One day I swung by a big name electronics store, looking for a new pair that would work better, but didn’t find anything that looked too appealing. I didn’t know what I was really looking for, I mean, I assumed athletic people needed to listen to music while they ran just like I did, so it stood to reason they’d already solved this problem, but if they had, I wasn’t finding it on the shelves.

When I got home, I hit up Google, and in less than 5 minutes I found myself with an incredible selection of ‘sport’ headphones of all shapes and sizes. Still not really knowing what I was looking for (and hating to spend money on something I might dislike) I was pretty reluctant to buy anything without being able to physically inspect them first – especially when every single set of headphones I checked had a mix of rave and terrible reviews. Eventually, I found myself coming back to the Sennheiser MX85 Sport Series again and again, so I figured I’d take a shot.

I’m really glad I did, because I think these things really rock. I’m not an audiofile, so I can’t speak intelligently to the sound quality, but I don’t have any complaints. What I can say, is that these things stay in your ears, even when you’re a big lumbering dude who has no idea how to run properly, and even when you drop your iPod shuffle while doing said lumbering. They stay in your ears, and they’re comfortable, and that’s exactly what I wanted. All in all, I couldn’t be happier with them.

It feels a little odd to be raving about a purchase I made months ago, and even odder still to think that this post about my headphones is twice as long as my post about my 5k. So odd in fact, that I almost didn’t write this out. For someone with steady employment, buying something in the $30 price range isn’t really an accomplishment, particularly when compared with running farther than you’ve ever ran before in your life, so what’s the big deal?

It might sound a bit silly, but buying those headphones was in investment in my health. I didn’t buy a home gym, or a treadmill, or some gimmick on tv telling myself that once I had it, I’d start using it to get healthy – I was already in the gym, doing the hard part, and when an opportunity to make an excuse not to go came up (“I need to get new headphones”), I refused to use it. Instead, I invested in the commitment I’d already made to myself and, in doing so, strengthened it.

So, when I say I love my headphones, I really do. Not because of how they sound, or because they don’t fall out, but because they serve as a reminder of how I’m slowly changing my life for the better.

Being in California, most places I eat now are required to have calorie counts available upon request, but this is really above and beyond. I love it, and would love to see more places adopt this kind of proactive approach.

Found on Consumerist

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I read somewhere once, that one of the difficulties with being on anti-depressants is that once you start taking them you feel fine, and begin to think you don’t need them anymore. In a way, I feel like I’ve reached a similar point in my weight loss; a dangerous point where I feel good about the progress I’ve made, and start looking too far forward, at the expense of the present. In past weight loss attempts, this is the point where I would lose my way. I’d justify eating one bad thing “Because I’d been doing so well,” and that one bad thing would lead to another, which would then lead to more, until eventually I’d be right back where I started (or worse).

Luckily, I have a much more accurate and objective response mechanism for my weight than I ever have in the past – this site. I can’t just dismiss last night’s binge in the way that I used to, because now I have the evidence of its impact staring me straight back in the face. Even better, I have the ability to see that yesterday isn’t the whole story.

Looking back at my food intake for the last 3 months, I can see that I’ve broken my calories goal by more than 1,000 calories more than once, and none of them caused my weight trend to come to a crashing halt like it did today. After evaluating my rate of weight-loss over the last two weeks, I see that it has been steadily slowing. I also see that I have more day’s over my goal than I did the previous four weeks combined. So even though I’ve been averaging below my calorie goal, the big changes in caloric intake from day to day have had a negative effective on my metabolism; my midnight meal was just the nail in the coffin.

Armed with that data, I’m hoping that renewing my focus will be an easier process. I knew there would be obstacles and plateau’s to face along the way, and I never intended for this to be some sort of sprint to the finish line, but I didn’t expect to run into something like this quite so soon.

While it’s certainly an interesting read, The Hacker’s Diet isn’t revolutionary – it essentially boils down to eat less calories than you burn. However, John’s use of exponentially smoothed moving averages to trend one’s weight and become liberated from the tyranny of a fickle scale really struck a chord with me – both as a geek and someone who’s dieted diligently only to see the scale not reflect it.

I knew I wanted to incorporate those calculations into My Wasted Life, and luckily I decided to do a quick Google search before I started, because most of the work had already been done for me via The Hacker’s Diet plugin for WordPress. All of the weight calculations and charts on this site are based off of the code in that plugin. I had to do a bit of poking around to get the data displayed in the way I wanted (details of which can be found here) but that was trivial compared to all the work that had already been done.

So, despite the fact that neither of them will actually ever see this, I want to express sincere thanks to both John Walker and Keith Thornhill. Their work on The Hacker’s Diet and the The Hacker’s Diet plugin helped make this site possible.

How are you calculating calories?

Guesswork mostly. I’ve been trying to eat at home more, and since I don’t really cook, those calories are easy to track as they’re listed right on the package of whatever I’m eating. When I eat out it’s trickier, but not impossible. As long as I’m willing to honestly judge portion sizes, I can get all the data I need using sites like Calorie King & Nutrition Data. Obviously in those cases the calories I’m listing are only best estimates (which I’ve been denoting with a tilde before the calorie count), but I’m working diligently to make those estimates accurate.

Eventually I plan to eat out less and cook more, but unless I buy a digital scale to weight out ingredients it will still result in the same basic guessing game. I figure as long as I’m seeing results, then I’ll assume my estimates are correct.

You don’t seem to be eating much healthy food…

No, I don’t. The scary part is, the meals I’ve been tracking here are exponentially better for me than what I was eating before. Up until about 3 months ago, I was literally eating fast food (Carl’s Jr, Del Taco, etc) 2-3 times a day.

I know I could lose more weight if I drank nothing but water, but I honestly don’t think I could maintain that. I’ve tried going cold turkey on things like that before and it’s never worked out. Rather than give myself rules I know I’ll end up breaking (and thus feel bad about), I’m trying to make intelligent decisions and use my better judgment.

That’s a terribly risky proposition for a ‘diet,’ but it’s a skill I’m going to have to develop if I ever want to live a truly healthy lifestyle. By making small changes, one or two things at time, I’ll eventually reach the same healthy lifestyle I could theoretically implement all at once, but this way I think I actually have a chance of succeeding.

Why is your goal 2,500 calories? Isn’t that alot?

Yeah, but I’m a big guy. When I started building this site, I used just about every tool I could find online to help me determine what were realistic goals.

I discovered that the recommended rate of weight loss while remaining healthy is 1-2 pounds a week in most cases; far less than I would have expected from shows like The Biggest Loser. In fact, most nutritionists seemed to agree that normal, healthy weight loss should not exceed 1% of your total body weight per week, which for me would be no more than 3.25 pounds. I then calculated my BMI, my BMR (2,476-2,809), how many calories I was actually burning in an average day (2,971-3,358), etc.

Armed with those numbers, and the knowledge that cutting 500-1000 calories a day results in 1-2 pounds a week, 2,500 was pretty straight forward – it’s about 500-800 less than I’m currently burning, and allows me room to burn more via exercise while staying in that healthy range of 1%.

It’s not the most aggressive weight-loss plan in the world, but I think it’s a realistic one I can stick to.