Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Health & Nutrition

  • Robert Ebert on AA

    Roger Ebert writes a long memoir about being an AA member:

    In those days I was on a 10 p.m. newscast on one of the local stations. The anchor was an A.A. member. So was one of the reporters. After we got off work, we went to the 11 p.m. meeting at the Mustard Seed. There were maybe a dozen others. The chairperson asked if anyone was attending their first meeting. A guy said, "I am. But I should be in a psych ward. I was just watching the news, and right now I’m hallucinating that three of those people are in this room."

  • Note to a seriously obese woman

    A 530 pound  woman complains about being treated like a social pariah:

    It’s not just the super-obese like me who have to take this punishment: There are people out there who are literally no more than twenty or thirty pounds overweight, yet they have to put up much of the same crap that I do.

    There’s nothing Satanic about cake and pie. There’s nothing Hitleresque about a roll of fat. I wish fat-bashers would think about this, and stop being so damn malevolent. But they don’t, because the bigots have ruled the day and the masses of ordinary Joes and Janes go along with them. That’s the way it will continue to be, until we can get our voice into the public’s ear. I have high hopes that that is beginning to happen now, and that it will gain traction in the years to come.

    I responded:

    Teresa, that was an interesting comment (and a little sad). Thank you for sharing.

    On the one hand you said you are comfortable with the medical consequences of being obese. On the other hand, you disapprove of the social consequences and the bigotry. At some point, the two things have to converge; I’m not talking about public ridicule; I’m talking about lifestyle differences and having to accommodate people of different sizes. Inevitably the need to make these accommodations  will stir resentment. It’s a worthy goal to want every individual to be full participants in  society, and I fear that at your weight, it will be  hard.

    I think most people are motivated not out of a desire to castigate obese people, but to make it easier to keep a moderate weight. In my city (Houston), everyone drives. Walking is rarely possible. Simple principles of urban design can increase exercise and make fast food less easily available.

    Teresa, I’m glad you are comfortable with yourself, and I suspect that your size may be the result of more than mere gluttony. From your standpoint, the difference between 400 and 500 pounds may seem insignificant, but please get some help! You are still young. It is still relatively easy to change habits and prevent long term health effects.

    Seriously, everybody reading this article is rooting for you!

  • Sustainable Seafood: Eat More Sardines!

    Jim Carrier writes a long piece on the shrimping industry:

    The industry acknowledges that 5 percent of the world’s mangroves, hundreds of thousands of acres, have been destroyed creating shrimp ponds. In some estuaries 80 percent of the mangroves are gone. A commons was privatized, ruining artisanal fishing and driving indigenous fishermen to work raising shrimp. By removing the thick coastal barrier of trees, shrimp farms have undoubtedly aggravated damage from hurricanes and tsunamis. And salt intrusion has sterilized once-fertile estuaries.

    Even in the best-run farms, two to four pounds of sea life is caught and ground up as feed for every pound of shrimp raised. Mortality rates of 30 percent are common. The dead shrimp, shrimp excrement, and chemical additives are often flushed into coastal waters.

    More about efforts to improve the system:

    The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for imported food safety, samples less than 1 percent of the 1 billion pounds, a “sorry” record, according to U.S. Representative John Dingell, who in 2007 chaired food safety hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mindful of consumer fears fanned by poisoned seafood arriving from China, the Global Aquaculture Alliance—an industry group underwritten by Wal-Mart, Red Lobster, and multinational seafood importers—has written standards that, if enforced, could produce clean, safe shrimp without damaging people or the environment. But that will take years, admitted GAA president George Chamberlain. Only 45 shrimp farms are certified by the alliance—out of more than 100,000 worldwide.

    This came from a NYT discussion about sustainable seafood development .

    Here’s a downloadable pocket guide about which seafood to try and avoid. Summary: avoid imported fish and seafood, avoid most tuna, sardines and lobster are ok (in general, US raised fish is more sustainable), Here’s a set of sustainable alternatives to popular seafood. Here’s a table summarizing the findings.  Maritime Stewardship Council has another database.

    As a general observation, I am beginning to conclude that consumers have a hard time processing all this information. It is far easier just to go to a supermarket with minimum standards. Whole Foods is basically the flagship store for these kinds of standards. My attitude has always been, “gosh, if only I could afford their pricey products!” (especially at a time when I am out of work). We are receiving lots of conflicting messages. Medical articles say, “eat more fish” and “sustainable seafood” is at least 2x the cost of imported seafood. So instead of compromising on our dietary choices, we compromise on our ethnical values with regard to production. I’m not justifying, merely trying to explain.

    A few years ago I learned that there were massive US tariffs on imported shrimp. I was outraged. Why shouldn’t we have the right to eat cheap and large  Indonesian shrimp? Nowadays, though, the current account deficit is a sign our economy is tanking. I never thought I would be so buy-American, but I admit that I spend a lot of time searching for an American (or Irish) alternative rather than a foreign brand.  (Remember: I have dual Irish citizenship). The competitive advantage our domestic agri-industry seems to have is better harvesting/growing methods. I realize that this statement is outrageous. Chicken and beef, for instance, are notoriously bad examples of industries which are dangerous and unsustainable. But if we wanted to, American beef/chicken growers could improve their standards in no time at all..provided they could be sure that Americans would buy American.

    I doubt that consumers can keep all this information in their heads about particular brands and types of food. Who really can remember all the certifications (and how to distinguish them from the meaningless  certification labels corporations affix to their products ). Even farmer’s markets –considered the holy grail  of local food enthusiasts  –is inconvenient for many and requires a certain level of consumer sophistication. The answer is not educating consumers but having retail outlets that  set better minimum standards. For example, Whole Foods sets a certain standard, and Walmart sets a certain standard. I go to HEB, but I really don’t know what that “means” in terms of food quality.

    I don’t buy too much gourmet food – I can’t afford it – but I try to avoid processed foods and things which are more natural (whatever that means). But supermarkets don’t market themselves in terms of food quality; they market themselves in terms of price and customer service. Hell, I’d sit through Walmart’s crappy lines if I knew their organic food was cheap and high quality.

    I talked with a man yesterday who was writing a book about a Houston nonprofit education group he works on dedicated to educating children about food and nutrition. It’s a great organization (and this man was a real foodie). He was compiling a set of photos about all the food he has been eating for the last year. It’s a fascinating project until I realize that I eat the same food day after day after day! For a while, I was a foodie and liked preparing foods I am not really complaining. After all, this strict boring diet has helped me to lose 20 pounds. Maybe when you cook for a family you can splurge or think about food as an event. For me, food is something that provides energy and messes up my kitchen.  If I become a RAW food enthusiast, it is not because of deeply held beliefs but laziness.  (Don’t get me wrong; I love trying new foods; I just don’t love preparing them).

    Here’s a tip about eating canned fish. Always buy canned fish packed in water –not packed in oil. A Whole Foods page explains:

    Choose water-packed tuna rather than oil-packed. The added oil used in canning mixes with some of the tuna’s natural fat. When you drain oil-packed tuna, some of its omega 3 fatty acids also go down the drain. Since oil and water don’t mix, water-packed tuna won’t leach any of its precious omega-3s.

    (I originally found this tip from Anne M. Fletcher’s Eat Fish Live Better).

  • Fat Robert, Meet Skinnier Robert (How I lost 20 pounds in 6 months)

    On June 13, 2008 I weighed myself and was totally shocked. I weighed 220 pounds!  I had gained a lot of weight, most of it over the past year.

    fatrobertsmall Fat Robert, 2007

    Skinnier Robert, 2008 Skinnier Robert, Oct 2008

    When I was in college I weighed about 170 pounds, and when I went to Peace Corps I weighed about 195. During Peace Corps I kept the weight down (despite the junk food I ate, the fact I was walking everywhere kept me from gaining weight). At my last month in Albania I stayed cooped up in the capitol city (waiting for the political situation to improve), and when I took a physical at the end of service, my weight was 202, which also shocked me.

    After that point (in 1997), I kept an eye out on my weight. Between 1998 and 2001-2, I fluctuated between 202 and 210 pounds, usually around 206-7. I remember having lots of difficulty losing any weight, so I concluded that my weight had reached an equilibrium (and I stopped weighing myself, except for once every few months). As long as I was staying healthy and eating healthy, I did not worry my brain too much about it.

    In June 2008 I was researching sleep apnea (I have weird sleeping patterns and wondered if sleep apnea were the cause). The research depressed me; it seemed like a long complicated illness; just the diagnostic tests would cost a lot of money. Then I read that a strong risk factor for sleep apnea was being overweight.  The consensus in the  user forums was that reducing weight would significantly help, or at least make clear whether it was the primary cause behind the sleep problems.

    On June 13 when I saw 220 pounds, it was a shock to the system. I recognize that BMI was an imperfect gauge of health, but my BMI stood at 29.8, fractions away from obesity. I knew I had gained a few pounds, but obesity…I just couldn’t square that data with my image of myself. I was not a fat person and never would be. I had been overlooking the spare tire I was carrying and had dismissed it by saying, I could lose it, it was seasonal fat, etc. And in fact, during summers I swam a lot, so I was still in relatively good health. But  I was at a vulnerable age where middle age health problems start to appear. Also, I was still at the age where I could change personal habits. I couldn’t predict whether I’d still be able to do this 5 years from now.   Being practically obese meant higher risks of heart disease, sleep disorders, impotence, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. It was a very scary realization; I had been deluding myself; I had blamed this on shot-term factors in my personal life, but this pointed to a longer term problem. Just coasting along with moderately healthy habits was not enough.

    Here are the things I blamed: living in Houston, the fact I was taking care of a sick parent, the fact I have a high tech job, the fact that I am a writer (and have little free time), the fact that my bicycle sucks, the fact I had to rely on “quick food” at fast food restaurants when short of time, the fact my mom keeps a lot of junk food in her house, the fact that my job provides free snacks. Actually all of these things were contributing causes. But they were not primary causes.

    So I came up with a goal, a timeline and a plan. The goal would be 200 pounds by January 1, 2009. The plan was to keep a webpage devoted to my daily weighings, and in addition to changing my diet and lifestyle, I would need to have a plan for sustaining it past January. I made this webpage my home page on both my home and work computer, and the daily weigh-in was a ritual I tried to do. I know it sounds like a bother, but if weighing myself daily ensured that these 20 pounds were gone forever, that was a small price for me to pay. Here are some lifestyle changes I made:

    1. I totally stopped on fast food except  very rare occasions. (I was already 75% there).
    2. I carefully monitored my intake of chocolate (a comfort food for me).
    3. I totally restricted my free samples at supermarkets (sometimes you can really fill up on those things).
    4. I totally eliminated frozen dinners from my diet, including frozen pizza. (This was very hard, because frozen dinners saved me a lot of time).
    5. I bought individual frozen portions of raw fish, which I used for quick meals. (Microwaved fish is really easy to fix, and doesn’t taste that awful). One advantage of these individual frozen portions is that I know exactly the portion size.
    6. I vowed to do exercise videos more regularly (I  improved on that, although not as much as I had hoped).
    7. I totally refrained from eating nachos at restaurants (it was hard to keep track of what I was eating).
    8. I tried to make do on exactly one carbohydrate snack per day (later on, I refrained from doing that, although I’m not sure I can keep it up).
    9. I started eating lots of frozen blueberries. (I eat them in a bowl. Because they are high in fiber, they decrease appetite. They also taste sweet and are a guilt-free snack).
    10. I continued my habit of eating 8 almonds a day.
    11. I vowed to seek out activities involving walking or physical activity (not really successful at that).
    12. I vowed more self-control on the holiday splurges (I was only partially successful at that).
    13. I vowed to follow Michael Pollan’s advice to eat only food with ingredients my grandmother would recognize (and with no more than 5 ingredients I did not recognize). That meant substituting shredded wheat cereal with oatmeal.  I drastically decreased my intake of bread. One treat for me was fresh baked bread at HEB. But when I looked at the ingredients I saw that it was laced with hydrogenated fat and other hard-to-identify ingredients. I couldn’t believe it. How hard is it to get a decent loaf of bread these days?
    14. I’ve started making breakfast the most important meal of the day, with light lunches and modest dinners. (Note: my work schedule is more flexible than most people’s. If I have to rush off to work during rush hour, I doubt I could continue this wonderful habit).  Ironically I prepare fewer home cooked meals because I worry about my ability to keep portion sizes down.
    15. I was willing to pay more for health (such as better bread, healthy snacks like blueberries and exercise videos) because I knew these expenditures would pay off in the long run. Sometimes, if you eat higher quality food, you eat less of it. (This is not always true).

    It was not easy to implement these steps or lose weight.  But after a while I got used to that “decelerating feeling” where my body was downsizing itself. It was mildly uncomfortable, but once you realize what’s happening, you have to resist the tendency to compensate. Once I reached 210, I was ecstatic; I vowed to move on and prepare myself for my European vacation (whose effect on my weight was not yet known). As it happens, my Europe trip had an enormously beneficial (but  short-lived) effect on my weight. I lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks, but within weeks I had gained most of it again. But it reminded me what it was like to be under 200 pounds again. It felt great!

    How does life at 200 pounds differ from 220 pounds? I feel less lethargic than before, more in control of myself, a little more self-confident, a little more wary of the American tendency to overeat. I feel a little healthier (not a lot), and I certainly sleep a lot better (that was my main reason for starting this strange campaign in the first place).

    This week because I am trying to compensate for the Christmas weight gain, I’ve been trying to lose weight rapidly, which is generally not a good idea. If you work hard, you can lose 2 or 3 pounds a week (at least in the initial stages). But this rapid weight loss is hard to sustain, and eventually you resume normal diet patterns.

    It’s easy to gain 5 pounds within 2 weeks as well, so when I’m now at 200, I really think of my current weight as 205 (my absolute ceiling). In fact, I won’t think I’ve truly gotten to 200 until I’ve settled at 197 or 198 for several weeks.  My next goal is to reach 190 by July 1, 2009. I think that is attainable and desirable, but if I don’t reach it, I won’t feel that bad. I’ve passed the main obstacle; everything past this is a smaller obstacle.

    In November I bought a pedometer and learned a lot of things about my walking. A healthy person is expected to walk about 6000 steps daily, with the ideal being 10,000. When I recorded my daily steps, I was shocked to find that on some of my days at work I would walk only 3000-3200 steps.  It’s true that I would do exercise videos in the morning, but it made clear to me that without this video workout,  the “normal Houston lifestyle” would be deadly. Unfortunately I had no solution to the  problem – at least one that didn’t take away more of my already scarce free time. I will be obtaining a dog in the next day or two, and I expect that doing that  will easily increase my daily steps to 5000 (although it’s unclear if it will simply reduce my time for exercising).

    Another factor in the equation is that I don’t socialize as much as most people. If that were to change (and I had less energy to concentrate on keeping my weight down), I don’t know how it would affect my weight. A lot of people  are parents or actively involved in volunteer groups. They would never have the attention span to concentrate on weight loss.   Spouses can  have dramatic effects on your diet; they whittle down willpower and often bake and cook lavish things in an attempt to make you happy. I wonder if the self-control I have won at such cost will be tossed out in a few months of living with a woman who is a great cook. Also, when you have a significant other, you tend to eat out more. Unfortunately spouses reinforce one another’s bad habits (but with weight gain, I think it’s the other way around; men’s bad eating habits rub off on the wife).  To my future wife who is reading this: I will keep my daily weight journal every day for the rest of my life  to track my progress (forward or backward).

    After reading several essays by Gary Taubes, I completely accept the Atkins thesis that carbohydrates contribute to weight gain because it increases appetite. The jury is still out, of course, and calorie reduction should remain the ultimate goal, but Taubes makes a convincing case that reducing appetite is probably the best way to reduce weight.  I also buy into the notion that obesity is contagious and dependent on what kind of people you hang around with. Unfortunately, in the geek world, lots of people have sedentary lifestyles, so there is the tendency to judge yourself against your peers rather than  against some objective benchmark. But BMIs do not lie. Also, the fact that median caloric intake among Americans have increased from 3300 calories in the 1970s to 3900 calories in 1997 is a very revealing (and damning) statistic.

    By the way, if you intend to lose weight, I highly recommend taking photographs of yourself before you start (just like those crazy ads in the newspaper). I have almost no photos of Fat Robert; perhaps I was trying to hide facing  myself.

    I know my weight will fluctuate over time, and I’m sure I will revisit this post in the future to indicate how successful each strategy has been in the long term. But this is my collected wisdom as of January 2009. Happy New years everyone!

    Postscript Jan 19, 2010. Some bad news. I have done some back sliding. Although I basically kept most of the weight off for about a year, over the last 4 months the numbers have gradually been increasing. I finally returned to a semblance of control at 210 and am bringing it down slowly, and now I’m arrived at a long term goal (which I feel is attainable). Keep my weight under 205. It means having to face the fact that 20 pounds may have been unrealistic (given my penchants and lifestyle). On the bright side, I’m going to get a dog soon, and I have high hopes that the extra exercise will have a positive effect.

    P.S.S. March 29, 2021. Crisis time again. In 2016, my weight went up to 230, and then after a long hiatus and multiple financial crises, I ended up living at my mom’s — and in my first visit to the doctor in 4.5 years, shocked to discover that my weight is 270. (I hadn’t weighed myself since 2018 and I hadn’t visited a doctor since Feb 2017).  I’ll write about  the causes of this increases and my action plan; suffice to say here that this time there it’s not just an self-improvement  exercise in narcissism. I am literally trying to save my life! 

  • What’s for between-meal meal?

    Michael Pollan writes:

    But the biggest threat to the meal-as-we-knew-it is surely the snack, and snacking in recent years has colonized whole new parts of our day and places in our lives. Work, for example, used to be a more or less food-free stretch of time between meals, but no longer. Offices now typically have well-stocked kitchens, and it is apparently considered gauche at a business meeting or conference if a spread of bagels, muffins, pastries and soft drinks is not provided at frequent intervals. Attending a recent conference on nutrition and health, of all things, I was astounded to see that in addition to the copious buffet at breakfast, lunch and dinner, our hosts wheeled out a copious buffet halfway between breakfast and lunch and then again halfway between lunch and dinner, evidently worried that we would not be able to survive the long crossing from one meal to the next without a between-meal meal.

    I may be showing my age, but didn’t there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between-meal snack? Well, it is gone. Americans today mark time all day long with nibbles of food and sips of soft drinks, which must be constantly at their sides, lest they expire during the haul between breakfast and lunch.(The snack food and beverage industry has surely been the great beneficiary of the new social taboo against smoking which used to perform much the same time-marking function). We have engineered our cars to accommodate our snacks, adding bigger cup holders and even refrigerated glove compartments, and we’ve reengineered food to be more easily eaten in the car. According to the Harvard economists’ calculations, the bulk of the calories we’ve added to our diet over the past 20 years have come in the form of snacks.

    His book In Defense of Food talks more about the social aspects of eating. Fascinating read.

    Pollan has a lot of things online already. See Unhappy Meals and an Open Letter to the Farmer-in-Cheif.

    See also his answer of NYT reader questions. See also the recent Bill Moyers interview:

    BILL MOYERS: I will make a confession that will show you how hard this is because there is so much human nature at play here. I mean, I like to take my grandkids to McDonald’s because it enables me to cheat a little, right. So how do you convince us that we’re contributing to climate change, we’re contributing to a precarious national security, we’re contributing to bad health? What do you say to us that moves us?

    MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the first thing I would say is, I’m not a, you know, I’m not a Puritan about food. And I’m not a zealot about it. And there is something called special occasion food that we have in our house. And it’s kind of understood that sometimes you go, you enjoy your fast food. You have your Twinkie, whatever it is. People have done this for thousands of years. There’s nothing wrong with doing it. Our problem is we’ve made special occasion food everyday food and that one in three American children are at a fast-food outlet every single day. And that’s where you get into trouble.

    Fun fact: Michael Pollan used to be an editor at Harpers.

    The interview covers a lot of things, including school lunch programs. It just so happens that a month ago I heard about an amazing nonprofit called Recipe for Success that helps elementary schools around Houston  start gardens to grow vegetables. Then they invite chefs from restaurants to give guest lectures about preparing fresh vegetables. What a great idea! (I saw their outreach coordinator give a talk about their group, and saw some amazing videos about what they’re doing.