally fat.  As a fat person, naturally.

But now I’m beginning to accept an alternative hypothesis.  Maybe my fat is like an ice cube.  It’ll melt, if I keep up the heat long enough.  In this case, if I keep up a modest calorie deficit long enough.

Maybe to a close approximation, your body fat percentage is just the long-term residual between energy intake and energy expenditure.  No more, no less.

Like a glacier.

But, I do not now wish to make the same logical mistake in reverse.  Maybe, all throughout my life, my body fat percentage could have been adjusted within a fairly wide range.  That’s no evidence that everybody’s fat works like that.

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Conclusion

 

That’s quite enough diet therapy for one day.

It was enough to discover that I really don’t have a good idea of what end-of-diet is like.  I get the fact that your eating patterns must remain permanently changed.

Beyond that, I never thought about it much.  Never had to.

For now, “down is good” is all I need to know, about my weight.  I’m under 30% body fat, by several estimates, but not by much.  I haven’t even reached the upper cutoff for healthy weight (20% body fat) per NIH.

Body fat percentage points erode slowly.  Chance of overshoot is slim.

But now that my diet may be ending of its own accord (or not, we’ll see), it’s time to get up to speed on the topic of where best to stop, if you have the luxury of choosing the end point.

 

An addendum contrary to the laws of Nature.

 

Weirdly, the only piece of diet puzzle that doesn’t fit is that, to the best of my recollection, the last time I weighed 185 was when I was in high school.

So, I can weigh no more than I weighed in high school, if I want to have a normal weight?  That’s per the NIH BMI chart.

Odder still, I might actually be able to weigh that, at age 66, while being in good health?  That should occur if I can manage to maintain a daily calorie deficit of about 500 calories, for another few months.

Something about all of that seems unreasonable.

Contrary to the laws of nature or something.  That older inexorably means fatter.

But until I come up with something better, that’s the goal.

Funny how a round number becomes a hard target.

 

After losing a total of 80 pounds, at a steady rate of five pounds a month, my weight loss has stopped.

I reached 205 in the middle of January.  I still weigh about that.  I have not yet glimpsed 200 on the scale.

 

Is this because:

A)  In some mysterious and unspecified way I have permanently slowed my metabolism by dieting, and thus am now doomed never to reach “normal” weight of 185 pounds? Do I simply now have a slow metabolism?

B) My body simply wants to be 205 pounds.  (Though, if so, I wish it had spoken up sooner.)  And so, nothing I could ever stand to do will ever get my weight below that “natural” level.  I am now doomed never to reach a “normal” weight of 185 pounds?  Am I simply “naturally fat”?

OR …

C) I’ve been eating too much.

After checking with the oracle, all indications point to C.

Edit 3/5/2025:  Weight loss resumed when I stopped eating too much. I’m now under 200 pounds and on track for a target weight of 185 sometime around the end of May. 

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Teaspoons are tablespoons, and other things that suck about dieting.

Above, that’s a 300 calorie peanut butter sandwich.  It consists of a slider roll (about 3″ in diameter) and two tablespoons of peanut butter.  I know the sandwich contains exactly two level tablespoons of peanut butter, because I took the time to measure it.

The peanut butter is the thin brown line barely visible between the two halves of the roll.

I was appalled by this sandwich.  First, by how little peanut butter that was.  But mostly, by how much peanut butter I had been routinely using, of late, when I made one of those freehand, without measuring anything.

And as goes peanut butter, so go most of the portions I’ve been eyeballing.

A common teaspoon, in the silverware drawer, is typically about a tablespoon, in terms of its capacity.  My coffee cup (mug) is more than two “coffee cups” worth of coffee.  My smallest soup bowl, comfortably full, holds about a bowl-and-a-half, as calorie lists typically equate “a bowl of soup” to mean an 8-ounce cup.

I knew all of that, intellectually.  But, somehow, of late, I’d been turning a blind eye to it.

Funny how your mind will play tricks on you.

Particularly if you want it to.

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Recalibrating and downshifting

I have committed that most basic sin of long-term weight loss, portion creep.  This is such a common thing that essentially all guides to long-term weight loss tell you to guard against it.  If you don’t routinely measure everything, then once in a while you need to do that, if only to remind yourself of what the portions of food should be, to match the calorie counts you’re using.

To be clear, portion creep doesn’t occur at random.  It has not, for example, inflated the amount of lettuce I eat weekly.  I have not suddenly been faced with a large weekly bill for cabbage or cucumbers.

Instead, the fact that portion creep only occurs for high-calorie, typically high-fat foods, tells me that this is not simply sloppiness.  It’s my brain, working to sabotage me.

And so, for a week or two, I’ll be measuring out “the good stuff”, meaning, energy-dense foods.  Things that are high in fat, mostly, but also starches.  Just enough to remind myself of what the actual portions are, that correspond to the calorie counts I’ve been using.

It’s also worth nothing that the problem items are energy-dense foods that don’t naturally come in fixed quantities.  Of which peanut butter and salad dressing are the poster children.  But also including cheese, meat, and some soups.

In the end, this is just the flip side of the volumetrics approach to dieting.  With volumetrics, you eat lots of items with low calorie density (calories per ounce).  Which boils down to non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and a smattering of other items.

More lettuce.  Less salad dressing.

It’s not rocket science.

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Conclusion:  We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Source:  Amazon.

After more than a year, and 80 pounds of weight loss, my diet has ground to a halt.

I’d love to blame my metabolism.  Or my genes.  Bad luck.  Astrological sign.  Tariffs.  Republicans.

Anything but point the finger at myself.

But the fact is, weight loss at this pace is based on just a 500-calorie-per-day energy deficit.  And it doesn’t take much screw that up.  A heavy hand with a few high-calorie foods will do it.

So, maybe this is the end of my weight loss.  Maybe not.  Maybe these excess calories are merely the symptom of my body finally getting tired of losing weight.  Maybe I won’t be able to stand going back to a true 1500 calories a day or so.

There’s only one way to find out.  And that’s to be strict about everything I eat, for a while, and see if the weight loss picks back up.  Or see if I’ve reached the end of my diet.

 

This morning I reached 205 pounds.  In my underwear, admittedly.  But it still counts.  So I’m calling it 80 pounds lost, since September 2023.  BMI is now just under 28.  If I can lose another 20 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.  Something that I honestly never thought I would ever see.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

And, while I’m at it, how helpful or not Google’s AI would have been, in dealing with these changes.

They are, in order:

• My mattress is too hard.
• My sneakers are too stiff.
• My balance is much better.
• My weight loss remains on trend.

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My mattress is too hard

Google AI score, 50%.  Good solution, totally wrong reasoning.

I never considered body fat to be part of the overall mattress-comfort equation.  But apparently, this is well-known, at least in the sense that Google’s AI knew about it.

After a couple of months of waking up with numb patches of skin on my hips and thighs, it finally dawned on me that, together, my mattress and I have lost a lot of padding.  And, as if the AI read my mind, the addition of a 2″ memory-foam mattress topper has solved the problem of a too-hard mattress.

That said, the rest of the AI’s “reasoning” was wrong.  The problem has nothing to do with firmness — the tendency of the mattress surface to sink downwards with weight.  The firmness of the mattress is just fine.  And putting a mattress topper on doesn’t affect the firmness, and can’t fix a mattress with the wrong level of firmness for the sleeper.

It’s the level of padding on top of that structure that’s the problem.

I give the AI partial credit on this one.

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My sneakers are too stiff

Google AI score, 0%.  (I’d give it a negative if I could).  On this question, Google’s AI hallucinated the reasoning and offered really bad advice.

You expect to buy new clothes when you lose a lot of weight.  And I have, right on down to my underwear.  But I didn’t expect to have to buy new shoes.

For the past couple of decades I’ve worn Nike Air Monarch shoes.  These are plain-Jane sneakers with lots of padding, heavy construction, and very thick soles with the Nike Air technology.

These were, effectively, the perfect shoe for an obese-but-active person.  The thick air-cushioned heel was more-or-less exactly what a fat person needs.

As a bonus, buying new sneakers was a no-brainer, because Nike kept these in production for decades.  I think that’s because Nike has a steady market of devoted wearers consisting of a) heavy people, and b) people who spend a lot of time on their feet, like nurses.

The thick soles were comfortably flexible for my old, 285-pound self.  But at 205, they’re like walking on padded boards.  To the point where it became almost comically difficult to, say, run on a treadmill while wearing them.

Though, to be fair, I don’t think the average purchaser of Nike Air Monarchs does a lot of running.

So, for the first time in two decades, I bought an actual running shoe.  One with lightweight construction and flexible soles.  I’ll never be a graceful runner, but running feels a lot better with a more flexible shoe.  At least I no longer have to hear “slap-slap-slap” as I plod along on a treadmill.

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My balance is much better.

Google AI score:  33%.  From what I can tell, the only point it got right is that it’s easier to maintain control when you have less mass.  The rest of it appears to be imaginary.

My balance is vastly better than it was.

To test your static ability to balance, just stand on one foot.  In medical parlance, this is the “single leg stance” test.  Health care providers assume that this measures something about your neurological health.  Eyes open, hands on hips, standing on one foot, if you can’t count to five before you fall over, you’re at enhanced risk of falls.  But if you get past ten seconds, apparently, you’re good to go (reference).

Near as I can tell, at 205 pounds, I can stand on one foot until I get bored.  That was not true of my 285-pound self, to the point where Wii Fit always told me that, physically, I was ancient, because it could sense how much I wobbled around when standing on the Wii Fit scale.  At any rate, I just now stood a minute, on one foot, and while it requires concentration, it seemed like muscle fatigue would set the limit there, not balance per se.

But I think this is entirely explained by physics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of my nervous system or musculature.

First, fat people — or at least those with a lot of belly fat — have a higher center of gravity.  Most of the weight I lost was from the waist up.  That, for the simple reason that I never had much fat on my legs (or arms), typical for “central obesity” in fat males.  And I had a big gut.  This means that my center of gravity is now lower.  That by itself, makes me more stable.  (Apparently, the whole story is more complex, and involves both lowering the center of gravity, and moving it closer to the spine.)

Second, I now have a better power-to-weight ratio.  By reducing my fat, the ratio of muscle mass to total weight has risen.  This means that for any given off-balance situation, I’m more likely to be able to bring myself back to an upright position.  (Crudely, 40% more power, reckoned as 285/205=~1.4.  That assumes neither loss nor gain of strength, for the muscles used for balance.)

In any case, it’s not rocket science.  Consider loading a backpack with 80 pounds of bacon, putting that on, and trying to keep your balance.  That was more-or-less the situation when I started on this course back in September 2023, compared to where I am now.

Improved balance is no surprise.  And it required no improvement in nervous system or musculature to achieve it.  It just required taking off the backpack.

My weight loss is on trend.

Google AI score:  100%.  Google simply repeats the conventional wisdom, which is that long term weight loss inevitably proceeds by fits and starts, not smoothy.

If you read about people who’ve lost a lot of weight, all you seem to hear about is how hard it eventually gets, how they plateau, how tough it is to keep the weight off.

For some reason, none of that seems to apply to me.  I have lost weight at a weirdly steady rate of 5 pounds per month.

I can only guess why I’ve had this unusual experience.

• As I’ve lost weight, I’ve lowered my daily calorie target.
• I monitor my diet, separately from counting calories.  Simply put, if I don’t wake up hungry, I know I ate too much the day before.
• I eat a very simplified diet, so “cheating” isn’t really possible.

But at this point, I think that’s mostly due to having an incredibly simplified diet.  This makes it easy to keep track of how much I’ve eaten each day.  And, more importantly, it keeps me away from food that gets me off track or amps up my sense of hunger.

Breakfast is a cup of coffee with a serving of protein powder in it.

After that, I eat five (or so) 300-calorie (or so) meals a day. Typical meals include:

• A garden salad with a nice high-fat salad dressing.  (Without the salad dressing, my body does not seem to register salad greens as any type of food, hunger-wise).
• A bowl of frozen berries, topped with “protein pudding” (Jello no-sugar chocolate pudding mix made up using whey protein powder).  Tastes like ice cream, gives you as much protein as a quarter-pound hamburger.
• A bowl of home-made soup of some sort.
• Peanut butter sandwich on a “slider roll”.
• A breaded fish filet on a slider roll.
• A 300-calorie piece of cheese.

All of that is fine, tasty food.  None of it is stuff that leaves me begging for more.  Some of it is from-scratch cooking, some of it is disgusting mixes of chemicals (no-sugar Jello).  None of it includes a large amount of carbs at one time.

Anyway, after a lifetime of obesity, this is what works for me.  I eat a very limited diet, the upside of which is that I never have to think much about what I eat.  And, after a year-plus of this, it doesn’t even occur to me to eat something outside of that narrow range.

Nor do I crave the foods I used to eat.

Weirdly, it now feels wrong to eat a full meal, as one might at a restaurant, or over the holidays.  And from the standpoint of weight loss, that’s a really good thing.

Interestingly, when I deviate from this — over the holidays, say — it takes me the better part of a week to get back on track.  I think it’s the combination of readily-available calorie-dense foods (e.g., stuffing from the turkey), and a lot of foods rich in simple carbs (e.g., desserts) that disturb blood sugar and insulin levels and set off a fresh bout of hunger a few hours later.

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Conclusion:  My diet and my new tastes evolved together.

Here I am, where I thought I’d never be:  Within striking distance of having a “normal” weight.

If I can achieve that, it’ll be for the first time since I went off to college.

I cannot say, exactly, why I’ve finally been able to lose weight.

But in the end, now that I know what it takes, I think that in the past I just under-estimated what it took to undergo sustained weight loss. It more-or-less required a complete revision of lifestyle.  Giving up alcohol was a big part of it.  Giving up refined-carb meals (e.g. spaghetti and meatballs) was part of it.  Finding a convenient fat-free protein source (whey powder) helped.  Giving up all pretense of “normal” eating patterns helped.

But the bottom line is that what and how I eat now bears almost no relation to how I lived in the past.  And, apparently, for me, that’s what it took, to get significant, sustained weight loss.

Let me emphasize how this is not like I’m a different person.  I still find all that stuff appealing.  (“That stuff” being “all those yummy foods I used to eat”.)

Hand me a Dorito right now and I’d snarf that down.  No questions asked (other than those directly related to hygiene.)

But it’s as if I no longer find that stuff compelling.  Or something.

In any case, I never even consider buying a bag of Doritos.

But that’s been gradual.  A few months into this weight loss, I might stroll the chips aisle at the Safeway occasionally, to pick up something.  But to dole it out. By the countable-small-hundreds of calories.

Later in the process, I’d stroll the aisle and buy nothing.

Now? I never go down that aisle.  Never think to do so.

Never’s a strong word.  Maybe one of those single-serving size bags at the 7-11?  There’s another habit that I’m out of.  Gotta be a couple of years since I visited a 7-11.

My change in diet and … tastes? occurred gradually.  And to some large degree, mutually.

If I’d gone from my previous diet, to how I eat now, in one step, I don’t think I could have stuck with it.

It’s very much that when I gave up my excesses with drink, I gave them up for food as well.

Either that, or I felt so crappy being sober all the time that I didn’t eat as much.

Take your pick.

The only real point here is that I didn’t clean up my act all at once.  I never “went on a diet”.  It’s just that the longer I was on this track, and the more weight I lost, the narrower and more simplified my diet got.

The bottom line is that I didn’t intend to get to this point. Things just kind of evolved.  And what you see above is (so far) the final product of that evolution.

The nice thing is that it’s not my tastes, by my cravings, that have evolved over this diet.  I progressed more-or-less by tossing the worst offenders out of my current eating habits, metabolically speaking.  And then, just vowing to drop the weight and clean my diet up further as I went a long.

I still like all that stuff I used to like.  I just don’t eat it.  And I’m fine with that.

How screwed-up is that?

If all goes well, based on the graph, I’ll achieve “normal” weight sometime late this spring.   We’ll see how it plays out.