In Sputnik’s Orbit

Some of you may not give a flamingo’s slippers about this, so I’ll keep it short.

As regular followers know, I bought a treadmill over the Christmas break, assembled a treadmill desk, and started using it and MyFitnessPal as part of my normal writing routine the second week of January.

I try to walk at least an hour a day, probably average a little over two, and occasionally up to eight. I never exceed 2.2 MPH with a 2% incline. I eat what I like, but hold myself to the daily net calorie targets set by MyFitnessPal. In practice, this means almost no bread, pasta, or rice, and generally pretty healthy eating. I’m not starving myself or suffering in any way. I do drink a lot of decaf, and I count the calories in the creamer and artificial sweetener.

After slowly losing ground for twenty years, I’ve lost 44 lbs in six months. My cholesterol is down 20%. My BP is down 20%. I am now about 15 pounds from the recommended ideal weight for my height–even without accounting for age. I see no problem with reaching that target and maintaining it indefinitely.

It ain’t easy, but it ain’t complicated, either. Just sayin’.

I bought a pair of those silly, er, trendy toe shoes that have been popping up everywhere. Why would I do that, you ask? Well, not to jump on the minimalist footwear bandwagon, that’s for sure. Humanity may have survived shoe-less until the last few centuries, but they did it with lots of broken toes, mutilated nails, and parasite-infected barking dogs. No, I did it because I’ve lost 44 pounds in five months by walking between two and six hours every day, and there simply is no footwear up to the abuse.

I’ve worn hiking shoes, walking shoes, pool shoes, good leather sandals, two kinds of boots and a pair of steel-toed anti-static sneakers. All have their place, but most of these have the side effect of crowding the toes together. This fosters the further side effect of asymmetrical callouses that eventually become hard and get pinched and generally become noisome.

The toe shoe, a shoe in which each (or at least most) of the toes gets its own little pocket, is a rather obvious solution to this particular problem. Fortunately, I live in an age in which most obvious solutions (and many, many far from obvious ones) are for sale within walking distance of my home—at least in principal.

So I bought a pair of Fila Bay-Run-Some-Damn-Thing-Or-Others and here’s what I think. They work. That is, they solve the problem without immediately presenting any intractable new ones. They do cause my stride to wobble and my knees to hurt a bit, but I’m provisionally okay with that because that just means they are bringing into play fine motor skills and muscles that have spent too much of the last two decades sleeping while hard leather uppers and synthetic soles went “clomp clomp clomp” along life’s byways. That’s fine. That means, if anything, that I’ll be burning more calories. Aside from that, they stink. Well, they smell a little.

Unfortunately, the impetus for this product is not good solid practical Americans like me, it’s the aforementioned fad. As a result, few toe shoes come with any sort of arch support or sole, and many take a positively narcissistic pride in the omission. In fairness, Fila makes a better shoe called the “Voltage” which has characteristics more suitable to humans living in the modern world, but the local store only carries these things—suitable only for the beach or for the lighter heft of Martian gravity. Well, perhaps I’ll order something from Amazon.

In the meantime, to those who think anti-shoism is a sensible idea, I say this. The whole idea of minimal shoe running arose from a spate of African bare-footed masters who emerged in recent decades and went on to Olympic fame. Despite their successes, the rest of the running world has not followed suit. Why? Because careful scientific analysis has revealed what most knew and some suspected. First, hard use without proper support destroys human feet. Second, Kenyans dominate the track for the same reason minorities dominate American sport: from the time they are small, that’s the only path they see out of poverty.

But, like the rest of my paw wrappers, these have their place, and so I march off into the dream-studded twilight of modern consumerism. At least when these puppies go to the beach, they offer a somewhat less painful alternative to Edward Abbey’s advice to “unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood!, why not?”

I must confess, I never much cared for dogs until I had kids and my wife decided they should have one. I bought a Miniature Australian Shepherd because if I HAD to have a dog, I wanted an actual dog–not something distorted by selective breeding into an affront to the natural world. I exaggerate slightly. The truth is, we had kept a friend’s border collie once and I found her a noble beast, but about three sizes too large for my needs.

Aussies were next of kin to the collie and a miniature breed was available. Other than their size, they were recognizably working dogs, recognizably, in fact, not too distant cousins to the wolf. Breeders warned, however, that an alarming percentage of Aussies, when purchased as pets, end up being taken to the pound. They warned that these were intelligent, willful animals who could not simply be smacked with the odd roll of newsprint and given a bed in the corner. Perfect.

I studied the latest in dog training and psychology. Everything my mother had taught me was completely and utterly wrong, but I could so this. Our dog came from a north Texas equestrian breeder, delivered at great expense by climate-controlled air freight, and no surprise ever more delighted a pair of impressionable girls.

But she never belonged to the girls. I brought her home. I showed her to her food and water. Aussies are bred to have strong jaws. They control sheep by biting at the ankles. Puppies have razor sharp teeth, so I used dog psychology to stop her constant nipping and biting. When she started teething on a $2,000 cherry-wood table, I gave her a more acceptable piece of wood. She started to learn limits, not out of fear, but because I expected it.

She was a sweet little thing when we were home to play with her, but we could not be home all the time. She could escape from or destroy anything of plastic or wood, so expensive steel gates were needed to confine her until she was house-broken. She escaped by squeezing through. I modified. She escaped by leaping over. I adjusted. She borrowed into the wall, I glued up wallboard (I was planning to put wainscoting there anyway).

I taught her a trick, then another, then another. I alternated the toys left out during the day. I taught her to run with my Trike scooter in the fashion of a sled dog and to jog left or right or to check for a post on command. I learned to use hand signals in preference to spoken commands. She learned to find toys by name, to “go get,” to “bring,” to “give,” and to “release,” all as distinct commands. I learned to make her work a little every day, and to recognize pent up energy before it could burst.

Gradually, she slowed down—but not much. She learned how to live in an urban house, and I learned how to be an alpha dog. Often, I know, it frustrates her that I don’t know what any dog should. I took me to or three years to realize why she was so stubborn about eating—she will not eat until I do. I learn and she puts up with me. She lets me bath her and brush her teeth, though she thinks both utterly mad. She makes sure I know when a possum or a squirrel or a blood sucking vampire raccoon is in the yard, and she just knows that if I can just understand her request, I may yet rise up and stop a thunderstorm.

Every night, just like when she was a puppy, she climbs up into my bed and rolls over next to me, exposing her belly for a while, then pads back out to the living room. If she barks in the dead of night, I don’t yell or throw a slipper. I walk out to the living room and ask her what’s what. She runs to a window or door and harrumphs. I turn on the light and look. “Good girl!” I say, “You scarred them away.” I head back to bed and she climbs back up on her perch on the back of the couch. Her fuzzy ear flops and as she rests her lids, but she’s got her eye on things.

Losing weight isn’t complicated. Gurus and manufacturers are happy to make it seem that way so they can sell what they sell. The fact is, though, if you burn more calories than you consume, you cannot fail to lose weight. Okay, it’s more complicated than that—but not much.

We humans are the survivors of countless privations. We are the ones whose ancestors survived all the famine, pestilence, wars, volcanoes, ice ages and so on, for several million years. They didn’t do it by looking good in Speedos. They did it the same way grizzlies survive hibernation: by having ample stores of blubber to carry them through the lean times. We, with our grande mocha lattes with creme, our super-big gulps, and our deep-fat-fryers, are the “beneficiaries” of these successful genes. We crave what will fatten us up because our genes are programed to store energy when it’s available. They don’t know that in this time and place, calories are not a scarce resource but a toxic embarrassment of riches.

Nor do we want to modify those genes, because sooner or later, somehow or other, lean times will almost certainly return to all of us. “Fixing” our genes to help us fit into our scivies now will certainly condemn our descents at some time in the future. So what do we do?

We do what we human always do, we use our formidable brains to adapt. In this case, we set a budget of calories, and we learn to live within it. Simple.

Simple doesn’t mean easy, though. Hunger is right up at the top of our hierarchy of needs (we’ll even choose it over sex). Saying “no” to such a primal craving is HARD. This is where technology comes in. Unlike our ancestors, we know how much energy is in our food and our labors, and with tools like the smartphone app “MyFitnessPal” keeping track of both is fairly simple. We can learn to live withing a budget, but first we need a plan.

• First, you need to estimate the number of calories you burn just being you. To save you some trouble, MyFitnessPal will estimate this based on your age, height, gender, and lifestyle.

• Second, you need a target weight. My Fitness Pal will help with this too, but in general, you need short-term achievable goals. Longer range is up to you [(though a healthy weight based on BMI is certainly wise) but it might seem dawning until you have started down the road.

• Third, you need to decide how fast you want to lose weight. Two to three pounds per week is generally considered the largest safely sustainable rate, but you certainly want to lose fast enough to see and feel the results or you will give up. That’s how humans are.

• Now it’s fairly simple to estimate the net energy intake that will get you to your goal. Again, apps like MyFitnessPal will calculate this for you. They will also calculate the minimum number of calories needed to keep your body from thinking it’s starving. That’s important, because if your body thinks it’s starving, your metabolism changes to run much more efficiently and your cravings go into overdrive.

• Now you have a net calorie budget. Done. Well, done getting started.

Notice I said “net”. It doesn’t matter in the slightest how much you eat. What matters is, how much more do you eat than you burn? Olympic athletes eat up to 8,000 calories a day, but they burn that much or more. The trouble is, if you can make it through a whole cheesecake, you can easily top that 8,000 calories in one sitting, but odds are burning that many in a day would kill you.

So, this is where the choices start. After accounting for my base metabolism (what I burn just being alive) MyFitnessPal tells me I need to net no more than 1,400 calories each day in order to make my goals. But hold on. I also need to eat at least 1,200 calories per day. That’s not much wiggle room, and I know from experience that exercise makes me hungrier, which is why I normally stop exercising just as I start seeing results. Too little reward, too slowly.

This is where a tool like MyFitnessPal is a life saver. Once I started tracking calories in and calories out, I started assigning weights to things. I love cake, but I’d rather eat a whole spicy chicken and rice dinner and feel sated until bedtime than a slice of cake that will be digested by the next commercial break. I don’t like exercising, but I also don’t like being hungry at bedtime, and an hour on the treadmill “buys” a serving of cereal and milk. But wait, ¾ cups is not a realistic serving size, but if I switch to the 80 calorie Fibre-One cereal, I can eat three servings for 240 calories.

See how it works? It’s all about trade offs. You can NOT succeed by starving yourself your body will not permit it. This isn’t a “glandular problem”, it’s survival instinct. You can, however, get used to skim milk instead of whole, wraps instead of buns, turkey instead of pork (or fruit instead of sausage). Then you find that the more you get used to lighter fair, the less you crave traditional American junk. Tabouli, Fatoush and Jeruselem salads, steak tips and broccoli, Teriaki Salmon—these are all favorite foods that I would not have touched twenty years ago. I don’t eat them because I’m on a diet. They are just what I eat, and at the moment, I am adjusting my weight downward.

I also bought a treadmill. I’m pretty dexterous, so it took about three days to get used to typing while walking at 2.2 miles per hour and a slight incline that increases the workload to approximate “real world” walking. I’m a writer and a computer analyst, so I can pretty much spend as much time walking as my feet can take. I shoot for two hours a day. I don’t always make it. On weekends or telecommute days, I may do five or more hours. It took a while to work up to that and I had to buy special anti-static shoes for use in cold, dry weather.

Results may vary. I do what works for me, and I’m sorry to say it took me twenty years to find it. You have to find what works for you. You have to find it, because diets just don’t work. What you have to do is stop being the person who got you here, and start being “You 2.0”. You don’t have to eat the comfort foods your grandmother ate during the depression. You don’t need to new year’s dinner your great grand parents ate to assure themselves they had survived the potato famine. You kids are not going to have a better standard of living if you teach them to eat the fried catfish and ice cream you had at family reunions. You are free to make your own choices, and pass down your own traditions. Pick healthy.

It’s all a balancing act. I want to write anyway, so it “costs” very little to walk, and it doesn’t take much to tip the scale. Sometimes, I still snack too much, but I record it honestly. Sometimes, I have to get up before I brush my teeth and have one more cup of yogurt to stay within my budget. I record everything, and I will do so till the day I die. I don’t see that as a punishment or a sentence. It’s a rational reaction to living in a body ill suited to a changed environment. It’s what I should have been doing all along, and it’s a damn-sight better than starvation.

This is neither a fad nor a diet. This is a lifestyle that works and that I can sustain indefinably. In a little less than three months, I’ve lost thirty pounds. At this rate, I’ll be gone in a year and a half. It’s been nice knowing you all.

The other day, I was reading a security analysis about the impact of viruses in the Linux world. Viruses are not quite unknown in Linux, but they are so rare that most end-users don’t bother to install any virus scanning at all. How can that be?

It’s probably a combination of factors–market share and architecture among them–but the prevailing wisdom is that it’s mostly open source that protects Linux. So many eyes look at the code so often, there is nowhere for agents of propagation to hide.

I submit, however, that there may be something more basic at work here. Linux, in all it’s flavors, exists to get stuff done. Microsoft products exist to drive sales. Microsoft needs to pack it’s SKUs with feature lists. Linux products live or die by end-user reviews. What doesn’t work is soon reworked or soon swept away.

I recently discovered that OpenOffice/LibreOffice has a “Compare Document” feature. It works exactly as you would expect. You load one document, then click “Edit- Compare Document” and select a second. Changes between the two documents then appear through the standard track changes feature. It could not be any simpler, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be improved in any substantive way.

Unless you work in Redmond.

Before tweeting about this feature, I thought I should google MS Word. Surely, it has this feature too and I just never knew it. Indeed, it does, and it’s a doozy. Why, it has a side-by-side feature and legal line-through and all sorts of other bells and whistles that I can’t be bothered to read about, much less remember to use.

The blogosphere tells us the OpenOffice feature just works, and gives endless lecture on where to go looking for the Microsoft. Feature set vs quality.

Did I ever mention how many times Word corrupted by first two novel manuscripts before I abandoned it three years ago?