Day 23: Hunger

On this diet I'm often hungry.  It's not the lack of carb-rich foods that does this to me - it's the long delays between meals.  At the moment, I'm skipping breakfast, eating lunch and supper, and squeezing in a small third meal before bed on some days, but not every day.  The result is hunger, especially in the morning.

What struck me as I started to get used to this pattern is that I remember being hungry from my childhood in the 1970s.  We weren't poor - it's just that in those days, we didn't snack like we do today.  Nowadays - even in the house of my parents, who didn't snack in the 1970s - there are always convenient snacks in a handy cupboard, at the front of the fridge, or on the kitchen counter.  Snacking has just become such an acceptable thing to do, and we're urged to snack on healthy food (apples, nuts, etc) rather than to avoid snacks.  The result in my case is that it's very rare that I'm ever hungry.  I believed that eating frequently was helpful for people trying to control their weight, because it curbed cravings and prevented binging.

The trouble with snacking on healthy food, as the book points out, is that you don't rely on your fat stores for energy.  Instead, the fat builds up little by little until you realise you're overweight.  Why did it not occur to me that this was a problem?  I feel I've been seduced into thinking that hunger is bad for you.  Right now, I'm pretty sure it is a key aspect of my successful weight loss over the last three weeks.  Moreover, once I get to a weight I want to keep, I suspect I'll still need hunger to burn off any excess fat stored after big meals.  Perhaps if I only ever ate tiny meals then I wouldn't have to store any fat, but that just doesn't seem realistic.  Normal meals, with hunger in between, seems like the better approach.

Day 19: Fat geek

I've just discovered The Hacker's Diet, a book by the founder of Autodesk, who by 40 had achieved everything desirable - great marriage, great company, wealth, happiness - but also a lot of excess weight that he just couldn't shift.  As an engineer and manager, he thought - why not approach this the way I've approached the things where I've succeeded?  The result was the book.

Not me - but I'll have some data soon

He studied weight in humans (this would have been in the 1980s - a lot of this is common knowledge now and hence the first half of the book is pretty boring), and concluded that weight operates like any sort of feedback system.   He describes different sorts of feedback systems (representing different people with different histories), and one of these certainly resonated with me.  He had one character who was always gaining weight.  I weighed 125 pounds in high school when I first attained my current height and stopped growing.  At my heaviest, after three decades and intermittent dieting and exercise, I weighed 168 pounds.  However, that hasn't come on all at once.  Every five years or so I would realise that I had a "new normal" weight, higher than before.  If I dieted, I always went back to the new normal.

The Hacker Diet doesn't recommend a specific miracle food or exercise regime (though it does recommend exercise - but only for longevity, not for weight loss).  Instead its advice boils down to this: track your weight using a long term rolling average chart so you can visualise your underlying weight, without the daily "noise" produced by the amount of water you're carrying or the "solids" in your digestive tract.  The idea is that you will feel less defeated by high points that are just "noise", and you'll have clear information about whether whatever you're doing is making your "new normal" lower, higher, or the same.  That it takes him over 100 pages to say this much indicates that the book was written by a professional engineer rather than a professional writer.

At any rate, my inner geek has suffered degrees of frustration - yesterday's technology disaster has been followed by success, but only after much gnashing of teeth.  Fresh batteries?  Check.  Consistent readings?  Not a bit of it.  Googled for solutions?  Check.  Does it give consistent readings now that it's off the (flat) carpet and on the lino?  Check - and at last I can get at my data.

The result is that I know know how much of my body is fat - and it's a lot.  Really that much?  44% apparently.  Now, I do find that a little hard to believe.  I mean, yes, I'm overweight, and I realise there's fat all over the place - under the skin, surrounding every organ, and of course in the blood and stored in muscle and so on.  But close to half?

Well, I will keep measuring each day and see whether it maintains the same or similar ratio of fat.  If so, I'll just have to accept that I'm a whole lot fatter than I thought.  And if I do have this information, I can act on it with repeated experiments and measurements - Excel spreadsheets here we come.

Day 18: Technology Day

After my recent sneak peek at the scales, and my enthusiasm for what they showed, I decided it was time I invested in really good scales.  I've had my doubts about the old set.  They are the simple type with a spinning dial - could their accuracy be affected by the strain of over a decade of having heavy people stand on them, hoping for better news?

Accordingly, I picked up a set of fancy scales from our favourite pharmacy.  Would they work?  A woman behind the desk reassured me that she'd bought them and thought they were great.  I got them home, and read the instructions.  Of course they needed AAA batteries, and we had none left.  Back out to the store.   Lucky I'd done all my chores for the day....

With my eco-friendly rechargeable batteries duly installed, I followed the instructions and got my weight.  Amazing!  Exactly the same as the old scales.  Maybe old tech is better than I was prepared to give it credit for.

Moreover, new tech turned out not to be that superb either.  Mind you, it's gorgeous - glass and digital readings and everything.  It reads tenths of pounds and kilos - something I couldn't possibly have got from the rotary scales.  It is supposed to read my body fat, something I was very enthusiastic to learn.  Apparently it sends some sort of electric pulse through your body and works out how much fat, bone and muscle you've got.  What's not to like?

Well, my main gripe is that apart from weight, I haven't had a reading yet.  I waited in vain for % fat and other metrics, then looked for troubleshooting notes.  I found the bit at the end of the booklet that said not to use rechargeable batteries.

Defeated!  But never mind - with luck I'll get some non-rechargeables tomorrow, and find out about what my body is made of.  Unless the technology finds some other way to trip me up.

On a more positive note, I found by this evening that I'd consumed almost no carbs other than the green leaves ignored by this diet.  I'd had a large lump of cheese in a hungry moment, but on reading the label, I found it was carbohydrate-free!  I had green beans in my salad at suppertime, but on googling their carb content, I found the small serving I ate had only about 1g carbohydrate - I suppose they're largely water and fiber.  My allocation per day is 60 grams of carbohydrate, and I'd hardly had any!  So as a treat before bedtime, I indulged in 100g of salted cashews (25g carbs).  Funny - when you haven't eaten much in the way of carbs, cashews taste pleasantly sweet!  Moreover, they are much more filling than they were before I started this diet.