Remind me next time to actually plan to get up and spend enough time outside to let my eyes adjust. So cool, and it’s modern smartphones that enable this to be captured so easily.
Tag: Science
Geeking out in Wyoming – My 2017 Eclipse Story
To celebrate the launch of the new Thought Grapes YouTube channel and the new Seeds of Thought podcast (including the first episode here), here’s a collection of my experiences from Idaho/Wyoming before, during, and after the 2017 solar eclipse. If you want to see the photos and videos in this video, I’ve created an album on Google Photos.
Enjoy!
Carbs are getting in the way of healthy eating
Canadians heeded the exhortation to reduce fat and reduced their fat intake to 31 per cent by 2004. But during this time, obesity rates spiked, which suggests that dietary fat is not a “primary contributing factor” in obesity, said the report.
I got healthy (and lost 45 pounds in the last 8 months) but not by focusing on eating healthier foods (like salads) at restaurants and at home. But my main focus was on the AMOUNT I ate, not on the types of foods as much. I didn’t count a single calorie, and though I started my diet exercising by biking to work every day, for the last few months I’ve only really been moderately active, but haven’t gained any weight back.
The demonization of fat (and subsequent need for people to eat lots of carbs at the grocery store, or restaurants, has meant that people have to eat a lot MORE food to feel full. Letting yourself eat fat, and trying to limit the amount of carbs you eat, is probably going to become increasingly important to the North American diet, whether these guidelines officially change or not.
> The Canada Food Guide is killing you: ‘The obesity epidemic… really began with our dietary guidelines’
So…Cold-fX is BS
“The study actually showed the placebo to be more effective at relieving (some) cold symptoms than Cold-fX.”
In something surely nobody could have seen coming, it looks like there’s a non-zero chance anybody who purchased Cold-fX as a cold or flu remedy could be able to join a class-action suit in order to get some of the money they spent that didn’t work as well as a sugar pill in treating seasonal respiratory viruses.
Yikes.
> Lawyer in Cold-fX lawsuit to fight for for class-action status, which could trigger mass refund
Bacteria Is Evolving to Eat Plastic
PET was only invented about 70 years ago. That means the bacteria must have evolved the ability to consume the plastic over the intervening decades. The results are published in Science.
I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’, but I kind of called this one.
As I keep saying, yes of course, plastic is a huge problem that we shouldn’t necessarily ignore, but nature (and evolution) are fascinating, and work on dizzyingly short timescales. In the second case of finding ‘fauna’ capable of digesting plastics so far (a fungus being the first, as mentioned in the linked article), bacteria have proven themselves to be unbelievably adaptable in even a short amount of time (plastic was invented less than 100 years ago).
When humans first started domesticating cattle, and really began using their milk into adulthood for sustenance, humans in Western Europe quickly gained the ability to process lactose, to the point that pockets in much of the world have no problem eating milk and cheeses. Evolution is amazing!
> Scientists Have Discovered a Bacteria That’s Evolved to Eat Plastic
I freaking love sunsets (January 23)
I’ve mentioned before that I like sunsets. When I have a day where I’m not really making anything, sometimes I just have to look up and see the beautiful colours a setting sun can give me. If you don’t like sky pictures, I’m sorry, because I do. These pictures were about 7 minutes apart, as the sun gets lower, the colours usually get better and better.
SpaceX Launch (January 17)
I can’t always have something new ready to go. But luckily for me, here’s something really cool starting very soon that you can go check out! This will be happening over the next couple of hours, and hopefully in the end SpaceX will be able to land their rocket on a small barge out in the ocean. It’s really cool stuff.The launch is happening about 10 minutes after this post is published. Let’s go watch!
Losing Weight, When You’re Lazy (January 13)
“Play to your strengths” is the advice given to Harry Potter during the Triwizard Tournament, and it’s invaluable insight is applicable not just to facing dragons in a magical school.
When I set out to improve my health last summer, I knew it would take more than some kind of amazing burst of willpower. I was going to have to change some of my habits, and try to control my worst impulses, like the one to eat an entire pizza in one sitting. I didn’t buy any expensive supplements or go on a strict nutrition plan. I didn’t count calories, or even consider any individual food as being off limits.
What I did end up doing, starting in July of 2015, was make a commitment to eating less, and to exercising more. In making that commitment, I had a few things I liked doing built-in to my schedule to jump start my new diet and lifestyle. The biggest thing I did was to start biking to and from work every day, about 7 km each direction, unless it was pouring rain.
Really, the only other major change I made was to purchase Soylent, the food replacement I’ve talked about to death here, and eat only that at work. I know that I tend to eat when I’m bored, and so I would bring snacks to work and eat them throughout the day, even if I wasn’t particularly hungry. By replacing that snack food with Soylent, which fills me up but which I did not crave, I was able to consume a lot less calories during the day.
Since food wasn’t around, I didn’t feel any strong urge to eat, and if I did, Soylent would be there to fill me up. I started losing around two pounds a week on average, but I started to notice a pattern developing. During the week, I would lose about 4-6 pounds, and then Friday through Sunday, I would gain back about 2-4 of that. My weight loss came in cycles, because as I mentioned, I have no willpower, and so I wasn’t afraid to have a few slices of pizza when hanging out with friends.
The secret to weight loss: math, patterns, and patience. After a couple of months of this pattern, where I would bike 4-5 times per week, play sports, and walk, my appetite, my waistline, and my stomach all shrank substantially. And through all of this, I never really had any strong cravings for food that I didn’t satisfy. When I did snack, I was less likely to indulge as much, mainly because I just wasn’t as hungry.
That’s not to say I didn’t get hungry. Another important part of this lifestyle was learning that it’s OK to be hungry sometimes without eating. I started treating hydration more seriously, and my hunger lessened in kind. In total, from the end of August (after my honeymoon) to the beginning of December, I lost about 35 pounds.
If you look in detail at my progress, weighing myself every single day from August 20, 2015 to January 13, 2016, I have lost a total of 98 pounds in the 89 days I lost weight. On the remaining days, I gained a total of 64 pounds over 57 days. In that time, I’ve learned that eating a bunch of snack food, or just too much in general, like I did on many of those 57 “gain” days, is absolutely not worth the work I put in on the 89 “loss” days
I am currently better, but far from perfect, at deciding when I’ve had enough. I still enjoy cookies, candy, pizza, delivery, chips, cheese, meat, etc., but I know a lot better how my body is going to react to those foods, and how much I eat will affect me.
Now, it’s the middle of winter, and I can’t bike all over the place (also, my bike was stolen back in October 🙁 ), but I am doing exercise where I can to keep up with food, and managing my intake better.
With the tracking system I’ve set up for myself, which I talk about here, I know that I can aim to weigh less today than I did yesterday, and less this week than I did the last, and I will be able to lose weight. It’s all about finding what works for you, and playing to your strengths. Stay healthy 🙂
If you want to get a copy of the spreadsheet I’ve been using, let me know and I can make a clean copy available for download. I have been using the wireless Withings scale to track my weight and body fat percentage, if you want to check it out, I would strongly recommend it (full disclosure: if you use that link, I do get a commission) and it’s been a big help to me. I have also been using the Withings Health Mate app, which is free, and IFTTT to make keeping track of my weight in a spreadsheet unbelievably simple.
You can do it, it’s all a matter of finding your own path.
Remembering my first publication (January 9)
Facebook’s “On This Day” mostly serves to cause people to reminisce about the past and re-share posts from years past. For the most part, I do the same thing. Sometimes, though, it really provides some gems.
In this case, I was reminded that my first major academic publication (that I was first author on) was published 4 years ago this week! Thanks to incredible help from my supervisor, Dave Bryce, and the rest of his group, I managed to put together enough research results to finish my thesis and put out this paper.
It was a really great moment for me, and it reminded me just how far I’ve come in the last four years. I’m no longer working in Chemistry, but I still have great memories of doing lab work and research. It was also a really weird feeling when I went and clicked on the link, and would have had to pay $35 to ‘rent’ my results for 48 hours.The fact that all journals charge so much for access to published work just reminds me how far we still have to go with open access. I look forward to the day when all research can be equally accessed by everyone, it will enable research to move that much faster. You can still access the paper if you want, because my old supervisor Dave keeps a copy of all the papers he’s had published on his website, which is pretty cool.
Weight Loss (How I Am Breaking The Pattern)
One of my favourite things to do is open up and talk about things that are going on in my life. If you want to hear about me in more detail, I convinced my co-hosts on Ottawhat? to let me talk about myself for an hour this week (listen here).
But that’s not what today is about. Today, I want to tell you what’s been going on with my weight in the last month or so. You can see all the past stuff I’ve written about Soylent here, but this isn’t really about Soylent either. This is all about my weight, and health.
Trust me, I was too small. For the majority of my adult life, I have weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. Most health experts will tell you that for my height, that makes me about 50-70 pounds overweight. This puts me just a smidge past overweight, and into “obese” territory. For almost a year, when I tore my ACL in 2010-11 and couldn’t do any real physical activity, my weight actually dropped down as far as 190 pounds, and I honestly looked like a skeleton. That is my “healthy” weight, so I know that I can’t depend on a measure like BMI (which doesn’t take density or body structure into account) to measure my health. Buoyancy is dependent on density, and I would drown if I tried to float, so I know I’m pretty dense.
All of that being said, in the last few weeks, I have been cycling to and from work about 70% of the time, and I have also not been taking a lunch. Instead, I have been having one serving of Soylent around 12:15 PM every day, in addition to breakfast and whatever I eat in the evening. The result of this is a pretty drastic drop in my weight since the second week of July, as you can see here.
The last month of weight measurements. Luckily for me, since I first bought a WiFi-connected scale in February 2014, my weight has been a known quantity as long as I stand on it every day. What I saw from the last 18 months is that what I had been “doing” to lose weight, wasn’t doing much. Even Soylent and cycling, as you can see from the graph above (starting at the end of June), weren’t really having any effect on my weight.
The thing that finally started me down the path you see on the right side of the graph is a pretty simple change, that is, using this graph. I am currently using the measurements from my scale, and feeding them into the graph described here. It keeps a moving average of the last 10 days (so 9 days ago is weighted at 0.1 in the average, 4 days ago is weighted 0.6, etc., and today is weighted as 1). What this means, as described if you read the article above, is that if you have an off day or eat a whole pizza, it doesn’t completely ruin your weight trend, because you will still have a string of good days before it that are factored in to your weight.What I’ve been trying to do with this information is keep the blue line up there below the red line. That makes weight loss incredibly simple, and it means that I can in theory eat whatever I want on a given day, just that I have to be healthy overall. As you can see, I went to a birthday party last weekend where I ate a little bit too much. Where that would normally be a huge discouragement, with this data available, I can see that as long as I put work in to make up for it, everything will be fine.This was a really good, too big meal, from 2012. What all of this really comes down to is that to lose weight, I have had to limit what I eat. I don’t necessarily need to eat healthy foods, but that definitely helps. Even more than losing weight though, this has come from a desire to be healthier. I know that I just plain eat too much food. At home, I have a lot more control over what I eat, and that really helps, but restaurants are becoming a bigger and bigger pain to eat at. The problem that I end up having is: the portions restaurants give you is WAY too big. Any restaurant worth its salt (heh) will know that the economics of food mean that they will make more money if they give you bigger portions. As meals (and servings) get bigger, you can charge more for them, and the only downside is that it’s WAY too much food for any one person in one sitting.What I have to get into the mindset of doing is mentally setting aside some of the food on my plate when I’m at a restaurant, and knowing ahead of time that I actively shouldn’t be eating all of the food I’m given. At the moment, I treat the food on my plate at restaurants as a goal, even though I stop being hungry very early in the meal. I think, if I can keep up these measurements and motivations, and actually change my restaurant habits, I can keep this up and get to a weight where I feel a little better about myself and feel healthy all the time, as opposed to feeling like I should eat a salad more often (because salads are the worst).That being said, as a work food replacement, Soylent has been unbelievable. It’s all I’m eating at work these days, and it’s been filling enough that I don’t need to eat any snacks before lunch, and I don’t feel starved biking home if I only have one small portion in the morning. Although I still don’t love the sucralose taste.
