Silver Case

Fitness Assessment

A few weeks ago I bought a Dahon Mu Xl folding bicycle. Sort of on impulse. But wow, it has been money well spent.

Although the bike looks like a cross between a young giraffe and a clown bike, the angles and distances between seat, pedals, and handlebars is very similar to my Trek Liquid 20 mountain bikes. I find it comfortable and endurable, but still quick enough. It feels very solid at low speed splitting traffic and still feels confident on faster descents (25mph?). On the way home tonight I tried to pedal it without hands, something I can do on all my bikes. It seemed to jump away from me, but I think it’s my fault, a combination of: carrying 20lbs in a messenger bag, being tired from a fast sprint home, and not really concentrating. Maybe also because the pedals don’t have clips.

“Pedals don’t have clips?” That sounds like a problem, but surpisingly it’s ok and I’m getting along alright without them. On 20 minute rides, the efficiency losses aren’t that huge anyway. The reason these pedals don’t have clips is that they can fold up. I’m sure I could upgrade or replace them, but I’m satisfied with them. The other accesories on the bike are superior. I’ve got used to the feel of Cane Creek elastometer shock-absorbing seat post. The little dynamo+Hella front light do goo duty at night and, I think, catch a bit of attention. The shifting of the 8-speed hub gearshift is flawless. The range between high/low gears gives good coverage of the shifting spectrum. I love having a hub, rather than derailleuers. Can shift whether I’m moving or not (good for setting up to dash from red-lights) and I never miss a shift. For urban biking, definitely worth the weight tradeoffs. Speakng of weight, this bike weighs about as much as a normal, generic mountain bike. I find that good enough. The V-brakes are sufficient too. Tonight I came to a very hard stop and actually pushed the seat post down the center tube an inch or two. (clearly I hadn’t tightened it quite enough)

How have I been using this bike? Commuting to/from work every day (except last thursday because I was hungover) and riding Little Boy around the neighborhood on the weekend. The commute is great. Oddly, the commute time is the same, whether biking or driving (some perfect storm of distance, traffic density, and signage), and I still have a lot of the thrill of freedom and elements on a bike that I had when I was a kid, so I WANT to ride to work. It’s not like forcing myself to goto a dull gym or to do calisthenics. (As an aside, I think a bike is probably the most wonderful object in the world. It’s beautiful, it’s fun, it’s liberating. )

So, in conclusion: I think the Dahon Mu XL is a wonderful urban commuting bike. I will be interested to see how it functions for me trying to commute from my new house. My current route is something like 5.5km. I do it in 20 minutes (averaging 10mph I guess… I stop at lights). My new place, depending on the route will be between 15 and 20km. So I guess I’m looking at a commute time more like one hour. Hmmm. Well, presumably I’ll go faster then 10km because I’ll have longer stretches of uninterrupted pedaling, but still, that means it’s a struggle to commute both ways (2hours a day pedaling?!).

mds weightXtimeOriginally uploaded by karavshin.

I’ve been burning off about two hundred grams per day since I started trying. That’s about 3kg (6 pounds) in two weeks. Seems like decent progress to me.

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started by I laid three ground rules for myself and decided to figure out the rest as I went.

1. No weird fucking diet plans. I have zero interest in these weird plans like the Atkins diets where you eat only fat and protein, no carbohydrates, or stick to strange daily regimens (one kiwi fruit and a prawn cracker for breakfast) etc. etc. There are an infinite number of these crackpots schemes. They’re at best ludicrous and unsustainable (kiwi and prawn crackers) and at worst bad for your health (man is not designed to eat so much protein and fat alone).
2. I’m not David Blaine. I’m no more going to starve myself of food than I would freeze myself in a block of ice or live underwater for a week. Acts of absurd self-discipline always break down. All it takes is time.
3. Exercise will be part of the plan. Skinny weak and unfit is still weak and unfit. Gross.

So what did I do? I had already browsed Jeremy Zawodny’s series of articles about losing weight. And I had also read an online book, “The Hacker’s Diet.” My first move from that was to frequently weigh myself as well as track my calorie intake. Excel spreadsheet of course.

I soon found that counting exact calories is a shaky progress. Until someone designs a portable, tareable weighing scale, my estimates of how many calories I eat will be poor. I did work at it, but I found calculating the calories tedious. What was better, however, was just the act of recording what I was eating. The real trick to this was eating less, and moreover, eating less shit. I don’t need to note whether that Krispy Kreme donut was 275 or 350 calories. It’s irrelevant, it was shit and I didn’t need to eat it. So my spreadsheet counting calories has become more of a food confessional that is relatively easy to maintain. I like to highlight when I eat garbage and make scathing comments beside it. I feel brightest when I look and see a mostly-vegetable day.

So the confessional helps. It especially helps after reading the Hacker Diet, which emphasizes that you need to run a calorie deficit. The important point it makes is that exercise is a terribly inefficient way to generate that deficit — an hour of exercise might burn as little as three hundred calories. It’s far more efficient just to not eat the marginal piece of shit.I keep that nugget of wisdom in mind and it becomes very easy to decline things when I have the urge, or to select the less-sinful alternative. Just forgoing a few bits and pieces a day contributes in the same way an hour of running would.

So how have I changed my diet?

For lunch I’ve tried to totally dump snacking on garbage (junk foods, candy, etc.) I keep a relatively light lunch. No soft drinks, no potato chip side dishes, no soups, etc. If my mouth gets itchy later in the day I either eat fruit or drink water till I’m not hungry any more.

For dinner I’ve done two things: (a) reduce portion size and (b) massively increased the proportion of fruit and vegetables I eat. Here is where I discovered some diet folklore to be total bullshit. The common knowledge is eating for a diet is going to result in bland, boring, bad food. Rubbish. It’s only bland, boring, and bad because it’s prepared stupidly.
Food tastes good because it’s nicely cooked, nicely dressed, and is made from nice ingredients. What I discovered is that there is nothing magical about meat, pasta, and dairy as a dinner. It just turns out that it’s easiest to make something that tastes good out of meat, pasta, and dairy than from fruits and vegetables.
Vegetables and fruits taste worse because people buy garbage from the grocer and cook it without the same attention they’d cook meat, pasta, or dairy. So I told myself, “I’m going to buy the best vegetables and fruits available, I’m going to buy lots of them, in huge variety, and I’m going to cook them with the care they deserve.”

In practical terms, that means we get most of our fruit and vegetables from the various Japanese grocery stores and pay the consequent price. However, the stuff tastes really good. Instead of tired sacks of green grapes and red deicious apples we have bags of Japanese grapes that taste like candy and Momotaro tomatoes we just slice raw with a tiny bit of sea salt. When vegetabes taste good enough, they become a much easier substitute.

It also brings up another point. The other night, dinner was enoki mushrooms, zuchinni, onions, and asparagus. How’d I make it? I brushed it down with fruity olive oil and grilled it on my electric grill, then sprinkled it with some sea salt. Ewww olive oil and salt, right? Well, from my perspective eliminating these flavor force-multipliers (olive oil and salt, in particular) is idiotic. They’re not the pareto solution to losing weight. Most of the calories I ate came from the big ticket items, the meat, pasta, and dairy, not the drizzles of virgin olive oil. Thus I cook my vegetables lavishly and with a clean conscious.

Food is a big pleasure in life, so giving up pleasant meals is unimaginable. So I conscientiously decide to skimp on the unimportant meals (lunch being the best example) but then one important meals, not feel guilty.

For example, today we had an early Reunion Dinner since Tien-Lee is back for the weekend. We went to a very nice Chinese restaurant. I ate some really indulgent dishes: Teochew crab, wasabi prawn, a sweet steamed fish, and some rich fish maw soup. I didn’t hold back on that experience, but I didn’t make it a binge — I skipped their house speciality which involved some preperation of foie gras (pure cholesterol and fat), and I skipped the steamed rice (there was no need for it when the fish tasted so sweet and tender on its own).
And then again this evening… I had four quarts of crab stock I made from our King Crab weekend. So I prepared an ad-hoc recipe for risotto made from that crab stock, a chunk of nice parmesan, and topped with crab from a Hairy Crab we had in the freezer, and some beautiful scallops from Japan. So yeah, not a low-calorie dish, but the portion was much smaller than what I would have eaten in the past. When I was hungry later we tore through a bag of grapes from Korea (Koreans are getting really good with their fruits — it’s almost as good as Japanese, especially the grapes) and some fresh strawberries drizzled with balsamic vinegar. So I am, again, guilt-free.

My biggest failing last week was exercise. I did almost nothing. Between work, and oversleeping, and getting home late from Japanese lessons, I never had the vigor to run to work. I’ll be better about it next week because I will be more conscientious about earlier bedtime. As well, I leeched an access card to the hotel pool next door, so I’ll be able to swim during lunch on days that I have Japanese or otherwise didn’t feel like running to work. So that should help. After all 3500 calories burnt sheds a pound of fat. That is around an extra three pounds per month on top of whatever calorie deficit I’m running.

This week I drastically reduced my calories. Perhaps by one third?  The scary thing was that it was hardly difficult to do.  I think I’ve been leading a Henry VIII gluttony-diet for the past half year.  Anyway, one thing I do frequently is on the way home, stop at Isetan, and buy sashimi and a bit of sushi from their grocer. The fish quality is pretty decent.   Last night ate some o-toro. They weren’t thick slices but they had the melting sweetness of o-toro.  I tossed out the rice bed. It was overwhelming the fish and wasn’t particularly nice anyway.

When Ling and I arrived to choose our selection for our bento box date (it was 9pm or so) Hokkaido Food Fair was being held at Isetan. This was mostly sacks of $100 dried squid and other fish, but I did see something more intriguing: $100 flash-frozen crab legs. I don’t recall the species (there were several) but they were deep winter sea crabs from Hokkaido, flash frozen.  According to Alton Brown (fwiw) flash frozen crab like this is about the best crab you’re going to get, in terms of freshness.

So I think tomorrow I may plan a special crab dinner using these babies. I need to do some research today and figure out the preperation and accompaniments. (If I am not struck down by YHWH first)
Tien Lee is returning for Singapore for work, but secretly arranged to come back a few days earlier (arriving Sunday afternoon).  No one else knows.  The kicker is, I told her to bring back fresh horseradish root from Australia. If she manages that, we’ll have some terrific accompaniment for the crab.

This is quite an interesting page:  pictures of many foods sorted by weight per 200g.  It’s pretty shocking.  I guess the first healthy/low-calorie food I could enjoy eating a decent portion of would be melon. There are few desserts purer than chilled Japanese rockmelon.

I have no idea how a french roll has more calories per gram than a disgusting jack-in-the-box hamburger, though, for instance.

Don’t look at the bottom of the page, as you’ll see the insanely tiny quantities of bacon, peanut butter, and butter that comprise 200calories.  I routinely use a half cup of butter (115g) in recipes.  ahahahah doh!

Also, for the american readers out there, 40g is very little.  I prepare my brewed black coffee as 20oz of water (a small thermos’ worth) with exactly 42g of ground coffee.  Coffee beans are light, even then apile of 42g of coffee beans is a very small cereal bowl worth.

Took the standard route but a bit more efficient at some intersections.  From Istana to Scotts had a wet sidewalk that I felt unstable on, especially with all the pedestrians.  Sickly-sweet cigarette smoke everywhere.  Ran first quarter and last third.  Wasn’t heaving too hard.  Think with a full run can easily shave off five minutes to start.  Should be my first goal upon returning from tokyo.

I don’t trust this fucking scale.

Only jogged about 25% of it, fast-walked the rest. I’d rather run, fast walking irritates my shins. Quite a lot of people-jam around Orchard and Raffles Link. Didn’t try any interesting moves to speak of. I was wearing a backpack. Missed a monsoon by minutes.S

So this is approximately 4.5mph or a 13.4minute-mile. By any measure slow. Oh well, starting from here from nothing.

Took the standard driving route Orchard/Scotts/Stevens

Every day I look in the mirror and face it, I’ve turned into a slug during the last two years. I have no strength or conditioning or endurance, and I’ve suddenly put on weight as well. I’m as heavy as I’ve ever been, and it’s nothing but sloth and flab. When I weighed myself the other day, I was astonished to see I weighed 80.6kg. Not just astonished, but nauseated. Enough is enough.

So what to do about it?

A few basic facts:

• I hate gyms. I despise them. They’re the pimsleur guides of physical fitness. Dry, boring, monotonous, de-inspiring. Just gross and horrible. To subscribe to one is to throw money away.
• Weekends are reserved for family, hobbies, and fun physical stuff, like kayaking or jungle-exploring, not for conditioning exercise.
• Although I feel nauseous when I exercise early in the morning, I rarely have the strength or motivation left to exercise at night after work. Often I’m additionally distracted by hunger.
• Like language study, I need to find a conditioning program that holds my interest, achieves measurable goals, and is feasible in my schedule.

Ling made a very obvious suggestion, almost in an offhand way, which later affected me. “Why don’t you run to work?”

Yuck, I haven’t enjoyed running since high school. But damn, it would be a way to get some conditioning in. I already get up early nowdays, and my office isn’t far away (in fact, the map page says it’s only 5.4km away… the classic 5k). If I was really disciplined about it, I could run both to and from work. It shouldn’t take any more than thirty minutes. I could get all my exercise out of the way in the morning, during my work week. Minimal hassle.

How could I improve the idea though? Well, clearly I have an iPod, and I could use the time to listen to my JapanesePod101 lessons. My current drive is only ten minutes, time to listen to one lesson, but running to work would give me time to listen to two or three segments. Multi-tasking. Nice.

It’s sounding better, but not brilliant.

Back when I was in university I was watching a foot chase during an episode of the X-Files. There’s Fox Mulder running down alleys, jumping over fences, climbing drains, etc. I always wanted to go out and do, what I called, ‘X-Files Runs,’ basically dashing around an urban landscape, leaping, jumping, climbing, sprinting. I never really did it much, and then I moved to to Wichita, Kansas, a hell-hole, for my first job, and the idea just sat dormant in my lists of things to do. Without a good base of conditioning, it’s pretty hard to do an awful lot of that.

About a year ago, I discovered the wild videos of David Belle, the inventor of Parkour.   It occurred to me that this is the perfect addition to my fitness program.  First, I [will] have have a baseload of running, which gives me endurance. However, that does nothing for a my weak core muscles, my skinny arms, or my focus.  Parkour strengthens that.  Secondly, I live in Singapore, which could be described as a concrete urban hell-hole, except if you’re talking about parkour, then it’s full of all sorts of exciting terrain.  Thirdly, I have a [too] rich imagination, so it’s always more inspiring to be jumping over drainage ditches and off ledges to escape from Alien Hitmen than to be counting down reps and sets as I lap a track or treadmill.

So my current plan is:

1. Get running to, and later from, the office as soon as possible.  I think I am so woefully fit right now that it will take a few weeks before I can run it with any sort of pace.  But I will think of it like learning hiragana, the necessary baseload to do the fun stuff (Parkour)
2. As I have the chance to (early mornings, during my commutes, weekends) work on my basic parkour moves, jumping, rolling, balance, etc.  There turns out to be a small park on a huge hillside five minutes from my house that is my perfect training ground.  There’s lot of practice there.
3. Get my disgusting weight down. It’s sickening. I’ve been drinking too much booze, eating too much rich food, and now that I wake up earlier, eating inappropriately heavy breakfasts.  Means eating less and eating better.  I plan on eating a lot more  Japanese style stuff, particularly onigiri and other simple, healthy things.
   
4. Keep lots of telemetry on my weight, times, and dependibility.  This sort of monitoring also keeps me honest with myself and motivated.

Funny how I’m posting all these articles about new goals and programs around the new year. It’s not really intentional. I just think that after two years of struggle, I’ve had two, almost three months of recuperation, and now I’m rested enough to actually start thinking big picture again. These aren’t common New Year’s resolutions.

Pig.