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Nick Cotter  //  Wired, tired, and tedious to know.

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Feb 26 / 1:57pm

Snake Oil Supplements

A cunning interactive chart showing the worthiness, or not, of different supplements, based on the evidence so far:

snakeoil_supplements_956.png
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Filed under  //  fail   food   health   science   visualisation   vitamins   win  

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Feb 23 / 6:37am

Plateau Central

An update on my weight loss progress: I'm now well and truly flopping about some kind of weight loss plateau:

My relentless progress from last year has essentially relented. I blame:
  • a barrage of antibiotics, which I in turn blame upon an annoying dog bite (both the dog and the bite are annoying)
  • an endless series of colds (we're each in the midst of one at the moment)
  • nasty cold wet weather - not the crisp frozen Winter mornings or the mild damp English weather, but just plain nasty and unpleasant to run in, particularly with a cold
  • Morgan, who now likes chips. Which means so do I...
I'm doing my damnedest to get back on track, but it's hard going.
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Filed under  //  fail   health   weight  

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Jan 19 / 2:31am

Attack Of The Norovirus!

One other way to lose weight fast is to get infected by a norovirus, as you can see from this morning's chart:

Now, back to bed...
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Filed under  //  health   illness   weight  

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Jan 18 / 3:38am

pitched battle on the plateau approaching?

I'm currently struggling to maintain my previous rate of descent, judging by my FatWatch graph this week:

So far I've been fortunate that my running takes out more calories than I put in. I'm still scaling down my eating after the holidays, and I've enlisted Tweet What You Eat to help me keep track of my inputs. I'm continuing to use RunKeeper to help track my output.

To raise the output I've started running longer routes. I added a half mile or so to my standard route last week, and I'm going to try and continue increasing it as the days get longer and warmer. But I'm getting more efficient at it, and there's a limit to how long I can run during a normal working day.

To keep my inputs down I'm starting by monitoring via TWYE and tweaking any treats and pangs of hunger by keeping an eye on it. But there's also my basic diet to consider. I'm a big fan of  The Hacker's Diet and its simple engineering approach: weight loss = calories out - calories in. I find most diets are just tricks, that, when successful, do just that, but often confound the issue by talking about different types of fat etc. 

Avoiding any complexity in this matter I'll probably start going down the raw food path. I've tried this before with some success. Again, the impact on weight loss is that you usually eat less, unless you can munch your way through a hundredweight of carrots. But there are general health benefits as well, plus hardly any washing up to do! This will be easier to try later on in the year when we get a bit more seasonal fruit (especially our own).

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Filed under  //  diet   exercise   health   running  

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Jan 11 / 1:07am

Dive! Dive!

I'm narrowly brushing against my goal line, weightwise, as you can see in my FatWatch chart this week:

It's quite a struggle to get back on track after the holidays, but I think I can do it!
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Filed under  //  exercise   goals   health   running  

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Jan 5 / 3:36am

Christmas Blowout Debrief

I appear to have survived the holiday feedfest relatively intact. Here's the FatWatch graph showing the numbers that shape my world, tummy:

You can definitely see the flat part with gaps in the measurements, corresponding to the start of the festivities. But although I've been heading for a collision with my goal line (the green dashed line) I think I've managed to veer away at the last minute. The next few days will tell, as I resume my daily running.
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Filed under  //  exercise   health   walking  

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Dec 24 / 3:11am

Christmas Eve Run

After a few days entombed with a mysterious illness that sapped my strength and consumed my will, I took one look at my latest FatWatch graph (which I will not reproduce here, as it is a bit embarrassing; suffice to say I'll show all once the festivities have died down in the New Year), and decided that I needed to get back on the road.

Today's walk/run was a little shorter than usual at 3.28 miles, but my time was much the same, just less than an hour. This may sound terrible for a run, but actually I did rather well in my own efforts. The main trouble was the ice. It took much longer to get up the hill out of Christow than normal - next time I'll bring an ice pick. The downhill stretch was similarly slower, for fear of going much, much faster...

Anyway, it's put me in a good frame of mind for the rest of the day, and I did manage to get some nice photos along the way.

Here's a view from the top of the hill just over Christow looking toward the Teign Valley:

The puddle I normally splash through had been changed:

Everything has taken on a nicely eerie wintry air:

And the most leisurely part of the run, the flat bit at the top, is now The Road:

Hopefully I'll manage to do a few more runs over the festive season, it really has been invigorating!
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Filed under  //  exercise   health   photos   walking   winter  

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Dec 21 / 12:40pm

Christmas Blowout

I'm now fully prepared for the Christmas Blowout.

Here is my weekly FatWatch graph:

Here's the quarterly graph - you can easily see the effect of adopting a rigorous "walk 4 miles every day" policy:

Now it's just a case of eating all the pies.
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Filed under  //  exercise   health   walking  

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Nov 30 / 10:12am

mmm.... graphs

Unfortunately not mmm.... cookies.

Here's my latest FatWatch graph:

As you can see the slope is leveling off a bit. But this is to be expected as I get more efficient at walking and running. And most importantly the slope is still downhill.

Note also my goal (the green dashed line) is woefully optimistic...
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Filed under  //  exercise   health   walking  

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Nov 24 / 2:11am

mass plateau approaching... remain calm!

Unfortunately it seems that my rate of descent has slowed:

I think this is primarily because I didn't do much walking over the weekend or yesterday. I think it hasn't risen only because I kept my food intake down yesterday deliberately. 

This will need to be remedied today!

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Filed under  //  exercise   health   walking  

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