State of the Potato

September 12th, 2020 by Potato

I’m not sure if I have any readers any more, with months elapsing between posts.

So before throwing up a few posts, perhaps a personal catch-up on where I’ve been.

As you may remember, my dad’s cancer came back last summer. He passed away at the end of May, and my siblings and I are the executors of the estate (though I’ve been taking the lead).

So it’s basically just the worst year ever. Estate administration sucks — there’s a fair bit of bureaucracy to wade through, and it’s simultaneously incredibly emotionally draining. There always seem to be new surprising challenges and things to deal with, so I can’t even say how close I am to being done with everything. Oh, and there’s covid, and there’s been no school for Blueberry since March.

There were also a lot of whip-saws this year. Dad’s health was really bad around Christmas, and we started to talk about death and get sad and stuff. But then we found out he had a weird, super-severe magnesium deficiency. Whatever was happening in his gut wouldn’t let him absorb enough to fix it even with max supplementation, but we were able to arrange for in-home IV infusions after the first few visits to the hospitals. Once those Mg levels came back up, he was up and feeling great. He visited the cottage again — all on his own! He was going to give me a new car, and pay for Blueberry and I to take a little Disney vacation, ’cause he didn’t need us to hang around the city and take care of him. Then covid hit and the market crashed and he wasn’t feeling good (and there wasn’t travel any way) and all that is off the table. His health and mood spiraled down again, and it was just generally terrible.

We had a year to prepare and get ready and I saw it somewhere else and it’s stuck with me — you can be prepared, but you can never be ready.

I’ve also had a whip-saw on my own health and diet progress. I was back to my target weight in the winter, and doing great at curling. Our team won our division in the centennial bonspiel! Our Mixed Doubles team made it to the A division, and we technically beat the provincial champions! (and by that deliberate “technically” you know that they defaulted but nonetheless we’re literally in the same league as the provincial champions even if we’re at the bottom of that league) I was making plans to keep up the positive momentum through the summer (“plans” in this case consisting of scrawling “sign up for tennis” on my whiteboard, but that counts!). Then covid hit and everything shut down. Spring was super-delayed, and it wasn’t nice weather to go for a walk (not that I had anywhere to go), and of course dad’s progress and death. So emotional eating was back on the table. And I gained the full “quarantine 15”. I’ve been out every day in August for a walk or bike ride (or done an indoor workout) but I’m still just flattening the curve as I’ve had more trouble getting a handle on the input side of the equation.

I had so many plans for this year. I didn’t think taking care of dad would take every moment of the day — most days I left him in time to pick Blueberry up from school (when there was school), and even on days when I stayed later he was often out of energy and in bed before 7. I thought I’d get so much done while I was off work: I had 3 book ideas kicking around, and all my websites are in need of some facelifts and functionality updates. Instead I’m over here barely coping with daily existence. I couldn’t even get my brain in gear to write a blog post or hell, even play a challenging video game. I’ve had a number of FTL runs and played some MOO2 and StarCraft: Brood War, but nothing new (even though I have some unplayed games in my Steam library just waiting for a quarantine). I have 64 un-answered emails in my inbox (if you’re waiting on a response, it’s probably because I couldn’t get into the head space to write one, and then fell into the guilt spiral of responding to a week/month/3-month-old email).

But now I think I’m doing a bit better, I am getting a post up, and I feel like I’m on the upswing from the depths of grief and depression at least.

Curling Headgear Update

January 24th, 2020 by Potato

After almost two full seasons with my protective headgear for curling, I thought I’d provide a quick update.

Firstly, there have been too many falls and close calls at our club, which reinforces the idea that it’s worth putting something on your head. One of my leads fell in practice, got a concussion, and has to sit out for several weeks (he’s still out of the game as I write this). Just last week, another experienced player fell in a game and paramedics were called (though it looked like she might have hit her head on the ice at the time of the fall, thankfully it was “frame damage” with a sore tailbone being the main complaint).

More and more people out there are wearing something on their heads, whether it’s a bike helmet, curling helmet, or hat with protective elements (and I know I’ve managed to convince at least a handful of curlers to buy a Crasche or Ice Halo). I think we’re moving from the “early adopter” phase to the “mass adoption” phase — it’s no longer remotely strange to choose to wear something protective while you play, and I’d estimate that 20% or more of the adult curlers (and essentially all the kids) at our club are now sporting protection. While I don’t have appreciable hair myself, I am told that it’s exciting that Ice Halo now offers a hat with a ponytail hole.

I’m still wearing all my options in various rotations. It didn’t take long to get over myself and wear the headband-style ones without feeling any sense of fashion awkwardness. Indeed, the Ice Halo HD is the one I most commonly wear, particularly when I play mixed doubles (where I feel I have the greatest chance of a slip as I jump up after throwing to sweep). I also exclusively wear it when I volunteer with the Little Rocks, in that case I want my head protection to be obvious and not hidden within a hat so that I can be a good role model for the kids. Blueberry for her part wears a hockey helmet to Little Rocks.

I’ve found that the Ice Halo HD band has really settled in — I can position it nicely so it doesn’t interfere with my glasses, and the elastic has stretched out a touch so it’s more comfortable and sits in the right spot (without being loose — I’m not afraid it will fall off my head when I really need it). After a month or two (~6-8 games with it?) I no longer had to keep adjusting it from getting too tight.

When I skip in 4-person curling, I tend to go with one of my hat options. I like the Crasche Curler touque because it’s a little warmer and I get cold when I’m just holding the broom, and go for it a bit more than half the time. Unfortunately, while I’ve gotten used to it and figured out how to position it a bit better, it does still catch the arms of my glasses a few times per game, and sometimes will creep up out of position. I only tried it once with only the rear set of pads, and didn’t think it helped much, so I’ve still been using it as delivered. The Ice Halo ball cap is quite comfortable now (though I sometimes still get a mark on my forehead from the snugness, I don’t feel any discomfort when wearing it), and great when I think I don’t want to be warm, as it breathes better than the Crasche. I tend to go for the ballcap or Ice Halo HD when I play a position that involves sweeping on 4-person curling.

When I go to spiels (i.e., play multiple games in a day), I take two of my options with me, because if I get a little sweaty it’s good to have the option to rotate out and let one dry between games.

Never Weight — Q3-19 Update

October 1st, 2019 by Potato

Another quarter where I put back on ~3 lbs. The actual experience was even more up-and-down: I spent a lot of time visiting hospitals and stressed so even holding the line was hard. I went on to vacation to PEI, and decided not to worry or track, and managed to pack on almost 4 lbs in 2 weeks on my ice cream diet. Then started getting back on track for a week or two, only to be hit with a big deadline and a week of late nights and a few all-nighters, and put 2 lbs back on again, then started losing again. So crept up a tiny bit slowly, shot up 6 lbs, then lost ~4. So I did the opposite of my goal from last quarter.

I also discovered a really dumb source of the creep part of that phase: I was aiming for balance rather than a deficit. I was sticking to my habit of chewing gum as a replacement for my habit of snacking, but not paying attention to the gum. There was a big sale on Juicy Fruit, so I stocked up. Like, 80 packs over 4 trips to the store stocked up. Aaaand as it turns out, Juicy Fruit is not a sugar-free gum. I was getting ~150-200 calories/day from my gum chewing, which works out to be about the unexplained creep I was finding.

Just a few weeks ago, FitBit decided they didn’t want my business and blew up their app. It started crashing, and taking minutes to log food, if it even would. I had to reset my phone multiple times per day, and they were releasing a new bugfix version every day that just wouldn’t solve the issue — and added a big battery drain and a lost connection to my tracker to boot. Despite many direct bug reports, and many people in various forums complaining about how the latest version was just plain broken, FitBit never seemed to think to just roll the app back until they could fix whatever they were trying to do in the new version. I found instructions online for how to roll back to a previous version (IIRC 5.3 seemed stable if you’re having the same issues), but rather than mess around with that, I ended up switching to Samsung Health.

It has the same core functionality, with a few pros and cons over FitBit. It’s fast and responsive — FitBit was never that fast to search, and often had a bug where it would revert whatever you put in for servings 3 or 4 times before finally taking it. However, Samsung is very inflexible about how you tell it how much you’re eating: servings or bust. FitBit made it really easy to measure your intake: cups or grams, servings or slices or fractions of a whole cake/pizza with a little drop-down. Samsung also puts your calories burned in a separate screen from your calories consumed, making it a bit hard to see how you’re doing on your budget — I really liked how FitBit had them on one screen, with your desired deficit goal included so you could see right away if you on track for the day or not (and with the past week’s data right there too, not another screen away).

My Dad got me an early birthday present in the form of a Samsung smart watch (Active 2 40mm if you’re curious) to replace my FitBit for activity tracking. I like it, though for such a fancy piece of kit it’s kind of ridiculous to me that you can’t customize some things (or they’re too hard for me to figure out). There’s a huge variety of watch faces, and you can choose a variety of data points to display (from heart rate and steps to weather, other time zones, or alerts from apps) in various places in the watch face. You can fine-tune the colours and the background. But I can’t choose 12 or 24-hour clocks, or whether to hide the leading 0 for single-digit hours. The 12/24hr thing might be secretly linked to how the host phone displays time, but the leading 0 definitely isn’t. And I can’t choose to make the font size of the seconds smaller than the hours:minutes unless that happens to be designed into a particular clock face.

Anyway, fall is here, which will bring with it leaf-raking, curling, and only two more weeks of grant season, so I know this next quarter is going to go better!

Of course, fall also brings Thanksgiving. And Birthday. Hamerican Thanskgiving. Potatomas.

Halloween.

November Halloween candy sales.

And I have a house full of Girl Guide cookies that I really hope my little marketing whiz will sell to someone who is not me. But until then, there they are…

Gulp. I should probably up the motivation with some kind of commitment mechanism. Let me sleep on that.

The Big C 2: Revenge of the C

August 1st, 2019 by Potato

Almost exactly a year later, we found out my dad’s cancer was back. He’s been really sick for months now, off and on in pain and throwing up, in and out of emerg and being admitted to the hospital several times over (in large part because of dehydration from the not eating and throwing up, and trying to solve the root cause of that problem). He’s still in there as I write this, though now he’s had a surgery to solve the intestinal blockage and I think at this point no one close to him is going to find out via the blog that he’s sick.

The prognosis with recurrent metastatic cancer is, well… it’s not good.

So let’s talk about something else. One of the issues of being admitted to the hospital is that it’s so hard to sleep. I got my dad a noise maker/white noise gizmo, one that’s made to hook onto a stroller for a baby, but works just as well on a hospital bed. And that little bit of steady noise helps him so much with sleeping through the constant noise of a hospital ward.

I had decided that this was a simple, inexpensive thing that could make people’s lives just a tiny bit better, so I should just do a side business things and find a way to get white noise gizmos in all the hospitals/patients’ hands — either by finding a way to sell them to the hospitals, which may involve building a modified version that’s easy to sterilize, has an IV pole clamp, etc., or by convincing the gift shops to start stocking them so patients/families can pick one up while they’re there. I also had the idea of recording the sound of a curling stone rolling across the pebble to add to the more common wave/wind/static noise choices. Anyway, a page of doodling half-thought-out business plan and it was starting to sound not so crazy. But then I went to get an affiliate link from Amazon for that link above, and realized there are a tonne of consumer-grade ones available already. So I will just leave it at the suggestion that if you or a loved one are going to spend some time in a hospital bed, add a noise generator to your list of stuff to get (which may include expecting mothers who have more foresight on a potential hospital stay).

I’m also glad to have a healthy emergency fund. I’ve easily passed $300 in hospital parking bills now, and may hit $400 before dad’s back home (and yes I’ve tried to take the bus a few times — hospital parking’s just expensive). It helps support the hospital and the lots are nearly full anyway, so it makes sense that it’s so expensive, I guess — I’m not really trying to complain too much about that, but still acknowledge that it can be a big, unexpected expense and there is a reason for that savings account full of money in case big, unexpected expenses come up.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I have reasons for not blogging.

Never Weight: A Year of Success (or a Tale of Water and Sadness)

July 5th, 2019 by Potato

My first few “never weight” updates were not very successful. It was this time last year when I finally buckled down and started to get successful. Now down ~40 lbs, I was talking about my success today and figured it would be worth a blog post about how I made it work. I’m not about to go write a self-help book, and I’m far from the fittest, healthiest guy, but I did make some progress and hopefully some of the things that helped me will be translatable.

First, the basics: eat less, move more. Move more, eat less. Calories out > calories in.

It is just that simple. But simple is not the same as easy. And it is not easy. I tried many times over many years to kind of half-ass my way to better health and never managed to lose more than 10 lbs or stick to it for longer than two seasons. It’s hard to create new habits, and to break old pathways that have had a lifetime of reinforcement in your cerebellum and autonomic nervous systems.

So it’s ok to acknowledge that it’s hard. It will be hard, and it’s hardest at the beginning.

There are lots of ways to try to approach eat less, move more, specialized diets and approaches, and I find a lot are over-hyped. They can help in various ways, but at the end of the day there may be mumbo-jumbo about insulin control or protein metabolism or whatever that they focus on when really they’re mechanisms to enable calories out > calories in.

For me, I needed a “Holy Shit” moment. I actually had a few: the first when I hit my “never weight” in the first place and decided that I needed to re-prioritize my life and stop sacrificing health at the altar of blogging/work/etc. That was near the end of 2016, so it became a new year’s resolution. But while I made some improvements – I started tracking steps to move more, tried swapping candy for almonds & cereal at my desk, I just didn’t make great progress. The second “holy shit moment” came last summer – I had put in a commitment mechanism and still failed. My cholesterol test came in higher than is healthy. My dad got cancer. A clever SMBC comic made me realize I can’t really take short-cuts. I finally started doing the things I knew I had to be doing all along.

On to my tips and reflections:

Most important: tracking what you eat (and your exercise).

Gif from Scott Pilgrim vs the World

Yes, it’s hard to nail the landing with that one. It takes time, it’s a pain to do, etc. I found FitBit really helpful (but other apps work similarly, e.g. MyFitnessPal):

  • It’s on my phone, and my phone is nearly always near me when I’m eating.
  • It tracks my exercise and gives me a budget, so I get instant feedback/permission (unlike tracking on paper) – I can pretend it’s a magic 8-ball and say “hey FitBit, can I eat this?” and it would say “yes, but then all you’ll get for dinner is water and sadness” and I could make a more informed decision, instantly.
  • I had a hard-and-fast rule that I had a 2000 calorie line of credit – enough that sometimes if I wanted a heavier lunch and lighter dinner I could have a bit of flexibility to make it work, but mostly I only ate what FitBit said I could. Cash only, no credit. If I wanted any more than that, I had to earn it through exercise first (and some days I did earn over 2500 calories, but I did the curling/biking/stairs first).
  • The app made tracking easy because I could save foods I eat often, and it had a database of many common foods (so instead of having to calculate every time, I could just type in “french fries, large” and get a decent estimate (and sometimes even the details for the exact brand of food I was eating).
  • It provides a simple colour-coded bar chart of energy out and energy in, and all I have to do for success is keep the bars green or teal.

I got cute about checking it. If a coworker brought timbits back from a meeting, I’d pull out my phone, open it up and go “thanks, but FitBit says no.”

Another important point was to keep in mind that people are bad at estimating. I started eating a lot of single-serve packs of things (esp. almonds) so I’d know how much was in there. I started using my food scale, and everything was put on a plate or in a bowl so I could be consistent in how much I took and keep my estimates close (and I started using the tiny baby plates and bowls to make things look like bigger portions). No eating right out of a bag. After doing it a few times I got decent at estimating how much I poured into a bowl, and would stop using the scale every time – but I still go back every month or so and check myself so I don’t get portion creep.

Break habits – break eating – bright-line rules

There’s a lot of automaticity in our daily lives, especially when it comes to eating (unconscious eating). That has to be fixed, along with emotional eating. In part, I had to break eating to stop the old habits.

Looking back, a reader (hi Joe!) had told it to me straight up in the comments section back in 2017, but I had to learn it the hard way: a drastic change can work better than trying to be incrementalist about it. Kind of like the spending bans for the debt bloggers.

So I had to break how I ate to make it more mindful. Part of that was through checking with FitBit before I ate anything. Whenever I was eating at my desk or the couch (not so much an issue at home at the kitchen table at meal time) I would ask “do I want to eat this because I’m hungry, or because I’m bored/stressed/nibbly/etc.?” If I was just wanting to move my mouth for non-hunger reasons, I’d chew some sugar-free gum. If I was actually hungry, I could then check FitBit for a meal/snack. Or (particularly the first two weeks), I’d text a friend and whine (thanks Netbug!).

I also had to pause now and then to see if I wanted to eat more. I got a lot of small 50-200 calorie portions of stuff, like single-serve packs of almonds, Welches fruit snack candies, protein bars, etc. And opening each one gave me a point to stop and reflect: did I want this? Was I actually still hungry? Would the second (or third) portion really do anything for me that the first or second hadn’t? Maybe even if I still felt hungry I could wait a half hour before the next serving? I also started doing something that sounds totally crazy but kind of works: if I want to eat for emotional reasons, I get up from my desk and go down and back up a flight of stairs. It adds activity and takes my mind off food (I did not believe people who said more exercise somehow makes you less hungry, and it still seems crazy).

At first I needed a few hard-and-fast rules: no candy, no doughnuts (not even timbits), no chips.

Bread makes you fat. Bread makes you fat?

Then I gradually re-introduced treats in more appropriate proportions and frequencies and (so far) have been mostly successful with keeping things much more balanced. But particularly when trying to break old habits, I found it handy to have rigidly defined black-and-white areas (and it was only once I had tracking with an app to lean on as my hard-and-fast way to control snacking that I could be trusted with snacks).

Another thing I used was a weak form of intermittent fasting: for 11-12 hrs every day, there was no eating. No breakfast before 11am, no snacking after midnight. I was a mogwai, and I didn’t want to turn into a gremlin. Yes, I found a way (more than once) to use that analogy out loud. I found a lot of over-hyping on intermittent fasting out on the web, but it is helpful, and it can make it a lot easier to be hungry (my body quickly got used to the idea of no breakfast – I was already prone to skipping it), and make it easier to make the calories out > calories in thing work. Plus it was a simple, bright-line, hard-and-fast rule that eliminated late-night snacking, which was one of my weaknesses.

Priorities, permission, and mindfulness

Life is full of conflicting priorities, and it’s very hard to optimize everything at once. So one important change in mindset was giving myself permission to make my health more of a priority. I increased our grocery bill buying my almonds in single-serve packs (roughly 4X the price-per-weight of buying a big jar, but the fancy ones are tastier & more satisfying, while being more amenable to mindful eating), and a bunch of other similar moves. I buy a lot more single-serve/treat size/etc. things and don’t just buy the best value or things in bulk. I can’t optimize the budget/retirement savings at the same time as my health.

I also try to focus on what I’m eating and enjoy it (though I am still definitely a wolfer). I recognize that ice cream is delicious, but a double scoop is not twice as delicious/satisfying as a kiddie cone. I gave myself permission to eat half of something and throw the rest away if it’s not worth the calories.

I also (mostly) found the time and budget to curl more (though I need to put myself into more summer exercise commitments – for now I’m trying to take the stairs up to my 5th floor office at least once a day).

Buddy/mentor system

Particularly the first two weeks, I was bugging friends a lot (mostly Netbug). I whined and complained and vented. The world was unfair – for years I had considered a 10-pack of timbits to be a nice mid-afternoon snack, and now was being told it was more than most of my meals. Subway was pulling a bait-and-switch with it’s large-print calorie counts – no one is ordering a veggie sandwich sans cheese and dressing, and adding those nearly doubled the calories of the final product. I wanted to eat but I wasn’t hungry and it wasn’t faaaaaaaair and is being fat so bad, really?

And I wasn’t legitimately hungry through most of it – I was just upset that I couldn’t have all the yummy things, and needed to vent those feelings. I think having someone who’s either going through it with you, or who has been there can be helpful.

Commitment mechanism

My initial commitment mechanism failed, but I still think it was a helpful approach to keep me on-mission.

The bathroom scale is a dirty, dirty liar; trust the process

I recognized that there’s a lot of noise in daily weight measurements. I mostly only weighed and tracked myself weekly, and the trendline in FitBit was pretty good at that resolution. I only reported here quarterly. Your weight can fluctuate by several pounds day-to-day, especially if you’re at all inconsistent about what you’re wearing when you do it or the time of day you do it.

My suggestion based on what I did is to not weigh yourself that often – just like with checking your stock portfolio too often, you’re more likely to be happy if you only check when there’s a decent chance of the signal outshining the noise. So biweekly/monthly, maybe as often as weekly.

However, I was listening to a podcast from Dan Ariely and he suggested a way to redesign the bathroom scale to send a number to an app that just shows you your smoothed trend, but not any day’s (noisy) result. And the point he was making is that stepping on the scale every morning is a good reinforcing behaviour – you can step on there and say (out loud or implicitly) that your weight and your health is important to you so you’re going to live today in a way that reflects that. But that can be sabotaged by seeing your weight randomly fluctuate up despite being good the day before.

Rather than get a fancy technology scale (that might not even exist on the market yet), my suggestion is to tape over the display with a helpful message. I suggest “TRUST THE PROCESS”. Step on it every day, say your affirmation, look at the message that you should trust the process. Then once or twice a month peel the tape off and check your progress.

Good luck!

Hopefully some big-bang behaviour changes and bunch of hacks will help you. I’m far from a guru, and failed a lot on the way, and it’s only been a year of being successful (and I’m still struggling to stick that landing). But I thought it was a good exercise to stop and reflect on what worked for me. (and no, there have not been more than a few “nights of water and sadness” but I like the quip :)

Scott Pilgrim has earned the power of self respect