bearing blog

This method wouldn't work in my house.

Sippican Cottage moves a big box into his basement:

Do you know how to move heavy things? I see all sorts of educated people that can't fathom how people built the pyramids. They'll believe aliens did it, but not regular people. When you become far removed from everyday things, you'll believe anything but the truth. Construction workers don't watch Mythbusters.

If I told you you had to move that 439 pound box down a flight of stairs, could you do it? Here's what's at your disposal: A thirteen year old boy, his mom, and whatever you have laying around. Easy. By the way; you're in a hurry, because the item is made from cast iron, and it's going to rain. And you can't drop it -- it's precision machinery.

Nice job.   Our stairs have a 180-degree turn halfway down, which is at least part of the reason why Mark's table saw lives in the garage.

Once through Anathem, the latest Neal Stephenson novel.

Exhiliarating!  And fun to read as a sort of puzzle, too -- one has to do a certain amount of figuring stuff out as one goes along.  There was a point late in the story when I hooted with delight at the way a certain plot point (which I had been expecting for some time) was revealed.  No more, lest I spoil it for you; take it to the comments if you care.

If you're interested in a taste of the level of philosophy-mathematics-religion-physics nerdiness that underpins Anathem, you can read the acknowledgments on the official book website.  If you are interested in a taste of the story, you can browse the book from a link there too.   

Me, I'm halfway done, which (as is usual when I read Stephenson) means that I've already read the book through ravenously in a high-speed effort to get to the end and see what happens along the way (because, also as is usual with Stephenson, the journey is worth it even if the end is a bit unsatisfying); and now I need to go back and read at least some of the bits more slowly in order to really understand what I've just been through. 

Stephenson fans know that from times to time, story elements and characters (or their descendants) from one book will pop up in another one.  I kept waiting for this to happen in Anathem as soon as I began to suspect that it might be possible.   I only noticed one significant story element, and I'm still pondering whether it sheds any light on its counterparts in Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle.  

UPDATE.  Oh, hey, I didn't realize people were doing this now, but here's a promotional "trailer" for the book.  No, there's no movie, it's just a movie-style trailer for the book.  (Jibed surprisingly well with my mental images of stuff, though, especially the sphere, which I have been imagining looked EXACTLY like one of those exercise balls.)

The bridge is back.

That was pretty fast.

I rode my bike under the new 35W bridge on Sunday as part of the Minneapolis Bike Tour.  Seen from below, it's a graceful, elegant, simple structure, and its white paint is still gleaming.  It couldn't have made a greater contrast with the twisted, rusty tangle of metal girder pieces still piled inside a chain-link fence next to the path by the river.

Some more clarification about how I came to those rules.

(Sort of an update to the last post.)

What I was looking for, when I was trying to figure out what my rules for meals and snacks would be, was a meal that was just not quite big enough to "hold me over" till the next meal.  I wanted to eat a breakfast that was small enough that I got real hunger pangs before lunch.  A lunch that was small enough that I was hearing my stomach grumble by dinnertime.  I wanted to go to bed feeling a little bit empty.

I figured (and I wholly admit this is a simplistic way of thinking, but it helped), if I'm not getting real hunger signals, my body doesn't need more food; and it needs to be in "need more food" mode to start burning itself for energy.  I would tell myself, when I started to get hungry an hour before dinner, that the hunger was the sensation of my body burning itself.  This was a remarkably helpful mental fiction for making it through that hour without raiding the fridge.  

Anyway, the point is, I tweaked my amounts until I could reliably eat meals that left me hungry just in time for the next one.  That's what I say other people might be able to do to come up with their own guidelines.

(I've really come a long way.  I've never even managed to let myself get to this low level of hunger for obligatory fast days.)

The small, controlled snacks in midmorning and midafternoon, it turned out, mainly served to take enough of the edge off that I wouldn't inhale my plate of food in the first 45 seconds after sitting down to lunch or dinner.  I, personally, seem to need these mini-meals -- at least in this time of life -- to be able to enjoy my food.    I do not think everyone needs to snack.  One of my good friends, similarly nursing a biggish little girl quite a bit, and similarly active, has been doing quite well with No-S.  But I couldn't find that out until I tried doing it different ways -- the same calories distributed over three meals vs. the same calories distributed over meals and snacks.  

It takes time to figure out.

But I should point out that I didn't need to try different things and then wait to see if I lost more or less weight.  That would take too long -- you'd have to take several days' worth of measurements before you could be sure that your change had an effect.  Instead, I tried different things and waited to see if I was the right amount of hungry.  That only takes a couple of hours, and I could apply what I'd learned as soon as the next day.  If I didn't get hungry before the next meal, I knew I should have eaten less, or skipped a snack, or had a smaller snack.  If I was ravenous and light-headed, I knew I should have eaten more at the last meal, or had a snack in between.  And for the most part, I did try to keep the daily calories between 1200 and 1500.  I recommend SparkPeople for that -- it's a decent, free online resource.

Oh, and another thing -- once the meal is over, it's over.  When I felt guilty because the lunch I ate wasn't healthful, didn't give me all the protein or vitamins or fiber I really should be eating, I had to learn to ignore the voice in my head that says I should eat some more food so that it would make the previous meal "balanced."  Meals don't have to be balanced; your whole diet does, on average.  I can't tell you how hard it still is to silence the little voice inside that tells me I should eat something more because I "need" it, when I'm not even hungry.   Oatmeal?  You ate nothing but oatmeal for lunch?  Don't you think you should have had some protein?  Go open up a can of kippers or get a chunk of cheese or something.  There's still time!  I swear to you, the whole time I was overeating, I had really convinced myself that I "needed" all that extra food.   

A great deal of this has been taking a good hard look at what I really "need" and eliminating all the stuff I'd fooled myself into becoming dependent on.

Feel free to apply that to life in general.  Maybe it's not a bad idea.

Yeah, I think that's what I'll call it.

The Bearing Diet for Not Eating So Damn Much.  (posted here in the form of the "rules" I settled down to for myself.)

It goes without saying that YMMV.  I mean, please don't infer from my rule number one that I recommend everyone eat one egg and a half glass of tomato juice for breakfast every morning.  It's just a handy, easy-to-prepare, balanced default breakfast, one that I happen to enjoy and that is just the right amount of food for me first thing in the morning.  (I take my egg boiled, by the way.  Six minutes.)   It only has to last me till ten-thirty when I have my fruit, nuts, and cheese (hereafter abbreviated FNC).   Monot0ny can be your friend when it comes to weight loss; undoubtedly some of our nation's fat problem comes from too many choices.    

A germane point:   when I began back in May, my default breakfast was two boiled eggs and a whole glass of tomato juice.  It wasn't until I tinkered with it and experimented with different amounts that I found I could do just fine on exactly half that.  And what gave me the freedom to tinker was carrying my FNC snack around with me on errands and to the playground and to friends' houses and things, because I knew I could eat it anytime I needed it and wasn't going to go all hypoglycemic on everyone.

Similarly, maybe the way your day goes, maybe you sleep with a baby who nurses all night and you actually get most of your computer time in the afternoon, so you really need a snack before bed and you don't really need an afternoon snack.  Maybe you need a big lunch and a tiny dinner.  Maybe you need plates that are bigger or smaller than mine.  Different rules, see?  It took me months to figure these out, paying attention to the times of day when I got hungry and when I didn't. The one-drink rule -- I realized I needed that one, like, four days ago, after finally facing a pattern that became impossible to ignore.

And it's not like I stick to all these rules all the time.  (Today, I had a second helping of Chinese takeout for dinner, and one of the kids' cookies at tea time.)  But I can face them objectively and honestly at the end of the day, and say "Yes, I followed my good habits" or "No, today I really was following my old bad habits."   

And because I know whether I did or not, I don't have excuses.  I always have a pretty good idea why the weight loss slows down, and why it speeds back up again.  I know that it's ME who gets to say whether I have good habits or bad habits:  not my genes, not the food, not the chef.  I own what happens here.  This realization is incredibly liberating.  

That and the realization that I cannot directly control the weight loss: I don't get to simply turn a dial to set the rate of change of my body mass.  (I'm an incomprehensibly complex nonlinear system, remember?)  But I can control my habits.  This is why I say that I had to change habits for their own sake.  It wasn't enough to want to weigh less; I had to want to eat less.  I had to want to get rid of all gluttony.  I had to learn to be disgusted by my own gluttony, repelled by my inappropriate attachments to food; I had to desire to come into correct relationship with my appetites.  I had to root out those problems, and find the habits that helped me fight them.

So is it gut feeling, or is it something else?

Christy emailed me with this NYT article describing how quick judgments of comparative number correlate to performance on standardized math tests.

This month in the journal Nature, Justin Halberda and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University and Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore described their study of 64 14-year-olds who were tested at length on the discriminating power of their approximate number sense. The teenagers sat at a computer as a series of slides with varying numbers of yellow and blue dots flashed on a screen for 200 milliseconds each — barely as long as an eye blink. After each slide, the students pressed a button indicating whether they thought there had been more yellow dots or blue...

Given the antiquity and ubiquity of the nonverbal number sense, the researchers were impressed by how widely it varied in acuity. There were kids with fine powers of discrimination, able to distinguish ratios on the order of 9 blue dots for every 10 yellows, Dr. Feigenson said. “Others performed at a level comparable to a 9-month-old,” barely able to tell if five yellows outgunned three blues. Comparing the acuity scores with other test results that Dr. Mazzocco had collected from the students over the past 10 years, the researchers found a robust correlation between dot-spotting prowess at age 14 and strong performance on a raft of standardized math tests from kindergarten onward. “We can’t draw causal arrows one way or another,” Dr. Feigenson said, “but your evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good you are at formal math.”

Interesting!  You can take a version of the test here.  The graphic says that "most adults will be correct 75% of the time," which tells me that whoever wrote the blurb does NOT have good number sense!  Or at least, not a good number vocabulary.  

75 was what I scored in my first set of 25 plays of the game.  I got much better after I noticed that I tended to err on the side of overestimating the number of yellows, and started clicking "there are more blue circles" whenever the numbers seemed to me to be close.  

Creativity.

If you don't like the sub-category of Things Kids Say, you really should skip this one.

I bought my kids a couple boxes of Wedgits a while ago.  This morning all three of them spent some serious unstructured play time figuring out how to put them together, while I messed around on the computer.

And then MJ brought me this and said, I kid you not:

"Look, mommy, I made a breast!"

Political line.

"My opponent has the misfortune to be a member of the incumbent party at a time when our economic cycle is facing a downturn. Though this has little to do with his policies, and my policies would do nothing to alleviate it, I'd like you to vote against him just to show that bad luck will not be tolerated in our country."

From DarwinCatholic.

Loss mode. Also known as The Bearing Diet.

Mark, who you will remember is a process engineer, wants me to come up with a list of rules for "loss mode" as a weight maintenance tool.  He has cheerfully volunteered set up an SPC (statistical process control) chart on which I will plot my weight every morning, watching for trends.  When the data indicates that I am so many standard deviations above my target, I will switch to the loss mode rules until the data returns to the target.  

This is the idea, anyway.  Right now I'm more than a few sigma away from that target, and so should be in loss mode all the time.

What are the rules?  If I were to distill The Bearing Diet to simple, objective instructions (eschewing judgment-requiring stuff like "only eat when you're hungry"), what would it be?

The first set of rules have to do with the content of meals and snacks:

1) Breakfast is one egg and a half-glass of tomato juice, plus coffee or tea-with-milk.

2) The optional 10:30 AM snack is zero to ten nuts, zero to one ounce of cheese, and zero to 1.5 ounces fruit. 

3)  Lunch is a single plateful, half of which is simply prepared vegetables.

4)  The mandatory 3:30 PM snack is zero to ten nuts, zero to one ounce of cheese, and zero to 1.5 ounces fruit, plus coffee or tea-with-milk.

5)  Dinner is a single plateful, half of which is vegetables, plus one extra helping of vegetables or salad, if I want.

6) No solid food after dinner.

The others are general ones:

7)  Always measure the foods I have trouble limiting:  for me, bread, crackers, pastries, grains, and pasta.  

8)  Periodically, pre-plan and measure a day's meals and snacks to ensure it's in the weight-loss calorie range:  for me,  1200-1500 calories.

9)  Stick to one serving of alcohol at a meal.

10) Dining out or in a pinch where the other rules are tough to follow, eat only half of whatever's not a plain vegetable.  Faced with desserts or sweets, the limit is three bites.*  

*I think of this one as The Annie Rule, named after my stepmother.  She swears by it as the single strategy with which she has maintained a healthy weight for, like, forty years.

That's it:  The Bearing Diet For Not Eating So Damn Much.  Does it look hard to follow?  Or complicated?  It hasn't felt complicated or even very difficult to me -- although the rules developed gradually.  I tried some rules that I later threw out; for instance, I tried and abandoned "no sweets" and "no snacks," but did settle on "no bedtime snack."

The big question -- still theoretical, I might add -- is, how would my behavior change if I wasn't in loss mode?  It's going to happen eventually -- either I'll hit my target, or I'll get pregnant.  One of these things will happen.  I won't be trying to lose weight forever.

I guess I'd allow myself a larger breakfast, I'd drink more alcohol, I'd serve myself bread/pasta/grains more freely.  I'd still periodically pre-plan my day's meals, only for a higher calorie range -- maybe something like 1850-2150 calories (gleaned from this nutritional needs calculator that takes lactation into account, and within a couple hundred calories, reinforcing my previous engineering estimate based on my weight loss rate).  I'd probably drink more milk and use more butter on purpose.  

I think I'd still stick to the one-plate meals, the Annie Rule, and the fruit-cheese-nuts snack regime.   They're pretty powerful at maintaining the habit of moderation. 

Eat, drink, and eat some more.

I posted my weight loss graph a couple of days ago and noted that I'd been less careful about  my energy intake; the slope of the graph had changed.  I went back to measuring stuff for a couple of days and was pleased to begin seeing new numbers again.  

Mistakes teach you things.  I learned something very important:  Alcohol is not really my friend, at least when it comes to sticking to an eating plan.   It's not so much the calories from alcohol itself; it's that, if I have more than a couple of glasses of wine, I completely lose the ability to say "no thanks" to the entire tray of cheese or bowl of tortilla chips or the extra serving of dinner.  Inhibitions disappear and all the reasons I have to work on my moderation skills float off and seem completely unimportant compared to wow, this manchego cheese complements the Cab perfectly.   I wonder how the gouda compares?

Just from the random variation in my social life and dinner plans, there were three or four occasions over the past few weeks where I was in close proximity to an open bottle of wine and didn't need to drive anywhere.   I like wine.  I had two or three glasses and enjoyed myself on those occasions.  I also happened to eat a lot more than I needed at those meals. 

The correction here is obvious.  No, it's not quit drinking.  I don't have a drinking problem.  I have an eating problem, and drinking makes it worse.  The solution is portion control.  My eating problem and I can handle one beer or one glass of wine.  At least while I'm trying to drop pounds -- now and during maintenance when the scale is on the high end of the range -- it's simply a bad idea to put an open, full bottle of wine on the dinner table.  

I told Mark that from now on I'm sticking to beer (which comes in small containers -- I usually keep 7-ouncers around for myself, and split 12-ouncers of better stuff with Mark) and (this is the hard part) wine that comes in itty-bitty bottles.  Now that you can get pretty good table wine in boxes ("casks" they call it now...), there's that too; I tend to keep box wine around for cooking and occasional drinking, but it's up high in the cabinet over my stove where the kids can't get it, and we don't tend to plop the box on the table where we can squirt it into our glasses without getting up from the table.