Family of Losers

September 14, 2012

This ran pretty long. If you just want to know how things turned out, just jump to the results.

The Problem

For awhile now I’ve realized that our family has had a weight problem. Not just me, but my more importantly, my kids. It was getting to the point that even friends and extended family members would gently suggest that something needed to be done. Especially as the habits we form in our youth tend to be those that carry forward with us for the rest of our lives. The trouble was, I wasn’t exactly sure how to approach it. My sister struggled with weight when she was younger and I don’t think the approach my parents took was an especially helpful one. I wanted to come up with a plan that was took more of a big carrot approach as opposed to a big stick. I also wanted something that was designed to demonstrate how to plan and succeed with a long term goal so that they might apply the things that they learned to other goals later on. I procrastinated for some time until driving into work one day I had an idea.

The Solution

The idea was a contest modeled after The Biggest Loser. Although I’ve not actually seen the show, I have a general idea how it works. I decided on a contest to see who could lose the most weight over a period of 16 weeks. At the end of that 16 week period the winner would receive a generous cash prize. It was a pretty big prize actually. I wanted it to be enough to really get my kids attention. In addition, the 2nd place finisher would receive a prize worth about half as much as 1st place. 3rd half as much as 2nd and 4th would get some amount. The only condition being you had to have actually lost weight. I wanted to make sure that no one ever felt like they were out of it just because they weren’t in 1st place.

However, having been a kid once, I realized that 16 weeks is a really really long time and I was worried that the kids might lose interest pretty quickly. So, I broke the contest down into four four week periods. At the end of four week period the person would had lost the most weight so far overall would get a prize and the person who had lost the most weight for that four week period would get a prize. I later added one modification to the contest as my wife and I began pulling away; that is, whichever of the kids lost more during a four week period got a smaller prize for that period.

Lastly, the contest would not be judged based on absolute weight loss, rather as a percentage of weight lost. This way a heavier person (me) wouldn’t have an unfair advantage over anyone else.

The Process

Step 1: Awareness

I feel that one of the biggest keys to weight management is simply awareness. It’s pretty easy to ignore changes in weight. For me anyway. I had an idea how much I weighed and didn’t much like it, but then again I simply didn’t pay that much attention to it. I think that went for all of us. Several years back I lost a bit of weight and all I really did was to raise my awareness. So, the first thing I did was buy an attractive digital scale. While we have an old analog scale, it was inconveniently located at the bottom of a closet somewhere, and I wanted something that would be prominently located (so it had to look nice) and have a high degree of accuracy. Once I got the scale I actually placed it near where the dining room transitions to the kitchen. There was some controversy, but in addition to wanting a place we could all gather for weekly weigh-ins, I hoped that its presence would just raise awareness especially around mealtimes.

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150 Calories

August 10, 2012

I’ve been told that I can get a little carried away talking about this weight loss thing that I’ve been working on, so I’ve tried to keep that in check on the various social media sites you might find me on. But I read something today that I just have to say something about.

Each day, and sometimes multiple times a day, I visit the Fitness and Loseit sub-reddits for encouragement and support as I continue this journey. It’s not an easy thing and seeing everyone’s progress inspires me to keep going. So many people have made some amazing transformations, it’s just remarkable.

Today I came across this post wherein a woman that is trying to make a healthy change was at the gym and she “heard the girl next to me turn to her friend and say ‘this girl is 300 pounds, oh my god’ with a look of disgust”. She showed amazing restraint with her reaction: “I turned to her and smiled and said ‘I would love to see you do what I am about to do with 200 pounds of weight strapped to your arms, legs, and stomach.’

I’ll have to admit that before I started trying to lose weight, I wondered how it was possible to reach such extreme levels of weight, but the more I learned, the more I realized how a relatively small difference in calories can have such a drastic change on your weight over time. For example, when I started (this time), I weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 225. For a 6 foot tall sedentary guy that works out to a BMR of roughly 2500 calories a day. I set a goal for myself of 184 and was shocked to see that if I maintained the same level of activity, which was basically none, I would eventually settle in at a BMR of 2200 calories a day. So basically what this was saying was that I was overeating by the equivalent of like 2 sodas a day. That’s it. 2 extra sodas a day equals about 40 extra pounds of weight.

Another thing I discovered as I’ve gone through this process is that the weight I would imagine would look good for me is probably far short of reality, so I’m looking at revising my goals. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 175. So let’s look at the numbers again. If I become a lightly active (1-3 days of exercise per week) 6 foot tall guy, my BMR should settle in around 2450 calories a day. That only about 50 calories less than my original calorie consumption! Now imagine I fall back into my old lifestyle and also start eating an extra 150 calories a day. I’d probably eventually settle around 237 pounds. That’s over sixty pounds and a difference between being well into the obese range with a BMI of 32.1 kg/m2 versus a normal BMI of 23.7 kg/m2.

150 calories. One soda. One beer. One cookie. A serving of potato chips. A handful of almonds. That’s all it takes and next thing you know you’re overweight if not obese. It’s not like you have to sit around all day eating buckets of fried chicken. Just a 600 calorie increase (basically one plain hamburger, no cheese, no bacon, no mayo) and next thing you know, you’re looking at 300 pounds.

So getting back to my original point, it really doesn’t take a lot to make a big difference positively or negatively. Although those changes will not happen overnight… sadly. And going back to the 300 pound woman at the gym. I know something of what it takes to make a commitment to a healthier lifestyle and I applaud you. When see really heavy people at the gym sweating on the treadmill, elliptical, exercise bike, etc., I’m not disgusted. Far from it. I’m inspired. Seriously.

And speaking of inspiration, can I just mention this commercial by Nike? I think of this commercial some mornings as I run and I think about easing up, or taking a shortcut, skipping a day, etc. I think about Nathan and the change he is trying to make and it inspires me to keep pushing. Good luck Nathan!

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Super Speller: The Beginning

April 29, 2012

It occurs to me I haven’t really talked about my little indie app over here on my personal blog. We released a new version today so I thought I might talk about how it came to be and some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

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Sharing with PowerMate

February 15, 2012

I like to keep the Bookmarks bar hidden in Chrome. I tend to not really use bookmarks much, although every so often I need to use a bookmarklet to send something to Instapaper, Delicious, Pinterest, etc. By the way Pinterest is actually pretty handy for collecting little user interface snippets that I like. Anyway, I didn’t want to click on the Bookmarks menu, but I also don’t want a row of 24, or so, useless pixels always sitting at the top of my browser.

What to do?

I don’t know why I didn’t try this sooner. PowerMate can open a URL, but that doesn’t really work with a javascript URL sadly. But! Both Chrome and Safari allow the execution of javascript via AppleScript. I have no idea about Firefox or any others, I didn’t bother to check. Anyway, it would be great if I could just bop the PowerMate whenever I have something I win to pin / save / tweet / share, etc. So I created a PowerMate trigger with a custom AppleScript that looks like this (this one demonstrates posting to Pinterest):

tell application "Google Chrome"
	execute active tab of window 1 javascript "void((function(){var
	e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('type','text/
	javascript');e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/
	pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());"
end tell

So perhaps that looks like gobbledygook to you. It pretty much does to me too. So I created a PowerMate set file that demonstrates using bookmarklets with PowerMate in a couple of different ways for both Chrome and Safari. A normal click with no modifiers will pin to Pinterest. A normal click with the control key held posts to Twitter. And a long press will open a menu letting you pick from Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, and Delicious. There should be enough there to demonstrate how to configure these bookmarklets however you like.

Oh there is one little wrinkle. The Instapaper is customized for each account so you’ll need to do a bit of editing there. Just replace the ID in the script with the ID found in your Instapaper bookmarklet.

The PowerMate set file can be downloaded here. Just unzip, drop it in the PowerMate app, and configure as needed.

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App Store Category Breakdown

February 7, 2012

Lately I’ve been wondering about the composition of the top apps on the App Store. You may remember that a while back I took a look at the composition of the Top 200 paid / grossing apps versus the number of submissions in each category. I kind of wanted to look at it in a slightly different way this time.

I was wondering if there was any difference between the composition of the top categories on the iPhone versus the iPad. I also wanted to see how the composition of the top free charts compared to the top grossing charts. And finally I wanted to take a look at the Games sub-category breakdown. I’m not going to go into too much detail, rather just point out a few things that popped out at me as I looked over the numbers.

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