I got a letter a few days ago, asking for help with a particularly intractable Kakuro puzzle: 8×8, Volume 14, Book 99, Puzzle #8. Since my Kakuro puzzles are arranged by difficulty, this is a particularly hard one, since it is in Book 99. Here you can see where the solver got stuck:

I was able to make a little progress using an advanced technique I call “Implicit pairs”. Take a look at the 4 circled cells near the top of the puzzle.

The vertical ovals show two containers, each containing a pair of cells, with the clues 13 and 11. The top horizontal oval is also a 2-cell container, with the clue 16. The bottom horizontal oval is around a pair of cells which are part of a much longer container.

Because we know the 4 cells sum to 13+11, we can work out the sum for the bottom two cells. It must be 13+11-16, or 8. So we can treat the bottom two cells as an “implicit pair” which sums to 8. Since it sums to 8, we can see that we can’t use the 4s, because 8 = 4+4, and this would cause a duplicate number. So we can eliminate the 4s, and this enables us to solve the four cells.

Are you stuck on a Krazydad puzzle? Send me a snapshot and I’ll try to help!

Happy puzzling!

There’s a snake in my inbox!

Bulgarian puzzle constructor Galen Ivanov sent me two collections of interesting new puzzles, Serpentominos, of his own design, which I’m passing on to you, as a Krazydad Christmas present. These puzzles share some characteristics with Pentominos, Dominos and similar mathematical recreations, and are quite different from the Sudoku and Slitherlink variant puzzles you may be used to.

As the illustration shows, you fill the grid with line segments, completely filling the grid with 13 “serpents” – each of which occupies 6 squares, and begins and ends on one of the provided dots. Serpents may not cross or touch each other. No two serpents may have the same shape (including rotations and reflections), and due to the constraints of snake skeletal anatomy, no serpent’s shape may include a sharp “u turn” — you can’t make two rights in a row, or two lefts in a row.

Please reread the preceding paragraph carefully, because all the rules are absolutely necessary to solve these puzzles, otherwise you will find them impossibly maddening (as I did, before I understood the sharp u-turn rule).

Galen has provided two sets of these puzzles, small-sized puzzles, as shown here, in which you fill a grid with 13 six-block serpents, and medium-sized puzzles, in which you fill a larger grid with 30 seven-block serpents.

If you get completely stuck, send me a snapshot, and I’ll try to help you make some headway.

113 Small Serpentonimo Puzzles

60 Medium Serpentonimo Puzzles

Enjoy!

Celebrity rankings, based on the number of prayer candles for sale on Etsy, 2016 EDITION

1.
David Bowie

2.
Drake

3.
Prince
Britney Spears
Adele

4.
Virgin Mary
Lana Del Rey
Krampus
Dolly Parton
Angel

5.
Rihanna
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Marilyn Monroe
Leonardo DiCaprio
Kim Kardashian
Kanye West
Hillary Clinton

6.
Zombie Golden Girls
Tina Fey
Steve Buscemi
Our Lady of Guadalupe
Miley Cyrus
Marilyn Manson
Lady GaGa
Kylie Jenner
Justin Bieber
Jon Snow
Han Solo
Edgar Allan Poe
Donald Trump
Darth Vader
Christopher Walken
Chris Pratt
Bernie Sanders
Amy Poehler

So I’m still down about 65 pounds, currently fluctuation between 179 and 183 lbs most days. I survived Thanksgiving and my birthday, both in near proximity, gaining and losing about 4 lbs over a week. A lot of folks have asked “what plan I’m on”. I’m not really on a plan, just a system of my own reasoning: Eat fewer calories than I exert. However, there are definite trends in my dietary habits. I eat far less sugar, I don’t eat fast food, I avoid quick/easy foods, and eat a lot more fruits/vegetables. I make a lot of omelets, and I eat a lot of yogurt. There are two foods in particular that I am currently eating so often that they show up at the top of my “MyFitnessPal” lists: Protein shakes and homemade soup. I thought I’d give my approximate recipes for both.

I probably have five or more protein shakes a week. I almost always have them in the mornings after I work out. My recipe has evolved – I started out using pre-sweetened/flavored protein powder mixed with yogurt and fruit, and now I use a pure whey protein that I mix with cocoa powder, and I don’t always add yogurt. I’ve gradually been adding “superfoods”
like chia seed and hemp seed, as a way to boost certain desirable properties. I’ve replaced milk with almond/cashew milk to reduce the calories. I’ve replaced Cacao powder with Hershey’s Cocoa, which also has fewer calories. Here’s my current typical recipe:

Krazydad Protein Shake

1 scoop Whey Protein Isolate (Now Sports)
1 scoop Green Powder (Amazing Grass Green Superfood Chocolate)
* 1 Tablespoon Chia Seeds (Viva Labs)
2 Tablespoons Non-Alkalized Cocoa Powder (Hershey’s “Natural”)
2 Tablespoons Psyllium Husks (Yerba Prima)
* 2 Tablespoons Hempseed (Healthworks)
* Optional: 1 Stevia Packet (Stevia in the raw)

UPDATE: I’ve stopped using the ingredients marked with a star in recent months, mostly because I’m trying to simplify things.

All the preceding ingredients can be pre-measured and stored in baggies in the freezer.

1.5 cups Unsweetened Almond,Cashew or Coconut Milk (Almond Breeze)
2/3 cup Frozen berries/kale (Wegman’s Strawberries, Blueberries, Cherries w/ Kale) OR fresh fruit & kale.
1 cup ice

Note, all the dry ingredients are available on Amazon. I’ve put unaffiliated links on each line.

Final numbers: 513 calories, 40g carbs, 26g fat, 44g protein, 9g sugar.

I try to restrict my daily sugar to 40 grams a day, which comes out to about 13 grams of sugar a meal. So this comes in below that and gives me a few grams to play with. It is easy to exceed this number by adding a banana (which adds sugar and carbs) or other fruit (and pay for it with a lower sugar lunch or dinner). I also sometimes add a half container of plain greek yogurt, which ups the protein, and possibly the fat. If I’m working out I also add two BCAA capsules (an amino acid, which may help with muscle recovery).

The main reason I’ve stopped using pre-mixed protein powders is that they tend to contain artificial sweeteners like Sucralose which my gut objects to. I have a higher tolerance for Stevia, so I’ll use that sometimes, but not always. The longer I’ve gone without sugar, the less I crave it.

I blend my protein shakes in a Nutribullet, and have learned, through experience, to remove and clean the gasket every time. Ideally, you want to fill the container about 2/3 full – this produces a thicker shake when there is available air to make bubbles, expand and fill the container. If you fill the container with ingredients, the result is soupier and less “shake like”.

I am a chocolaholic so my recipe makes a very chocolaty shake. If you are of the vanillaholic persuasion, do your thing.

Okay, now on to the soup! I make this soup at least once a week, and it feeds the entire family one evening, and then me for another day or two.

I’ve been making all my soup in a 6 quart Instant Pot electric pressure cooker. This is super fast, compared to the traditional method, and gives the meat a great texture.

Krazydad Pressure Cooker Chicken Soup-like substance

1. Saute one chopped onion, 5 cloves chopped garlic, and chopped bulbs of 7-8 green onions.
2. Optional: Once brown, add a cup of a robust grain (Ferro, barley or brown rice) and saute it for a minute.
3. Add a 14 can of fire roasted tomatoes.
4. Add 4 cups of chicken stock or bone broth (when I make bone broth in the pressure cooker, it makes enough for two batches of soup. If you start making bone broth around 2 or 3pm, you can have soup for dinner. More recently I’ve been getting lazy and using a single 32 oz box of soup stock from the market).
5. Add a ton of chopped veggies. My veggies typically include 2 stalks celery, 2 carrots, a half or whole eggplant, a zuchini, a poblano pepper, a jalapeno, some chopped kale or spinach, mushrooms, a handful of pitted kalamata or other good olives.
6. Add 2 or 3 chicken breasts or an equivalent amount of chicken meat.
8. Dried herbs/spices (Oregano, Basil, Thyme, Roasted Cumin, Black Pepper)
9. Pressure cook for 6 minutes (it’ll take 20 minutes or so to get up to pressure), then let it sit for 10 more minutes, and release the pressure valve.
10. Remove chicken, discard bones, if any, shred the meat and add it back in.
11. Add fresh herbs (cilantro or Italian parsley) and juice of 2 limes.

My pressure cooker liner has a “don’t fill above here” line. I totally ignore this line and generally fill the pot to the top with veggies, and then cram the chicken in. It seems to work okay, as long as the fluid level isn’t above the line. The result is probably closer to a stew than a soup, and by the second day, the ferro, if added, have absorbed most of the fluid.

Pretty much all the ingredients in this soup are optional (especially the grain and the non-savory vegetables). The only thing you really need is stock and onions. I use whatever vegetables I have on hand, and try to change it up a little each time I make it. Its hard to imagine a vegetable that won’t work in this soup, although I’d be hesitant to use a lot of beets.

Sometimes it’s closer to a restaurant chicken tortilla soup (cumin/lime/avocado), and sometimes I emphasize the Italian herbs and olives. Every batch is great, but roughly every fourth batch is knock-your-socks-off great. I don’t know why but I suspect it has something to do with getting the proportion of savory ingredients right. Over time, I’ve been adding more and more green onions than I thought I originally needed, and this seems to help.

I can eat two bowls of this soup, for dinner, without too many ill effects.

My surname, Bumgardner, which comes in a variety of spellings (Bumgarner, Baumgartner, Burgrade (!), Bungarner, Baumgart, and so on) means “Tree Grower” or “Orchard Farmer”. I’ve known this for a long time, and have often taken some delight that my profession, which involves weaving and growing elaborate data structures, is a form of tree growing. I am a virtual tree grower, continuing in the family tradition.

This week I got obsessed with another form of tree growing: genealogy. Since I’m still quite new at this, I thought I’d share my newbie findings, while they are still fresh. If your feelings about genealogy are the same as mine were a month ago, feel free to go about having your life :)

The genealogy thing happened almost by accident. Up till now, I thought of genealogy as a hobby practiced in every family by one or more bookish relatives (the genealogy nuts), kind of like stamp collecting. I knew my Uncle Dave was into it at one time, and I have a Swedish family tree that my Mom acquired a while back from another relative who had the bug. I really didn’t know much about my family. I had never met my grandfather, didn’t know his first name, and couldn’t name my great grandparents. Now, 6 days later, I can name almost all of my 32 third-great-grandparents (and many of my wife’s as well).

It started, innocently enough, with a weekend trip to my Dad’s. He’s getting up there, so I thought I’d collect a little information for posterity. I asked him the name of his father, the one I never met. I got the names of a one or two grand siblings, his mother’s maiden name, and the names of her parents. I wrote that stuff down and took it home with me.

When I got home, I thought I’d start assembling the info into a family tree of sorts. I started googling the names, and found a lot of interesting links behind a paywall at Ancestry.com. I had checked out this site before, but had never signed up for a membership. It always felt a little bit like a scam to me, like I would pay my $20 bucks, and then I’d find they didn’t really have what I was looking for. But this time, I saw they had a free trial, and I said, “What the heck” and signed up. What I found blew me away.

It seemed that some of my unknown distant 2nd and 3rd cousins had already done a lot of the grunt work. With the few names that I had, I was able to find all my great parents, and then my great-great parents, and my 3rd great parents, and so on. It turns out that once you get 2 or 3 generations back, it gets much easier, because at that point there are a lot more descendants from these folks, and the likelihood that another genealogy nut has already done the work increases. Things get hard again when you get into the 18th and 17th centuries, when there is less record keeping.

I found this pretty cool picture of my great-great grandfather, Miles Bumgarner 1827 – 1898, and learned that he was a confederate soldier (there were a lot of North and South Carolinian farmers in my family). I found that through my grandmother, I am descended from King John Lackland (the bad King John of the Robin Hood stories), which also makes me distantly related to Alex Baldwin, Nelson D. Rockefeller, James Garner (my 5th cousin), and the Avery family on that Netflix show “Making of a Murderer“.

I found my 6th great grandfather, Peter Bumgarner, who immigrated to the colonies from Switzerland in 1719. I can only assume he came from a family of tree growers. More importantly, I found out who likely inserted the “D” into my surname (Miles’s son).

As I got deeper into this, I started reading the excellent blog, GeneaMusings by long-time genealogist Randy Seaver. I learned that expert genealogists can be a little put off by enthusiastic newbs like me, who dive into sites like Ancestry.com and start copying data from one another, without thoroughly vetting it. This can cause mistakes to rapidly multiply, greatly outweighing the nuggets of actual truth that hide among the record. I took a closer look and found a number of discrepancies in the massive family tree I had assembled in just a couple days by copying from other newbs. For example, my great-grandmother was born about 10 years after the death of the man I had originally recorded as her father – it turns out her biological father is unknown to me. Similarly, a number of people have confused Malinda “Linny” Keener with Sarah Malinda Keener, who were born within a few years of each other, creating a composite person Sarah Malinda “Linny” Keener — that one took a while to sort out; I had to look at a lot of census records, birth records, marriage licenses, until a more plausible story became evident.

So now, I’m starting from scratch, and rebuilding my tree more carefully, using only historical records. I’ve found the book that Randy recommends, Evidence Explained to be very helpful, and I’m making greater use of FamilySearch a free site provided by the LDS church, which has more rigorous sourcing than Ancestry.com and more closely resembles Wikipedia in their attempt to build a grand-unified tree (rather than a massive collection of individual trees that copy from one another, as sites like Ancestry do). I want the information I collect to last, so I’m thinking about ways I can keep it localized, so it doesn’t disappear into the ether when Ancestry.com files chapter 11. I have a feeling I’m gonna be making some software tools for my own use, although there is certainly already a lot of stuff out there.

I’m also, almost as a side effect of this hobby, having a lot of email correspondence with my relatives, especially my aunts, many of whom I see or speak with rarely. Its kind of nice to be in more constant contact with my family, and I’m looking forward to meeting some undiscovered 2nd cousins.

Over the past few days I’ve learned a lot, like what a “5th cousin once removed” is. I also learned, or relearned that Government employees often don’t give two shits when it comes to spelling names in census records, marriage licenses and the like! I mean, really, “Burgrade”? Burgrade…

The surnames shared by my 32 3x great grandparents include Atkinson, Avery, Bandy, Beasley, Beatty, Blair, Bumgardner, Chambers, Cunningham, Erwin, Giles, Gilliland, Keener, McCrory, Propst, Setzer, Shaffer, Sloan, Resberg, Shrum and Stomberg. Think you might be a 2nd or 3rd cousin? Drop me a note.

This is one of a series of posts about my health/fitness journey. The first one is here.

Part 6. Befores and Afters

I promised a blog entry on the whole “Endomorph/Ectomorph” thing and it’s coming, but the research is taking me to some interesting places, and it’s gonna take a while to complete, plus I’m super busy playing Pokémon Go. If you want a sneak peak, read the Wikipedia article on Somatotype_and_constitutional_psychology. I’ve ordered some of Dr. Sheldon’s books, and they’re pretty wack-a-doodle. So that’s coming.

In the meantime, I thought I’d give you an update, and also fill a gap I made in my very first post.

The update: I’m now down to 183 lbs, and intend to lose a couple more, than hopefully build up a few pounds of muscle, maybe getting back to 185. That’s the plan anyway.

So, in my first post on this topic of fitness and health, I recited a litany of problems I had before I started this journey. To recap: I felt shitty, I felt invisible, I had man boobs and a nasty chronic cough, I had foot pain which caused a limp.

I really didn’t like my double-chin (don’t know if I remembered to mention that one), but I’ve had a double-chin pretty much most of my adult life, and I didn’t care for it much. I had crazy food cravings too.

Now what I didn’t tell you, but perhaps you inferred, is that all of these issues have gone away now that I’ve lost 60 pounds.

Nope. Not all of it.

So I thought I’d talk about the stuff that’s changed, and the stuff that hasn’t.

The feeling shitty part has changed, for sure. No doubt I will continue to have bad days, but in general, my overall mood and outlook are significantly better. I credit the exercise, mostly, with providing a huge boost in my energy levels. But I am also genuinely proud of what I’ve accomplished.

Did you ever stand in the supermarket check-out line, silently judging yourself (or others) as you compared the food you bought with the food of the people ahead and behind you? I stopped at the market tonight to get some dinner things and a few oddments, and the contents were just a little different from what they would have been a year ago. Then: Cereal, milk, bananas, Ben & Jerry’s, an onion and some tomato products. Now: An onion, some tomato products, 2 chicken breasts, a bag of farro, kale, eggplant, zuchini, poblano, an assortment of green olives. By the way, tonight I made a chicken/farro/veggie/olive/eggplant/bone-broth soup that briefly made me reconsider my life-long atheism.

The feeling invisible thing is mostly a manifestation of age, but your sense of your attractiveness-level certainly plays into it. That self-regard is now elevated, but by no means constant. There are mornings where I feel like a superman, and others where I only see the flaws. The difference is, I am no longer avoiding the mirror. I’m interested in what I will encounter there.

I still see man-boobs, but I’m pretty sure every man has them. What are you gonna do? Nipple removal? I am inching closer to removing my shirt in public. Maybe next year.

Health-wise, the chronic cough, which I had for over 10 years, and which had prevented me from teaching classes on a regular basis, as well as singing, started going away after I lost about 20-30 pounds. By the time I lost 40 pounds the cough was completely gone and has not yet returned. I fear that it may return, and I will continue to fear so until a full year has gone by, because the cough used to be seasonal. But an encouraging sign is that I no longer need to take constant doses of Omeprazole, a stomach acid reducer (acid reflux was a likely contributor to my cough). I am singing stronger than I have in years. And if I could play the violin, I would be playing it too.

The foot-pain went away too. At first. It really seemed like I was heading towards an impossible ideal of good health. And since exercise was making me feel good, I kept piling more of it on. But as I gradually increased my exercise to 5 workouts a week, a couple of evening night-hikes at Griffith Park, and dog-hikes every morning, averaging 17K+ steps a day, the foot pain returned, with a vengeance. And with it came some new pains. Knee pain from all those squats, steps, and lunges. I discovered I had a torn meniscus in one of my knees (possibly both), and I found that constant walking and running aggravated the foot pain. I had to take it easy for a while. Now I have slowed my workouts to 3 or 4 a week, and I’ve had to stop the night hikes. The foot pain is still there, but it’s very gradually getting better.

I’ve put my lower back out twice, at the gym, but interestingly, it is not nearly as bad as when I would put it out and I weighed 60 extra pounds. I’m not a complete wreck when it goes out, but I still need to be careful.

I can see a convave curve under my chin, where I didn’t have one before. But I still have a bit of a double-chin below that: I can see it if I do that two-mirror profile trick. Probably genetic. I’m not fond of it, but I don’t look like Alfred Hitchcock anymore. I’m too vain to get my little double chin fixed with plastic surgery.

And of course, I still have food cravings. The other night, in the supermarket, I was compelled, for some reason, to walk down the cookie & cracker aisle. It was an aisle full of stuff I no longer want to eat, and it was all calling to me. “Hello Jim!” said the Oreos. “Eat me!” said the Mallomars. “Come back to Pepperidge Farm!” said the Sausalitos. “We miss you!” said the garlic bagel chips. I really need to avoid that aisle.

And I still clean my plate, a life-long habit perhaps instilled by a misguided sense of thrift. I pretty much have to plan my meals around the certitude that my plate will be cleaned. There is no “I’ll eat half, and take the rest home”, something my wife does almost as a matter of routine.

If you ask about my new-found sense of self-control, I can only tell you I don’t have one. I’ve just found some new foods I like, and have gotten a little better at planning.

There are mornings where I still feel fat. I look in the mirror, and all I see is my fat tummy. There used to be this awful “Special K” commercial in the 80s which asked Can you pinch more than an inch? and it still taunts me. Fuck Special K. I can pinch way more than an inch. I imagine they were trying to make the entire television viewing public feel inadequate.

So I’m still fat. I’ve dropped nearly 8 inches in the waist, and I still feel fat. I’ll probably always feel fat. Just not as fat. And some days, I don’t feel that fat at all. It’s really kind of variable, like the clouds in the sky. It would be nice if there were meteorologists who could tell you how fat you would feel on Wednesday.

I worry that maybe I’m working on an eating disorder. Because I love the losing weight part. I want to just keep going, because it makes me feel good. Eventually I have to stop. Right now, I think I’m eating pretty well, and I feel pretty good, but I’m curious how I will feel in a year.

To be continued…

And now my soup recipe:

Chicken Farro "Mediturreen"

Prepare these chopped veggies & seasoning in bowl:
   One Zuchinni, diced
   One Japanese Eggplant, diced
   One Poblano, chopped
   Few leaves Kale, chopped
   Two stalks celery, chopped
   10-15 good olives, seeds removed (brown or green)
   1/8 tsp Cayenne
   1 tbsp Oregano
   Black Pepper
   Salt

Brown one whole red onion, chopped and a few cloves sliced garlic in olive oil.  
Add 2 cups Farro (barley would also work) and brown it for a minute too.
Add 5 cups bone-broth or stock  
1 can fire-roasted tomatoes, 
the veggies, 
and two (raw) skinless chicken breasts.

Pressure cook 5-6 minutes and then let it sit 15 minutes before releasing the steam
OR bring to boil then simmer a couple hours.
Shred the chicken and add back to pot.
Add chopped Cilantro and juice of one lime before serving.

UPDATE: I’ve done probably a hundred variations of this soup since acquiring an Instant Pot. We typically have it once a week and eat the leftovers for a couple days. There’s a lot of room for variation.
We like Farro the best, but you can also try other grains or noodles. Often I add mushrooms and green onion tops. There is wide variance in the veggies – I like to have a green leafy one like chard or kale at the end,
and in general its best with a a ton of veggies. If you don’t have bone-broth, a box of chicken stock works great.

This is one of a series of posts about my health/fitness journey. The first one is here.

Part 5. Diet Nonsense

Of all the aspects of health and fitness, I believe the most controversial is what we put in our mouths. There is just a huge amount of contradictory beliefs out there about food, and opinions seem to fluctuate all the time. When I was on Weight Watchers, we were on the tail end of the “low fat” era – I think the now infamous “Snackwell” cookies were still on the shelves, and I bought a few boxes. A few years later we were in the midst of the “low carb” era, and I tried the South Beach diet for a while. I ate a lot of bacon, and made an ersatz mashed-potato like substance out of cauliflower. Now a lot of my friends avoid animal products or gluten. Others are doing Paleo, Keto, or all-animal diets. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I live in Los Angeles, which is quite possibly the epicenter of weird food fads.

It is really hard to know who or what to believe.

For a long time I have prided myself on being an objective, skeptical kind of person. I’m an atheist. I buy the Skeptical Inquirer and Scientific American. I like to think that I don’t dabble in wierd woo-woo beliefs (but I suspect we all do, and just don’t know it). I’m pretty sure there is no afterlife or ghosts. I subscribe to Occam’s Razor, all that stuff.

And when it comes to food, what can I say? I’ve got a few woo-woo beliefs. It’s kind of hard to avoid them.

At the moment, sugar is the accursed food demon of choice, and I’m inclined to go along with that irrational belief, even though I know, logically, that sugar is probably being excessively demonized. I’m not eating zero sugar — that is impossible and will kill you, but I’m trying to avoid added sugar. Most of my sugar comes from about a cup of fruit a day, as well as the sugar that naturally occurs in some of the foods I eat, like yogurt.

Another woo-woo thing: I use this green powder in my protein shakes. The label on the green powder is full of woo-woo language (“green superfood!” “antioxidant!” “alkalizing and energizing!”) that should be setting off alarm bells in my scientific head. It’s made of 80% chlorophyll from some unnamed source (a substance for which there is little scientific evidence of any benefit, whatsoever). It smells like a barn. It’s made of freshly mown grass, I think. Perhaps I eat it because it smells like a barn. Its my penance for not filling my milkshake with kale.

I think one of the difficulties in thinking about food is that we eat it for different reasons. We might modify our diet because of nutrition (more kale), or because we want to lose weight (cabbage soup!) or because it confers some psychological benefit (mac & cheese!). Usually some complicated combination of these reasons.

It seems clear that we have to strike a balance of all three of those areas: nutrition, calories, and mental health. I tell myself I’m using the green powder for nutritive reasons, but really, I’m probably doing it for psychological reasons. If it doesn’t hurt me, that’s probably okay. You know what they say about chicken soup for colds – “it couldn’t hurt”.

It also seems clear that food is an intensely personal thing, and what works for me is not necessarily what is going to work for you (particularly when it comes to mental health foods). Nonetheless, I’ll tell you what I did, and what I’m doing.

When I started my new regimen in March, I was principally motivated by weight loss, but I figured I may as well improve the nutritive value of the foods I eat at the same time. I knew (or thought I knew, or had read somewhere) that the most significant factor with weight loss is caloric deficit. Basically, using the model of a car, you want to burn more fuel than you are consuming. Not that cars gain weight, at least I’ve never seen a fat car that wasn’t naturally fat, or big boned, but something like that.

So I googled something like “caloric deficit to lose 1 pound”, and the first thing that came up was this quote:

The articles I found online often suggested shooting for a target of 1 pound a week. And I said “fuck that”, I’m going for 2 pounds a week. This was mainly because I had done it before, and I knew I was theoretically capable of it, and I worried I didn’t have the mental fortitude to sustain a 1 pound a week weight loss, even though it is probably much healthier and easier to maintain in the long run.

So this meant that to lose two pounds a week, I would need a caloric deficit of 7000 calories a week. This comes out to 1000 calories a day. A nice round number.

Then I had find out what my “resting” or neutral caloric burn rate is. This is not as easy as it sounds – you can’t just google it. I googled it anyway. “Determine your caloric intake” and got this:

So now I had to figure out what my “basal metabolic rate is”. I used the calculator thing that Google sent me to, and entered in my age, gender, height and weight, activity level. It said I needed 2,355 to maintain my caloric level when sedentary and 3000 calories when moderately active. And this, my friends, turned out to be complete and utter bullshit.

So, here’s a hot tip: If you want to be super objective and sciency, do NOT rely on these simple online calculators. Instead rely on your own observation.

I ate what felt right to me, to where I wasn’t hungry, but also wasn’t excessively full. This turned out to be about 1800-1900 calories. I found, over time, that if I ate about 1800 calories, I would lose about 2 pounds a week, which means my “basal metablic rate” is actually closer to 1900-2100. When I eat 2300 calories, that’s a “cheat day” and I invariably gain weight.

Now if you can eat 3000 calories a day, and maintain net-zero weight loss/gain. Kudos to you — you are a very lucky person! Me, not so lucky.

The point is, my body isn’t your body, and these kind of tables simply do not take into account every single factor that contributes to metabolism. You need to observe, rather than follow.

So, for the past few months, I’ve targetted 1800 calories, and I’ve averaged two pounds a week weight loss. The highest weekly loss was 4.9 pounds, and the lowest was -0.8. Since I hit about 190, the rate of loss has decreased – I’ve fluctuated a lot more, and if I wanted to continue rapid weight loss, I would have to reduce the calories. I’m at a pretty good weight now though, I think, even though by some measurements, like the BMR system, I am still technically overweight.

I stopped eating a lot of things I ate before. I stopped eating breakfast cereal, except maybe once every 2 weeks. I did this because the amount of breakfast cereal I usually eat is about 6 times the serving size listed on the box, and packs a huge caloric wallop. I found that I could satisfy my breakfast cravings with a container of yogurt and a banana, and eventually, I started enjoying plain yogurt and a little pineapple.

I stopped going to McDonalds, In & Out, and ordering pizza. I stopped asking my wife to make lasagna. I significantly reduced sugar and carbs. I saw a nutrition counselor (Sarah Lynn Baird at FitFax) and she suggested I maintain a specific ratio of carbs/fat/protein (using myFitnessPal as a measuring tool) so I did that. It’s pretty much impossible to do, but it gave me a rough idea of proportions

In addition to a lot more yogurt, I started eating more fruit. Before I started, I hardly ever ate fruit, but I’ve grown to like it more. Reducing sugar has definitely affected my pallete – it makes me crave sugar less, and enjoy things like fruit and plain yogurt, that I didn’t enjoy so much before. I currently limit my sugar intake to 40 grams a day (according to myFitnessPal).

I made a lot of sandwiches on low cal bread (my favorite brand is “Alpine Valley” but any bread that is under 100 calories a slice works for me). I make big Dagwood style sandwiches where I pile on the veggies, but try to use sensible amounts of meats & cheese.

I make a lot of omelets. I can’t stand egg-white omelets, but I found I could use 3 egg-whites and 2 yolks, or maybe 3+1, and it’s still prety good.

Both the yogurt and omelets are attempts to increase my protein intake without too much effort. A lot of folks increase their protein intake by eating chicken, but I’m not a huge fan of chicken (especially tasteless white-meat chicken) so I tried to find other, quick & easy ways to get protein.

Because I’m working out a few days a week, and I like to get a small protein burst after workouts, I found a low-sugar protein bar I like, and started eating one of those after a workout. I also started making low-sugar protein shakes, which I have for a mid-day snack or breakfast substitute. My protein shake of choice is a chocolate flavored low-sugar whey protein powder, woo-woo green powder, psyllium fiber, plain yogurt, water & ice. Sometimes I add a little fruit, milk, cacao nibs or ground coffee. This shake is definitely a kind of wierd soylent green superfood, but I enjoy them and they satisfy my “milk shake” cravings.

Lately though, even chicken has been growing on me, especially since I started using an electric pressure cooker, which is an awesome addition to my kitchen. I use it to make chili, chicken soup, stock, and yogurt. It is very effective at concentrating and maintaining flavor, which is important when you’re eating less fat & salt.

A lot of folks are very anti-red-meat. I believe (and hope) this is partially a woo-woo thing, and I allow myself to get protein from red meat, since I like red meat. I still much prefer a steak taco to a chicken taco, and I don’t deny myself the steak, just because there is some minor benefit to the chicken — in this case, I think the psychological benefit outweights the health benefit.

Sara Lynn encouraged me early on to have regular “off plan meals” (aka “cheat meals”). This is huge, and I love the idea. It confers a huge psycological benefit. Think of it: twice a week I can eat whatever the fuck I want, guilt-free. Love this. I typically do a cheat meal for Saturday morning breakfast. This is because early Saturday morning is my weekly weigh in, where I measure my weight loss for the week. The cheat meal is a really a “celebration meal” which marks and honors the day. The first one I had chicken-fried steak & eggs with gravy and toast, hash-browns. This is something that ordinarily would have filled me with self-loathing and guilt, but I could have it guilt-free, and then I had a few free days to burn off the calories.

Because of the cheat meals, I tended to gain a bit of weight on weekends, and then do most of my weight loss during the work week. By having the cheat-meal in the days immediately following my weigh in, I had a long time to burn it off.

I have had 3 or 4 plateaus where I didn’t lose much weight (or had a gentle rise, like a roller coaster bump) for a two-week period. Psychological these are very hard, and you have to trust that the plateau will end. If you stay on the plan, they always will. Sometimes I tried to shake things up by varying my diet, but it’s really hard to tell, over the short term, whether those methods help. There are simply too many variable factors, I think, to do short term meaningful adjustments.

Speaking of woo-woo diets, I think the Body for Wife” blog is excellent, and I agree with most of the stuff James Fell has to say about fad diets, even what he has to say about sugar, even though my nutrition counselor says the exact opposite.

At some point, you also have to trust yourself.

Next: Where are the skinny endomorphs?

This is one of a series of posts about my health/fitness journey. The first one is here.

Part 4. Nerdstrong (part 2)

The name itself pretty much sold me. These guys are very good at branding. I only had to read a few reviews to understand that I was the target audience.

Nerdstrong is a small gym in one of the unlovelier parts of North Hollywood (most of North Hollywood). It doesn’t have rows of gleaming bikes and treadmills. This was fine with me, since I was already doing a lot of walking and hiking. It was the stuff above the hips that needed the work. The gym has weights, a big complicated rack thing, these things called kettle-bells, maces, MACES!, and a bunch of other things which I later learned are typically used in CrossFit, whatever that is.

There are numerous accounts of how the gym started on the interwebs. Most of them frame the story as Andrew’s story, which makes sense, because Andrew Deutsch is the founder of the gym. But I like to think of it as David’s story, because I identify with his role better – so I’ll frame it that way. This version of the story is totally apocryphal, but here’s how I imagine it:

There was this guy named David Nett, who was a D&D nerd. He ran awesome dungeons and stuff. One of the people he regularly played with, Andrew, was into Crossfit and fitness, and Andrew tried to get David into fitness, just like David got Andrew into nerd things. David clearly needed Andrew’s help, but David was having none of it, because he was a nerd. Then Andrew had an idea, “what if I gamify this fitness thing to fool David into doing it?” So he incorporated elements of D&D into the fitness routines – so instead of just workouts, they became quests. This cheap gimmick was all David needed to reset his beaten-down nerd mindset, and he became a combination nerd/fitness nut, and started wearing a cape and weird leggings. Then he posed for the logo and Andrew drew it. Then other people started joining in, and soon Andrew’s garage became nerd/fitness hangout central. Eventually the two acquired a larger space and Nerdstrong was born.

Something like that.

Oh, it was originally called NRDFIT, but Crossfit and lawyers exist, and also, that’s a shitty name, so they changed it.

I joined Nerdstrong in early April, a month or two before the gym’s second anniversary. I had already dropped 20 pounds at this point and was ready to step up my game. When I first walked in the gym I marveled at all the details: The cool logo, the space invader wall, the wall with the hexagon thingies. The little shelf with the many-sided dice. The power-access panel with the One Ring inscription on it (that one spoke to me deeply). This was clearly a room that was made for me.

I did a 20 minute introductory workout with Christy Black, which seemed nigh impossible, but I survived it. I was crazy sore about 36 hours later, but I went back. I had to go back. I sampled a bunch of the different classes and eventually signed up for the regular membership thing.

I met the other gym members as I continued to take classes (it’s all classes, by the way). Many of the members form a tight knit cluster of friends who have been attending for a year or more, geeks to the core. They are a different kind of geek than me — Gen-X/Y/Z Comicon Pop Culture geeks, whereas I’m more of a late Boomer LOTR music/lit/math hacker-geek, but whatever, I may not be the same species, but definitely the same phylum (and there’s a handful of peers, age-wise and interest-wise as well). The gym members have been, to a one, kind, supportive, up-beat, wacky, endearing. They are my kind of people.

The workouts vary a lot. Sometimes they can be crazy hard, othertimes, just hard — a lot of it has to do with your mindset that day. I suck at them. I will always suck at them. Especially lunges. It doesn’t matter, I’m doing them.

Not every workout is “gamified” or pop-culture-themed. Some of them are – the weekend ones are. And sometimes, honestly, it’s just a gimmick, a title like “Logans Run” to slap on a set of reps. But I don’t care – it was enough of a gimmick to get me started, and that was really all I needed. Sometimes, the themification is really fun and entertaining, like the “Hamilton” workout, in which we dueled as Burr and Hamilton, while music from the soundtrack played, or the July 4 “Independence Day” workout in which Andrew, in mirrored aviators, did a stirring rendition of Bill Pullman’s speech before we tangled with the aliens. We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! That morning, the gym floor was partitioned into chalk outlined areas representing different scenes in the movie. We tangled with alien tentacles (battle ropes) and uploaded a virus to the mothership (this involved uploading an actual virus to the local DMV, I think maybe…).

Some of my favorite workouts involve using the many-sided dice for randomness, which almost always leads to bad things I don’t want, but entropy is fun, right? Right?

Certain exercises have really challenged me, and I have learned, painfully, that I have to be careful how hard I push myself. My body does not always want to cooperate. I pushed myself really hard for a couple months, and then found that I was having pretty bad issues with my knees and feet, and had to lay low for a few weeks. Then I got better and started to push again, then I put the back out at 6am one morning, doing dead lifts. The back got better amazingly fast, much quicker than it would have if I were still 245 lbs.

Lots of progress. When my wife joined, a few months later, she took the same 20 minute introductory workout as I did, and I took it along with her. It still wasn’t a walk in the park, but the amount of improvement was immense. When I started, I could do about 0.7 of a push-up. Now I can do ten times that amount. I can now do about 0.7 of a chin-up, which is about ten times where I started with those. Like everything else, I log my workouts, and I can see that for about the same amount of work, I am now burning fewer calories.

I also worry about Nerdstrong. I’m a careful person, and I’ve been part of these small, idealistic utopian communities before. They never last. They whither and die, or they grow, and the growth kills the essential character of the community. I can see the same faces at every work out, and not a whole lot of newbies. Is that bad? Or if there were suddenly a ton of newbies, that would be scary too. All the coaches have day jobs. How long can they sustain this? What happens post Nerdstrong? Do I need to make contingency plans? I watch the faces of the coaches very carefully. Are they all getting along? What if they break up, like The BeatlesOne Direction?

The other day, I looked at the other gyms on Yelp. They still don’t look that great, but I suppose I could manage, in a pinch. It would be lonelier, and there would be no monthly board-game night, but I could do it I guess. Moreover, I think the Nerdstrong community is strong enough that it would find a way to perpetuate itself, even if the physical gym were to go away for whatever reason. But I worry too much.

Right now, we have something that’s great, that’s working for us, and we should treasure it as best we can!

And treasure it I do, because I have finally, after a very long time, found a relationship with the word fitness that I can live with. This gym has helped me to rewire my brain and make numerous positive associations with fitness. When I walk into the Gym, I’m not revisiting my childhood, I’m inventing a new one.

Next: Diet nonsense

This is one of a series of posts about my health/fitness journey. The first one is here.

Part 4. Nerdstrong (part 1)

Before this year, the thought of going to a gym was akin to the thought of singing “Oklahoma!” to the clerk at the local 7-Eleven. It wasn’t in the cards. So was the thought of taking my shirt off at the beach (or even going to the beach, really). My rare physical activity was restricted to walking and hiking — activities which had no negative emotional baggage for me. At different points in my adult life, my legs were in pretty good shape, but fitness stopped at the hips.

I really only had one thing to compare a gym to, having never been in one — P.E. class. Specifically, elementary school P.E. class where I was routinely bullied by more physically gifted but emotionally challenged peers, and occasionally by a barrel-chested, crew-cut, aviator-wearing gym teacher of another generation who implored us not to “run like girls.”

Mr. Manning, was probably not a bad guy. He was an adult male, single, who lived with his mom, in our small town of Ringoes, N.J., and liked to flirt with the elderly lunch ladies, who flirted right back. He coached a successful regional elementary school basketball team, and was beloved by many of the kids and families at the school. When he died a few years ago, I saw they wrote a nice obituary about him, from which I saved this picture. As a teenager, I remember going back, and having a friendly conversation or two with him. This was the beginning of a long and difficult process of making amends with my relationship with physical fitness and sports.

I suspect that a lot of the kids who struggled in P.E. class, like me, didn’t have strong fitness role models in their lives. In particular, my parents divorced when I was 4, after my dad had been attending night school, and my mom worked most of the time, so my only real exposure to sports and games was via the kids in the neighborhood and my older brother. Like a lot of kids of my generation, we ran wild, unsupervised, through the neighborhood, playing massive games of hide-and-go-seek and cops and robbers. When it got dark, we would go home, and watch black-and-white TVs.

When I was 7, My mom remarried a man who turned out to be authoritarian and abusive. We moved from West Orange to Ringoes, a small rural town, and I entered the 3rd grade. This was the age at which kids start playing more formalized sports, other than say “Duck Duck Goose”. I was surprised to find I was not particularly good at them. I remember a particular game of kick-ball, my first or second day in that new school, where I repeatedly failed to kick the ball a sufficient distance. “He’s not very good” I heard one of the other kids say. This was the day I became “the kid who’s not very good at sports”.

In older grades, as we were introduced to other games, like basketball and touch football, I found that most of the other boys already knew the rules, and the gym teacher assumed we knew the rules. I remember a game of basketball, in which one of my team-mates chided me as he ran past, “Get in your position!”. I had a position? This game has positions? It’s not just a bunch of people scrambling to get a ball and put it in a basket?

I learned to read before Kindergarten, and was devouring books as a child. My brother and I slept in bunk beds and the bottom book was my fortress of solitude. Every day after school I would climb into bed and read fiction. “A Wrinkle in Time”, “Stranger from the Depths”, “The Hobbit”. My favorite books were juvenile fantasies, in which a boy, his brother, and an annoying neighbor girl would stumble upon a hidden portal in the woods that transported them to a magical land. These kinds of stories came in many varieties, and there was always one or two in the monthly Schoolastic catalog. I loved escapist stories. My mother often complained that I spent too much time in the summer indoors reading, while my brother spent too much time outdoors playing, and that we should switch places once in a while.

My reading level was always high for my age, and in English and math class, I excelled. My hand was up first often enough that the teacher would sometimes say “Anyone? Anyone but Jim…”. The local farm boys who struggled in those classes, the ones who were called upon for an answer and failed to come up with it, especially the ones who were good at sports, became my tormentors in the locker room.

In eight grade I read “The Lord of the Rings” for the first time, and then reread it, and reread it. Nine times, I think. I was a huge Tolkien nerd in high school. I attended a very nice private Quaker school that didn’t have general P.E. classes. Things got a little better, although I was still required to enroll in a team sport each semester. The first one I tried was cross country. I was totally out of shape and unprepared for running such long distances, but I occasionally tried. The nice thing about cross country was that there were long moments of solitude, where we ran alone through the woods. Then I was free to stop running, and I would walk, and feel guilty. Occasionally I would lop off a section of the track, and feel guiltier, and I was never caught, or so I imagined. I hated competing, and felt a flush of shame whenever I was cheered from the sidelines. In subsequent years I tried my hand at swim team, gymnastics, track and field. I was jealous of the female students, who got to take “fun” sports like archery, field hockey and horse-back riding.

In high school, all the “elective” classes happened during the same period, and it was your choices which determined if you were going to be a manly man (wood shop, metal shop), or an artsy man (theater, choir, band). I was a musician, of course, and struggle with basic carpentry skills to this day. I associated sports with manliness, and I didn’t want to be manly. I didn’t want to watch westerns. I still don’t like video games that feature musclebound behemoths with flame throwers.

And then I was out of high school, and I went to CalArts to study music, a school which suffers from neither a fraternity nor a football team, and I was never again subjected to a P.E. requirement of any kind.

I had survived.

At this point, I pretty much detested anything that I associated with organized sports. Particular team sports with balls. I could tolerate running. I enjoyed hiking because nature and all that. I enjoyed the occasional game of frisbee because hippies played it. I played a softball game once, in my twenties, at a company picnic. Everybody sucked at it. I didn’t feel bad, but I still struggled and felt enormously self conscious.

As I aged, my relationship with sports mellowed. I attended a Lakers game and enjoyed it. I find things to enjoy about the Olympics and X-Games. The Paralympics this year are pretty amazing, and I’m DVRing the whole thing. But I’m probably never going to be a died-in-the-wool football fan or basketball fan.

So, after I started losing weight in March, I contemplated maybe going to a gym. I knew, logically, that it would be good for me. I knew, logically, that my self-consciousness was all in my head. That the gym was full of fat awkward people like me, and that I would be just as invisible at the gym as I would be at Starbucks.

But it still didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know the dress codes. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t want to encounter bullies (even imaginary ones).

Still I looked on Yelp one day at a few gyms within the local area. They were big box gyms full of exercise bikes and treadmills. A lot of people in the reviews talked about impersonal they were. I encountered a common attitude, that the gyms almost wanted you NOT to go. Their business model worked best when you bought a membership and didn’t attend. Huh.

Still, I might have gone to one. It might have been fine. But then I looked at Yelp again, and I noticed this other gym that I had somehow missed the first time.

Nerdstrong.

Next: Nerdstrong, part 2

This is one of a series of posts about my health/fitness journey. The first one is here.

Part 3: Old Age Superpowers

At fifty three, there’s a lot of things I can point to in myself that aren’t what they used to be. My reflexes are slower. My hearing is worse. My knees are fucked up — I was recently told I have a torn meniscus in one, and that was the good knee. I don’t like standing for long periods and can’t tolerate concerts that don’t have chairs. Since I hit my 40s, I’ve been periodically convinced that my mental acuity is declining, although I think this is probably mostly a delusion brought on by lack of self confidence. Still, I’m told there’s a reason most mathematicians do their best work in their 20s.

However, as I decline into my dotage, there’s a few superpowers I’ve developed. One of the more important ones, which has definitely played a role in improving my health, is the rather unsexy superpower of planning.

When I was in my 20s, I took great pride in my flexibility and ability to play it by ear. I found my parents’ apparent need for precision to be unnecessary and a little sad. I gritted my teeth during a car ride in which my parents seemed unduly concerned whether our dinner reservations were for 6:45 or 6:50, and how long it would take to get to the restaurant. Of course, that much vaunted flexibility and relaxed attitude of my youth was the flip-side of a lack of organizational skills, a greater sense of entitlement and not much accountability.

But now I’m the same age as my parents were then, and I take great pride in knowing exactly when I’ll arrive somewhere (thank you Google Maps). And I can use this superpower to improve my life in innumerable ways.

Take Evernote, my current journaling tool of choice. For almost every project and interest I have, I keep an Evernote page which contains a list of Todos, future plans, ideas and so on. I have a set of notes tagged health, in which I journal my progress from day to day. I’ve logged a lot of my exercise & workouts, so that over time, I’ve developed a better sense of how many calories I’m likely to burn doing a quick walk to Starbucks, vs a cardio-heavy workout.

In the first installment in this series, I mentioned my lack of impulse control when it came to food, and how difficult it was (and still is) for me to control my eating. Short-term planning is one of the tactics I use to combat this. Often at the start of the day, I will plan what I’m going to eat for lunch and dinner. The commissary at my work posts daily menus, so I can see what’s going to be available, and I have a few go-to options I can eat for dinner. I’m not necessarily going to follow this plan, but I have a structure to work-around, and I know roughly how many calories I’m going to consume. If I change plans, I can insure that I’m changing to something that isn’t going to considerably change things for the worse. Impulse control becomes more of a problem when things are out of my control, or when I don’t plan. If I don’t plan my dinner, and I let the time slip by, by eight-o-clock I become ravenous, and then it gets harder to keep a lid on things. A short-term plan is like a contract, and I find it easier to abide by a contract with myself, rather than to wing it every single day. If I’m going to a restaurant, and it’s in myFitnessPal or it’s a chain, I can usually find the nutritional info and plan what I’m going to eat before I arrive. Short-term planning really helps with impulse control.

I use long-term planning to provide periodic ego boosts. For example, once I had decided I was going to lose 2 pounds a week, I shot a few arrows into the future, and marked the days on my Google Calendar when I was going to hit certain interesting weights. When would I hit 208 pounds? June 6. Let’s note that. That’s the day that according to the awful BMI system, I would no longer be classified as “Obese”. When would I hit 199 lbs? That’s a cool number. July 3. When do I hit 185, my last minimum weight? August 31. That particular arrow was shot pretty far into the future, but I missed it by just a week.

At some point I figured out that I was losing an inch in my waist every 8 or 9 pounds, so then I was able to shoot some more arrows into the future, and work out the dates when I would have a 34 inch waist and a 32 inch waist. Every one of these arrows is a present to myself. I bought some new pants that I didn’t quite fit in yet, planning for the day when I would. I planned an annual physical with my doctor and scheduled it around the time I would hit 200 lbs. I planned for a future visit with my cardiologist, who was likely to reduce my blood pressure meds. All little arrows containing little presents to myself.

These presents were like handles on the rope I was climbing. If I made enough of them, I could see the next one, just ahead.

Speaking of planning, remember how I was using a spreadsheet to track my food, weight calories? Well that’s just one tab from a five-tab spreadsheet. The other tabs are “Blood Pressure”, “Exercise”, “Food Reference” and “Calculators”. “Blood Pressure” is a blood pressure log and graph. My blood pressure meds are now significantly reduced, but I’m still monitoring it closely. “Exercise” is a journal of my walks, hikes and workouts. My Fitbit can be used to log a lot of this stuff, but I find it useful for note keeping. “Foods Reference” is nutritional info for Foods and recipes I commonly eat (somewhat redundant now that I’m using myFitnessPal). “Calculators” has formulas for calorie burn, BMI and PBF, as well as a set of goals. When I first started on this journey, I was probably spending an hour a day fiddling with these spreadsheets, and more importantly, thinking about this stuff. It has become more routine now, but I remember what happens if I go on auto-pilot, so I’m trying to remain vigilant.

One thing is very different from my 1999 Weight Watchers regimen: my approach to exercise & fitness. More on that in the next installment.

Next: Nerdstrong