Body Fat, Weight Loss and All That

I've been reading The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes, which I commend to you if you want to know anything about diet and nutrition. It prompted me to think over the whole issue of weight loss, diet and exercise properly.

Let's start with the basics. You eat a 300 gram apple. As a result, you now weigh 300 grams more than you did. The only way you will weigh the same as you did before you ate the apple is to lose 300 grams. How do you do that? Well, what goes in has to go out or be stored. The stores are triglyceride molecules in fat cells or additional bone or muscle mass. What goes out is urine, sweat, faeces and moisture in your breath.

How about losing weight by exercising? Say, walking a mile at about four miles an hour. This will burn roughly 100 Calories. The body stores 7,700 Calories in a kilo of (white) body fat. So you have burned up 64 grams of body fat. The catch is, aside from the sweat you dripped onto the pavement or absorbed in your clothes, you haven't lost any weight yet. The body fat has disappeared in a reaction using oxygen and other chemicals to make various waste products: the mass of the waste products equals the mass of the body fat, oxygen and other chemicals. (To many, many decimal places, chemical reactions conserve mass.) Those waste products are still in your body, so you still weigh the same – this is why you never seem to weigh less after a work-out at the gym. You won't lose the weight until you pass water or faeces. What the exercise does is increase the amount of waste material you pass.

By 64 grams for a mile-long walk. Unless you are an athlete or an infantryman, you will use very little energy by “exercising”: most of your energy use is in your basal metabolic rate – keeping your core body warm, processing food, re-oxygenating blood, making all those cells to renew your body and other such work. For a man, that's about 2,000 Calories a day. Cut down your food intake to 1500 Calories in the right way, so that you burn body fat and you are losing 300 grams a day, or 2 kilos a week. That's how you lose weight without having a Hollywood trainer and all day to exercise.

So how do you make sure you burn the body fat? The answer, Taubes is suggesting, is “carbohydrates drive insulin, insulin drives fat”. Cut down on sugars and starches, your insulin levels go down and your body releases more fat from its cells, which burn up and create more waste products. It also reduces the need for all the water needed to handle carbohydrate-based food processing. A good chunk of weight loss in the early stages of any diet is water being disposed of because it's suddenly become surplus to requirement.

This, at any rate, is how I make sense of what Taubes is saying. I'm trying it right now. The challenge is eating a low (refined-) carbohydrate, low sugar diet while working in an office in central London.

Downtown

Is a classic 1965 song by Tony Hatch sung by Petula Clark. Baby Spice – I'm sorry, Emma Bunton - did a version in 2006. (That's over forty years later: those songs were a darn sight stronger than we all thought at the time. Quick: name a song written in 1925 that was in the charts in 1965. No? Thought so.) It's about how you will shake off the blues so much better if you go to the heart of the Big City – even when I first heard it, I assumed it was about Manhattan, not London – and seek out entertainment there. One reason it's strong is that it has an six-line verse, a five-line verse and a chorus. The third three-line verse is:

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along...
So, maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares and go

Okay. Now, who is Petula singing as and to whom? Sometimes girls sing boys' songs just because that's how it worked out in the A&R meeting. Well, she must be singing as a woman to a man – right? In which case, she's waiting for you downtown, and in 1965 there weren't that many professional women drowning their sorrows after work. Of course, she could be a professional with an older profession.

The key words are: “Someone who is just like you”. Just like you (a boy) how? She's a girl in 1965 and back then girls weren't like men like they are now, in 1965 women were different. And if she was a girl meeting your boy, why would you need a "gentle hand to guide [you] along"? You're a boy, she's a girl, and back then boys and girls who were out late knew what they were out late for. It was a damn sight less coy than it became later. But if you're a boy and she's not a girl, but a boy, and it's 1965, well, then everyone needs a gentle hand to, err, guide them along.

Damn. Another great song that's actually about the gay life. Listen to it on You Tube anyway.

Brief Holiday

On Wednesday and Thursday I took a couple of days in north Somerset, where I stayed overnight in Dunster, walked on the sands of Blue Anchor and Dunster beaches, up to Dunkery Beacon and along the Quantocks. I broke the drive down to have lunch at Glencot House...





...and then took a walk on the Quantocks which started in an obscuring mist that cleared enough to see the reactor houses at Hinckley Point. (Click on the photos for a little more details)



The north Somerset area, between Bridgewater and the Devon border, is a time-warp: I've been going there since the late 80's and it hasn't changed in any way. If anything the fields and forests are lusher than they were twenty years ago: the hedges are certainly higher.



It's a very marked contrast to north Devon - for reasons that turned out to be bad, I thought it might be an idea to look at Ilfracombe, and was reminded of why I never go to English seaside resorts.

On the next visit I will work out some way of breaking up the drive back. Two and a half hours of on the A358 / A303 leaves me feeling a little hyped at the end. The trick is to avoid the M25 during the rush hour, which means you have to pass it before about four in the afternoon or after about eight in the evening, so you leave either just after an early lunch or have a very long day. I will also remember to stay for some time in one place on the return day – perhaps sit on the beach for a couple of hours – so that I don't spend the whole day driving. I will also remember to take the camera along when I'm on the beach.

I'm very bad at taking going-away-somewhere-holidays and this was the first this year. I thought that if I kept it short and simple, it would give me some encouragement to take a longer, foreign, jaunt later on.

Am I A Nerd?

I'm never really sure if I qualify as a techie person. I don't have a zillion computer manuals at home, I have a Mac but haven't been drawn to the rocks of the Unix command line (oh goody, I can practice my awk!) nor started to learn Ruby. On the other hand, my recent reading has included Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, Ashley Kahn's The House That Trane Built and I'm currently three-quarters through William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, plus I'm still working my way through Hartshorne's Algebraic Geometry and I check in with Daily Dose of Excel every day. I think that makes up for not getting down and dirty with Xcode yet. There's more to being a nerd than programming.

Anyway, there are two wonderful essays about techie types. Peter Seebach's Care and Feeding of Your Hacker and Michael Lopp's (aka Rands) The Nerd Handbook. Both are well worth a read. Rands has a terrific line about the Nerd's “annoyingly efficient relevancy engine”: “your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.”

Of course, you understand, that's not me. I do not sit in meetings doodling over a problem while monitoring the blah-blah (excuse me, I mean, insightful discussion) for anything remotely connected with me or my job. I do not scan the conversations around me in cafes for anything cute, silly, interesting or memorably pretentious. I don't have problems keeping focussed on what someone is saying if I'm not interested – of course not. Nor do I take one look at a woman and decide a) what it is about her I find sexy and attractive, b) if I would sleep with her if I had the chance, c) if I have a remote chance, and if the answer to a) is “Nothing” or to b) or c) “No” then she vanishes from my world like a passing bus. I'm not that shallow. I'm looking for People Like Me (aren't we all looking for People Like Us?) and given how specific a description that is, my relevancy engine has a default setting of “Off”.

By the way, if you think this is a bad habit of nerds, you haven't been brushed off by a really top-notch networker at an industry event: those guys can be halfway to their next target before they've stopped shaking your hand because they realised you are way too low on the corporate tree to be useful to them. Watch Four Weddings and a Funeral and see the way Corin Redgrave seems to shake Hugh Grant's hand affably while utterly ignoring him (it's in wedding two).

What's interesting to me right now about this is the identity: am I really a Nerd? And if I am, how do I get to be a better Nerd? Because I've spent a lot of my life avoiding certain nerdhood things. For instance, Star Trek and general Trekiness no, Battlestar Galactica yes; tee-shirts with words on them, no, shirts from Jermyn St, yes. There is room here for the idea of a “gentleman nerd” and I'm going to elbow me some out.

Make sure the staff toilets work before you ask for excellence

"How dare you ask for excellence when the staff toilets are filthy!". This is in a Tom Peters book – Liberation Management, I think. Before he went new age on us in the late 90’s, Tom was more of a Good Guy in the same spirit as Robert (Up The Organisation) Townsend than all that big-company ass-kissing in Pursuit of Excellence suggested.

I have worked for a company (an FTSE-100 household name) that asked for excellence from its staff and gave them a building where the toilets backed up regularly. I saw the cisterns once when the maintenance door was open – you and I have better equipment at home.

How can the company ask for excellence from you and me and let the landlord get away with toilets that don’t work? Well, if they think they really are providing an environment where you and I can be excellent, then they are a) self-satisfied or b) not very well travelled. If they know they are not providing that environment, then they are either c) going through some PR motions or d) just trying it on, e) so dumb they don’t know what "excellent" means. How dare they be a) complaisant, b) provincial, c) devious, d) taking the Mickey or e) dumb and then ask you to be self-critical, experienced, honest, straightforward and smart?
That’s why the toilets have to work before you can ask your people for excellence.

Steal, Don’t Plagiarise

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that "second-rate artists plagiarise, first-rate artists steal". Plagiarising is passing off other peoples’ work as your own: it’s intellectual theft, it’s misrepresentation, it’s dishonest and you will never be allowed in the playpen again once you have been caught at it.

What Wilde meant by stealing is different: he meant that great artists take from the work of others. They take a character, a plot, or idea, a trick, a phrase, a colour, a shape, a technique, any damn thing they can get their hands on that helps them solve a problem in their own work. Visual artists and designers of all stripes sometimes call it "inspiration", but what they mean is that they took someone else’s idea and used it to develop their own ideas. Mathematicians and scientists put this at the core of their practice: they use other people’s results and techniques and give out credits in a footnote or the name of the theorem or algorithm.

Steal, don’t plagiarise. Look at the work of other people and take whatever techniques and ideas from them that you need to get your own work done.

Know what you’re going to do when it doesn’t work

Confidence is not believing that your plans will work out or that the worst won’t happen: that’s optimism. Confidence is knowing that you can recover when things go wrong. The military have a saying about plans: "no plan survives its first contact with the enemy". Contingency planning is essential: working out what might go wrong and how you are going to cope with it.
This is why you read the manual, hire good people and train the rest: good people will have the knowledge to fix it when it goes wrong. To put the same thing another way: you don’t hire a professional builder to chase in a water pipe, you hire them because they know what to do when the bricks fall out of your wall. (This actually happened during some work I had done on my bathroom.)

Some things aren’t supposed to have another door: marriage, children, joining the Mafia, ageing and taxes. Which is why people invented divorce, adoption and the Netherlands Antilles, and continue to look for something to slow or reverse ageing. (You can’t get out of the Mafia.)

"Never enter a room with only one door" should be a Russian proverb if it isn’t already. Always have a way out, a Plan B. That way you don’t have to worry about what happens if something goes wrong.