friends, you can stop forwarding me the links to this story. i've read it.

NYT story today: Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside

Yes, I am interested in genetics. Yes, my diet has recently fallen by the wayside. Yes, I plan on getting back on the diet wagon, regardless of whatever my genes say. No, probably not today.

I might be more forlorn if I thought my problem was that I had a slower metabolism, and so my body would inch upward even when I ate a reasonable number of calories. Instead, my problem is that I seem to want to eat more food than other people--and, for that matter, almost all other large mammals--do. The appetite may well have genetic origins, but it provides more hope for intervention.

wwol: week six update

I would seem to be operating under some unusual definition of the word "week," as I have skipped around my weigh-in date for my diet from Friday to Sunday to Tuesday. All I can say is, traveling makes the details of tracking-based dieting difficult, although I have stayed reasonably consistent with the system. I'm out of Cambridge the next six days, and have little pretense of renewed diligence until I return. At least I'm down another fraction of a pound, continuing my streak of posting losses each week.

Being on this diet has definitely been good for me, and I strongly suspect I wouldn't be sticking with it even as modestly well as I am if I didn't know I was accountable to posting about my progress on this blog. So, I owe you one.

Also: Decorum prevents me from using language vivid enough to express how I feel about this:



This whole winter thing has got to end.

dispatch from los angeles

So, my flight from LA was scheduled for 7:30 this morning. I arranged for the cab to pick me up at six, and had things packed so that I could set my alarm for 5:30am and still be ready to go in time. Of course, it took me being awake packing and whatever until 2:30am so that I could have the luxury of sleeping in until 5:30am.

Instead, at 4:30am, my phone rang. I presumed somebody I loved was dead. This didn't mean I was able to rouse myself fast enough to actually answer the phone, but I did immediately check my voicemail. The message was an automated voice from Orbitz, which I had used to buy my ticket. I heard the words "flight status" and was less annoyed, as I could understand the utility of getting a notification of a flight delay even if it did come at 4:30am. However: Orbitz was calling to tell me my flight was on time.

I presume I checked some option or something about giving my updates by my cel phone, although I don't remember this and certainly didn't know the result would be my getting phone calls at 4:30am.

P.S. I'm too tired to write a separate post about this, but: For followers of my diet, we are through week five. My weigh-in was down three pounds, meaning I'm down 12 pounds overall. I will not, however, be tracking during this week's (Sunday through Thursday) travels, but I will endeavor to remain faithful to the basic plan. I'm not sure how I will count this in terms of my general ten-week committment; it will probably depend on how well I do.

wwol week four update

I am through 4 weeks of my scheduled 10 week diet, and I am down 9 pounds. In addition to eating a pound of carrots every day I am at the office, the main staples of my diet are Lean Cuisine meals and Breyers light yogurt. When I go out to eat, I restrict my attention to the salads. Coke Cherry Zero remains my loyal companion, although one should ignore rumors that our relationship is anything more than strictly platonic.

The upcoming week should be relatively easy, but then the week after that is followed by a couple of trips, which is where I teeter closest to caloric-conscious-lifestyle ruin.

Confession: While not perfect, I've done pretty well at sticking to this diet. No way I would be doing as well if not for me announcing that I was going on a diet on this blog and knowing that if I fall off the wagon I am going to have to pronounce that to whoever reads this. Another way that having a blog has improved my life.

well, that should tide me over for the next day and a half*

"[name] joined Weight Watchers Online."
"Really?"
"Yes, although I just got a text message saying, 'Man, I didn't realize a Qdoba chicken burrito was 27 points!'"
"I only get 19 points for an entire day."

* I realize what a weird phrase "tide me over" is as I type it. It is "tide", right? Not "tied" or "tyde"?

weight watchers online: week 3 update

Okay, so tracking my Weight Watchers points while traveling has proven difficult. Nonetheless, I was well-behaved the whole week, choosing to be skeptical about the text message I received from a friend on Thursday: Remember points don't count on your birthday. In any case, today was weigh-in day and I'm down a couple more pounds. When I entered my weight, the WW site suggested that I should " Get some encouragement. Drop in on the Newbies Get Acquainted message board." Me, interacting with strangers. And here I thought I was doing well and they would recommend some kind of reward. Part of the reason I chose Weight Watchers Online in the first place was that someone who had been successful with it said, "You won't have to talk to anybody you don't know."

wwol: week two report

(week two weigh-in)

Okay, so we hit a bit of a rough patch in Week Two of my diet. On Friday I ate three hot fudge sundaes and half of a cow. No. Kidding. In fact, I've done fine with the diet part and am confident that I stayed under my points for the week, but I fell off the wagon of explicit tracking while I was in NYC and traveling meant that I did not get to do my weekly weigh-in on Friday like I was supposed to. So, I've made the executive decision that Week Two for me lasted nine days instead of seven days, and Sunday is my new weekly weigh-in date instead of Friday.

As for the Week Two weigh in, I was just two-tenths of a pound below last week's weight, which didn't surprise me since I thought I didn't think I really lost more than five pounds my first week. I do feel like the elevator is going down and so feel good.

BTW, I joined Netflix so I could watch TV shows while I am on my elliptical trainer. Let me know if you have any recommendations for TV series I should put in my queue. I watched a couple seasons of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer when I was in graduate school, but otherwise haven't watched series television in well over a decade, so I'm pretty teevee terra incognita. Of course, I joined just in time for it to be warm enough that I'll probably spend most days jogging outside, and then I'll just use my iPod as it seems like it might be dangerous to hold my laptop in front of my face to watch DVDs while I jog.

wwol: week one report

Weight Watchers has used the slogan "Give us a week, we'll take off the weight." As a methodological matter, when you compare a single measure taken right before an intervention with one intervention afterwards, the estimated effect of the intervention will tend to be overstated, at least if there is any way the high earlier measure was part of what prompted the intervention in the first place. So a year with an unusually high number of drunk-driving deaths prompts a state to pass a stricter drunk driving law, which then looks like it has a larger effect than it 'really' does because part of what had led to the spike in deaths the previous year was unusually bad luck. With weight, you have day-to-day fluctuation around one's 'real' weight, and so you might expect that people start diets after weigh-ins that are bad partly due to bad random fluctuation. This would then lead to the expectation of an unusually good first weigh-in followed by tapering off, although only for those people whose diets were prompted by a dismaying turn on the scale.

Anyway, I have committed to staying on this diet for ten reasonably good weeks, which I hope and plan will be consistent with ten consecutive weeks, but if not I'm not letting myself off the hook. This week features extensive use of what I call my orange gambit, based on my observation that you rarely see a fat person who eats a pound of carrots a day. So I had a pound of carrots six of the first seven days, not even getting into the crazy consumption of rice cakes and Lean Cuisine meals. Here is my WWOL points tracker for the first week:



I don't always enter the time of the meal in the right place, so it's not like there are days when I really blew all my points in the morning. Also, if you look at the activity column, you'll notice I worked out fine the first four days and then stopped -- this corresponds to my portable DVD player breaking and thus rendering my elliptical trainer too tedious (a replacement part is on order, although I could also download an audiobook and listen to it on my iPod).

My first weigh-in was today and, consistent with the expectations above, went well:



Anyway, one week down, nine to go. I appreciate all who said they were rooting for me. The guy who commented and said he wasn't rooting for me is appreciated in his own, different, way.

cast out your mints!

This is not going to turn into a diet blog, but, in addition to those announced in the comments of my original post, I've convinced someone else to sign onto the caloric-restriction cause, with a dialogue that included:

"I've gained [#] pounds and Girl Scout Cookies just arrived. My pants don't fit comfortably anymore."
"Throw out the cookies."
"But... Thin Mint!"
"You know what I say is right. Thin Mints are ephemeral joys, comfortable fitting pants a lasting pleasure."

She later sent me an e-mail titled "Fat Mints" that included:

I am on my way now to give all of the girl scout cookies away. I am embarrassed to admit how many boxes there are, but it will suffice to say that I have more than I can reasonably give to one person.

The spouse and I discussed my weakness for these particular types of cookies this morning on the way to the gym, and I think that perhaps there is a reason beyond my sweet tooth. When I was 9, I sold 750 boxes of them and I got to go to horse camp for free that summer. It was awesome - not just horse camp, but the little girl scout cookie business that my dad and I had going on. Happy memories.

Thus, when I see one of those order forms, I see my dad sitting in his blue mini-truck at the curb waiting for me to come back from knocking on the door and peddling the cookies. I see the living room packed from floor to ceiling with cookies. What I forget about that is that we were selling the cookies to others, not eating all 750 boxes ourselves.

It's interesting to think about how the Girl Scouts profit so much from the unhealthy eating habits of our nation. I wonder if they had started out selling Girl Scout Cigarettes and that had become the organization's dominant revenue source, how long the program would have kept going and what kind of rationalizations would have been used to defend it.

Anyway, now I need to get some people to enter into a writing pact with me as well. The last month of traveling and other distractions has been bad for all kinds of habits.

wwol, day 2

I will admit that I am not exactly feeling like a swollen reservoir of dietary willpower here, so I am hoping that the public accountability of the blog and concomitant prospect of broadly-known humiliation if I fail will help keep me on the straight and abstinarrow.

declaration of apogee

(my personal wwol screen)

So, longtime readers of this blog know that, between May and October 2005, I lost around 45 pounds with Weight Watchers Online. This reversed the Great Weight Gain of 2003, in which I put on weight at a rate equivalent to scotch-taping a Twix bar to my body every day for nine months. Anyway, prone to bad habits as I can be, especially when I am doing a lot of travelling and feeling generally harried, I have lately been creeping back up again. Not at the 2003 pace, fortunately, but in all, I have gained 15 of the pounds I lost back. So things are happily not where they were before, when I would be regularly mistaken for the unfortunate detritus of a human-narwhal breeding experiment, but still the elevator is moving in a direction I don't want to go.

Today, harnessing the might of my credit card and this blog as devices of committment, I have rejoined with the goal of losing 15 pounds. I will be providing updates here. You should root for me.