August 2015 Review

There’s a Flanders and Swann song about the weather in England. “In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it’s not!” July is usually hot but quite sunny. August is now terminally grey and overcast. And depressing. It’s also the month when, for some reason, I start to take stock of what I’m doing and make some changes.

I changed up my work shirts to blue, single cuff, non-iron, slim cut, 17.5x35 from T M Lewin's. Of whom I’ve long been a fan, but until I looked at their website I had no idea just how many combinations were available. The one I ordered was exactly what I wanted. I lost two pairs of trousers on the train earlier this year (it feels like last year) and punished myself by buying replacements from M&S. Those got dumped as well, for two proper pairs, again from T M Lewin's.

Finding out from my Fitbit that pretty much no matter what I did, I got around 6:15 - 6:45 hours’ sleep (unless I really do climb into bed at 21:30 or so), I decided that watching an early evening film and getting back at 21:30 wouldn’t kill me, as long as I didn’t then spend an hour looking at nothing much on the internet. So I’m trying to make that a new habit.

I read The FUSE: Gridlock; DMZ: On The Ground; Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies; Mai Jai's, Decoded; Philippe Georget's, Summertime All The Cats Are Bored; Fuck Yeah, Menswear; a monograph on Basquiat’s paintings; The Architecture of Modern Mathematics; and No Highway by Neville Shute.

I saw Straight Outta Compton at Cineworld; Salt of the Earth, Eden, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Precinct 75 at the Soho Curzon, The Killers at the Prince Charles Cinema. Also S1 of Miami Vice. (Will Nikita look as dated in thirty years?)

I’d registered for the Windows 10 upgrade on my old Samsung, and a couple of weekends after the launch date, it told me it was ready to install the new OS. Which it did in about ninety minutes, from the internet, without losing any data or programs, or requiring me to fill in forms about the software I use. Corporate IT departments please note.

My new gym routine is fairly settled. Tuesday is weights day. Sunday and Thursday are body-weight flexibility exercises: jumping onto or over boxes; Vipr movements; … ; and pull-ups, pull-downs and rows. I need to work on my back. Following my trainer’s advice, pull-ups get done first, and following some bro-science, I don’t do a set to failure. I feel a lot less ache-y and more energetic as a result. Three weights sessions were not doing it for me.

And I had a signing ceremony with Sis and Nephew at my solicitors. They are now my attorneys for Finance and Care. This is a slightly more emotional exercise than you might think. It involves thinking, if only for a while, about what you want to happen to you when you start going gaga or get some unpleasant cancer. Which was probably why I felt it was a much more emotionally-messy month than I’ve made it sound.

Counting Calories - Get An App

My Fitbit has started telling me about the food I eat. Or rather, I have started to confess to it. It has a UK food directory, which makes it a lot more useful than the American version imposed on users last year. To use it well, I’ve had to get into a couple of habits: reading the calorie count on food packaging, and calculating or measuring the weights of a single item (as when I buy two salmon fillets.)

Download a calorie counter app - I use Fitbit’s built-in tracker, or try MyFitnessPal, or Google for some reviews. Very few food brands cross national borders, so you need one with an English food list if you’re in England, a French list for France and so on. However since you are never going to eat another packaged supermarket supper again, but cook nearly all your own food from raw ingredients you’ll only be using a fraction of the food database and since modern food suppliers simply don’t provide us with a wide range of foods (as opposed to brands), it won’t take long to build up the short-cut menu that all these apps have.

The app does a number of things for you. It can look up calorie values (Apple, 1 medium), but most of all it can do the calculations for you. Food packaging states the calorific value of 100g of the contents. It might tell you per pack or per item as well. Portions are rarely 100g. You can try to calculate the calories in 115g of salmon at 229 calories / 100g in your head, or you can use the app. Look up the food, adjust the portion size and add it to the list.

Is it worth doing this? Isn’t it all a bit “quantified life” (whatever happened to that?) and geeky? Shouldn’t we just, you know, use our common sense, eat properly and don’t obsess about it? Well, no.

I walk five miles a day during the week, and do three hours a week in the gym. That, along with my basal rate, burns around 2,800 calories a day. I need to lose weight (aka body fat), and to do that I have to maintain a 500 calorie / day deficit consistently. (Much less and my body will homeostatically adjust for the difference.)

Know what 500 calories is? 500 calories is a slice of fudge cake from Cafe Nero. It’s a Tuna sandwich from Pret. It’s six chocolate digestive biscuits or a 120g bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. It’s not quite all of a Steak-and-Kidney pie from Square Pie. It’s a 100g of potato crisps, two-and-a-half small croissants from Sainsbury's, four tablespoons of olive oil (!), or a square of Bakewell tart from Pret.

I don’t smoke. I don’t drink, and I don’t get much chance to do the other thing either. If something happens that causes me to get emotional, I might show the weights who’s boss, but I’m more likely to hit the fudge cake. You can go have a couple of pints (260 calories) or some wine (equivalent about 300 calories). If it’s really bad, I may wind up at a meeting, eating a bar of chocolate, and listening to some middle-timer rattling on about nothing. So I need a habit - recording food eaten - that interrupts the habit of eating on emotions. I may be suffering emotionally, but dammit, I don’t have to put on weight as well. The Fitbit app tells me how much I have left to eat for the rest of the day, allowing for my planned deficit. That’s what I really need to know and will keep me in line.

If your common sense is unusually well-informed about the calorific value of various foodstuffs, if you can prepare and cook food from raw ingredients quickly, and you have the emotional reactions of a brick, you can "use your common sense, eat properly and not obsess about it”. Otherwise, get an app and start tracking.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like (3)

According to Mrs Robinson the GP we should all be eating 2,000 calories a day because diabetes.

Schools need to teach pupils what 2,000 calories a day looks and feels like. It means a breakfast of toast or cereal, a sandwich and zero calorie drink (like water) at lunch and a supper of protein, veg and a portion of carbohydrate like some boiled potatoes. Some fruit and a yoghurt, and you’re basically done for the day. Who eats like that nowadays

This also has to be the most joyless menu ever devised. Mrs Robinson is clearly one of those who believe that good living is dull living, flavourless living, tasteless living. Decent people don’t have fun. Decent people have a sad sandwich in their car between housecalls in nearby villages. With water. Decent people don’t even fry-finish their potatoes because Oil Has Calories.

2,000 calories a day is not a bowl of cornflakes, a home-made ham sandwich with a glass of water, and boiled potatoes, carrots and a thin slice of chicken, with an apple and a yoghurt as snacks. Nope. That would be about 1,000 calories. And it would be a really bad diet. Those morning carbs - eaten at 06:00 - will burn straight off after a stressful commute, leaving you craving something by about 09:30. Those sandwiches for lunch you made at home will suffer the same fate: you’ll be craving by 16:00 or so. Yoghurts are about the most pointless food ever devised. And I defy anyone to eat 500 calories of fruit (excluding bananas) in one sitting. Or even in a day.

Mrs Robinson needs to know what 2,000 calories looks like. She also needs to get some kind of life. In the next post, I will explain how to manage your diet without counting a single darn calorie.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like (2)

So let’s talk about diabetes. There are two types of diabetes. The first is what your grandmother had: an auto-immune destruction of beta cells in the pancreas that makes insulin production impossible. That is managed by injecting a substitute insulin. This is Type 1 - or as I will prejudicially call it, “real” diabetes. The “not-real” type is diabetes-by-analogy, or so-called “Type 2“ diabetes, and this arises when, for one of many reasons, the body can’t process sugar as well as it used to, and the blood-sugar rises to the point where nasty lumpy sugar molecules can start doing some real damage to various parts of the body. At one point I went along to Ashford Hospital after fasting for twelve hours, was given a litre of Lucozade to drink and had my blood sugar levels measured two hours later. I think it came out at 9 mmol per litre, which meant I had, according to the World Health Organsiation, impaired glucose tolerance, or as the PR people call it “pre-diabetes”. My levels now are around 4-5 mmol / litre. Diabetes mellitus is diagnosed at 11.1 mmol / litre. 

When my blood sugar came down, I stopped getting random infections, often in my nose, my head cleared and my emotions stabilised. Even though I was in the middle of a horrible re-organisation at work, about to be down-graded, and under stress, I felt better. Increased blood sugar isn’t funny, and it’s vaguely scary how little it needs to increase before it has a noticeable effect on my ability to function at the levels needed in today’s working world. Chronic high blood sugar is nasty and dangerous and can really, really mess up your life. But it’s not a disease, it’s a symptom.

Why don’t I want to call "Type 2 diabetes” as a disease? A disease is a chemical process in the body caused by some (usually external) agent, and the symptoms are the results of that process. Stop the process and the symptoms go away - that’s what we call ‘curing the disease’. A disease is usually cured by killing a virus or bacteria, or in some cases, by chemicals that make our own immune system back off attacking a perfectly acceptable part of us. A real condition, such as syphilis is treated with a real medicine with a real chemical effect. This will work despite our body fat, exercise regime, religious beliefs, the state of our chakras, how much exercise we do, or how mindful we are (which is the definition of technology: it works whether you believe in it or not). The only change we usually need to make to our diet is giving up alcohol for the duration. 

Calling something a disease creates the expectation that there’s a cure for it that works whether we believe in it or not. Since high blood sugar has many causes, there isn’t a single cure for it. At best there would be a medicine that reduced blood sugar to normal levels. There is, and it’s called “insulin”. But NICE doesn’t like giving it to people who aren’t Type 1 because it’s expensive… I mean, because they fear the patient will become dependent on it. Instead they hand out drugs with names that end in “formin”, which make a third of the people who take them feel nausea, while a third have problems with their, ahem, married life and stop taking the pills within a month.These drugs definitely do not work. Not like penicillin or ranitidine work. 

The pharmaceutical industry wants you to think that high blood sugar is a disease, because then you will expect to be prescribed a cure, and press your GP for one. It may not happen now, but at least a couple of years ago, there was an NHS bonus for GPs to diagnose you as having high blood sugar, get you on nasty drugs and then find your levels had dropped. That sounds more or less like a bribe to me. Despite that bribe, the NHS no more believes in “Type 2 diabetes” than I do, and suggests exercise and diet as the first approach to managing high blood sugar.

But “they didn’t push the envelope”. The NHS recommends small changes in diet and exercise regime. What the doctors will never tell the poor saps sitting in front of them is that the change must be sudden and fairly extreme. (It is of you’re very obese and get a diet from a nutritionist.) I went on a 1,500 calorie / day diet and hit the gym four times a week. That works because the body can’t adjust to the sudden and dramatic change of regime, and it burns calories and loses weight, especially fat from the abdominal region. The official advice is to make small changes, and rightly so: the parade of long-term un-exercised carb-munchers that GPs see would simply keel over if they tried to repeat what I did. 

1,500 calories is the US Army’s extreme weight-loss diet and you’re not supposed to do it for long (I can’t find a decent link to this anymore and there’s a lot of faddy looking stuff when googling “us army 1500 calories”). It works in conjunction with, oh yes, being a soldier. Not an office-worker. Being in good shape is part of a soldier’s job, as it is part of a model’s or an actor’s. They get support for it. Being in good shape is not part of an office-worker’s job, and they don’t get any support for it. Capitalism doesn’t care about your body-fat, except to sell you gym memberships and fad diets to get rid of it, and the shit that puts it there in the first place. 

As for the 2,000 calorie thing? Turns out that was a classic piece of US governmental bureaucratic fudge. 

We’ll carry on in the next post. 

What 2000 Calories Looks Like (1)

So in the Guardian recently was an article by Ann Robinson, who is a GP, about how schools needed to teach pupils what 2,000 calories “looks and feels like”. She then gave a description of if, which I will come to. But first, let’s address the fact that you’re impressed because she’s GP with a Guardian byline.

GPs are now pretty much gatekeepers to the NHS and health insurance. If UK pharmacists had the powers of continental pharmacists, most people would never see a GP. I have an NHS GP, whom I see if I suspect I may need referring to hospitals or specialists, and if I have a well-being issue, I go see the GP at my gym. GPs are not the repositories of health and fitness wisdom that the NHS and press likes to make them out to be. GPs know absolutely nothing about exercise, fitness and nutrition. I defy anyone to produce a GP (not resident at a gym or sports club) who can deadlift their own bodyweight, and knows the calorific content of a smoked salmon sandwich from Pret. They mostly see sick children, old people, addicts, people with treatment plans for chronic diseases or conditions, and of course, middle-aged people who have let themselves put on weight and have generally gone to the dogs.

GPs, in short, don’t know anything about healthy and fit people, because they never see any. They don’t know much about people who can take advice and stick with it, because they only see them once. What they know about are people who won’t or can’t, for whatever reason, consistently follow a regime of exercise and clean eating for an extended period of time. They see what you and I would call “the hopeless cases”. And then they give healthy and fit people advice. Because that works.

Now let’s turn to the article. Mrs Robinson’s article was a puff-piece for a piece of “research” by Diabetes UK, which is a charity that needs to scare the beejasus out of everyone as a way of raising funds. Here’s a list of its corporate sponsors from its 2014 Annual Report: Abbott, Boots, Bunzl, Bupa, Eli Lilly, Janssen , Lifescan , Novo Nordisk , Royal Mail, Sanofi, Takeda, Tesco, Truvia, and Weight Watchers.

Novo Nordisk, Sanofi and Takeda especially are heavily dependent on diabetes medications. There’s nothing, of course, wrong with corporate support, and of course it makes sense for companies in an industry to support research charities. What is wrong is to get waylaid by an industry that invented a “disease” out of thin air, then invented drugs that have at best a marginal effect on one symptom, which they then persuade health services all over the world to prescribe. Why do I say that? That’s the next post.

What My Fitbit Tells Me (So Far)

I have the Fitbit Flex. It counts steps and does a reasonable job of detecting restless sleep. It doesn't detect stair-climbing. The app that comes with it lets me log sleeping hours, food, water and exercise activities and times. It makes some generic assumptions about calorie-burning during those activities. Using one is excellent at keeping me honest about what I'm tracking, and there's a thing that should be called "the Fitbit effect"

My Fitbit will tell me, in about five hours, that I haven’t had a lot of sleep tonight. Every August I get a few nights when I can’t get to sleep. There’s no reason: it just happens. (Written Monday night / Tuesday Morning)

My Fitbit tells me three things: how far I walk each day, how much sleep I’ve had, and how many calories I’ve burned. I tell it how much work I do in the gym. As well as the app, they send me a mail every week with a summary. For the last week in August, I walked just over 5 miles a day, burned just under 2,900 calories a day, and slept for 6 hours and 50 minutes a day. That’s a week at work. The calorie count will include three sessions in the gym. In that week, I didn’t lose so much as a single gram. Burning 2,900 calories a day.

My sleep can vary between just over six hours a day to just over seven hours. I may get the odd eight-hours at the weekend. I’ve never slept more than 7 hours 20 in the week. Bear in mind that the Fitbit knows when you’re being restless and deducts that time. I can be restless for up to 35 minutes a night, rarely more, and almost never less that 10 minutes.

I feel more rested and clear within myself after 7+ hours sleep than I do after less that 6H:30M. Except for tonight (Mon PM-Tues AM), I’ve almost never had to get by on less than 6 hours. On the very rare occasions I get 8 hours, I feel as if I’ve physically wound down and it takes me a while to get going. But that only happens at the weekend.

What do all these stats tell me? That I should stop worrying about getting eight hour’s sleep. It’s not going to happen. I should go to bed when I’m tired and not worry about functioning on six hours’ sleep. I can do that just fine. I get quite a bit of my evenings back doing this. Bedtime at 23:00 is fine, as long as I’m tired. (This is possible because I’ve abandoned the 05:30 wake-up in favour of 06:00.)

I’m getting more than enough exercise every day. No need to feel guilty about that.

I need to look at how many calories I eat during the day, because I’m burning 2,700 - 2,900 a day and my weight isn’t shifting. Logging food on the Fitbit is a bit tedious, but maybe the English food list they have will help. That’s going to be the next project.

Underworld's Born Slippy - Minimalist’s Minimalist Dance Music

Okay, it’s time for some music.

This one is Underworld’s masterpiece Born Slippy, from the soundtrack of Trainspotting and never released on an album. Rightly, it’s their show-closer. It was a HUGE worldwide hit. Live, they do a nine-plus-minute version. And half the time there’s barely anything there. It’s all in the drums, and if you only heard the drums, you would still know this was Born Slippy. There’s so little to this it makes Philip Glass sound like Mozart (“too many notes, dear Mozart”). The only song I can think of with less is Timbaland’s production of Hollerback Girl for Gwen “Legs” Stefani. So settle back, put the headphones on and let your hair stand on end.