| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
erik nilsson | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I didn't mind being fat. It was hard to shop at Kenneth Cole, and I couldn't run as fast or far as I might want, but I could wear phat clothes that fit my phat fat physique. I felt substantial. Hearty. Hale, even. Actually, I did mind being fat, I just didn't know it. I thought I was getting old. My back hurt, my feet hurt, I had acid reflux, I snored, I had indigestion. But when I lost fifty pounds, all of these things went away. I'm still old, but now I'm old and a lot healthier. When I noticed I was losing weight, I started weighing myself on an old bathroom scale. We got a new scale, so I wanted to recalibrate the old weight measurements. This led to an interesting insight. Since the old scale was pretty repeatable, the recalibration was easy: figure out what "true" weights on the new scale corresponded to on the old scale. Measure at minimum and maximum weights and several points in-between, then fit a calibration curve. The recalibration was straightforward, so I can report that from September 2003 to May 2004, I lost weight at a surprisingly consistent rate of about 1.4 pounds per week. But that wasn't the big insight. To calibrate old (bigger) weights, I stepped on each scale holding more and more books to make up my previous weight. The shock was that if I picked up the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary, The Physician's Desk Reference, Gray's Anatomy, and about a dozen O'Reilly books, I was still carrying around less weight than I had been walking around with nine months earlier. It hurt to carry that much in books. No wonder my feet and back had hurt! It's much more useful to carry the weight around in the form of books than fat. It also suggests an interesting weight loss program: try to lose the weight of whatever book you are reading. Repeat as necessary. Or you can set your sights higher, to Larry Wall's Programming Perl (3 pound for the 3rd edition, but shorn of bad jokes and digressions it would be about 2.5 pounds), followed by the 52nd edition of the PDR (7.5 pounds), and so on. People ask me how I did it. I ate less and exercised more. This is not an innovative approach. One Saturday morning during breakfast, I remembered that I didn't really like breakfast. I'd eat, and feel nauseated. Then I'd wait for the nausea to pass, and eat some more. It occurred to me that this was kind of silly. "Breakfast is good for you!" a syrupy voice inside my head said. "Breakfast is the start of a healthy day! It's dangerous to skip breakfast!" Turns out, it's not in the least dangerous to skip breakfast. At least not for me. I only need and want two meals a day, so if I eat three, I bank the third one. Consequently, for me, breakfast is the start of an unhealthy day. Now I start the day with coffee, which aside from raising your blood pressure a little is good for you in some ways and bad for you in none. (These days, my blood pressure is fine.) I eat a small lunch when I get hungry, at a quarter to noon or so, and dinner in the evening. From this experience, I take three lessons: 1. There is a lot of variation in physiology, metabolism, and attitude. What works for one person won't work for another. Simple generalizations about diet and health are inevitably wrong for a lot of people. Skipping breakfast would be a disaster for a lot of people, but for me it's a good idea. 2. Many things are good or at least not bad in small measure, yet very bad in large measure. Food is good for you. So eat healthy: get a lot of vegetables and limit the quantity of dead animal you eat. But a lot of good food will still make you fat. The largest defect in Western philosophy is to ascribe essential qualities to things. Consequently, good food is good by virtue of its inherent, uncontaminated properties of goodness. Thus it if a little bit of good food is good, a lot of good food is better. This is simply not true. A lot of good food will ravage your cardiovascular system and eventually kill you. Good food is only good food in moderation. A philosophical outlook that does not posit inherent properties of goodness to food is more conducive to losing weight. One could, I suppose, think of all food as evil, but this is unpleasant and possibly dangerous. Food is neither good nor evil. Eating is a balance. 3. If you want to lose weight, you are going to have to be hungry once in a while. One must not regard the regular sensation of hunger as an emergency. It's OK to be hungry. There are even benefits. Food only tastes really good when you're hungry. Only when I started being hungry again did I realize how dulled I had become to the real joy of eating. When hungry, eating a well-prepared meal is ecstasy. On a full stomach, the same meal is little more than a weight in the gut and a desultory spike in blood sugar. The emptiness and slight sour taste of hunger is normal and healthy, like being tired before bed or stiff after exercise. Rejoice in hunger as part of life, and do not be too eager to bury your hunger in a mountain of food. | |
|
|
||||||||||
| copyright © 1999-2007, Erik Nilsson | ||||||||||||||
