Author Archives: Chris

Before & After: Why I Care About My Health

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At the beginning of the year, I commented on my weight loss success. To recap, that guy over on the right, that was me back in April 2007. Looking at the picture now, I barely recognize myself. Wow, I was fat. I couldn’t do a single pull-up without a machine providing weight assistance. Then, in September 2008, my first daughter was born. That was the motivation I needed to not just lose weight, but to improve my overall fitness. I was determined to be a healthy influence for my kids. Fortunately, the event coincided with learning about carbohydrate restriction for weight loss and a Paleo lifestyle for overall health.

Fast forward four years. We’re spending the July 4 weekend with my parents in Big Bear Lake. There’s a nice park with a playground down by the lake, about half a mile from the house. Playground equipment isn’t just fun for children and is way more exhilarating than a stuffy old gym. There are kids climbing, swinging, and sliding, contributing to an energetic atmosphere. The warm sun beats down me, manufacturing that essential of hormones, vitamin D. Not only is the equipment is good for the climbing and sliding you’d expect, but it’s good for pull-ups and dips. No one has told any of the kids that they need to go to the gym to exercise, they’re doing all of this for fun.

So now this is me, playing with my daughter at the park this morning after breakfast. Inspired by MovNat, I couldn’t help myself. I saw those angled supports on the swing set and thought it would be fun to climb to the top. It turned out to be really easy. After doing a few pull-ups at the top, my daughter looked at me and asked, “Are we swinging, Dada?” I replied, “Yes, sweetie, we are swinging.”

Moments like this are why I’ve become so obsessed with health and fitness over the last few years. I can play with my daughters. I mean, really play with them. I’m not standing around the edges of the playground, merely encouraging them to do things I can no longer do myself. Someday they will be able to climb higher, run faster, and jump farther than me. But that day is far off and, as long as I’m around, I will give them a run for their money.

No Fair Food This Year

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Every year my wife and I attend the San Diego County Fair at least once or twice. Aside from the garden exhibits and animals, one of the big lures is the food. I mean, doesn’t this look delicious?

Fried Food at the Fair

Fair Fare

Not pictured is the deep fried s’more, which was a big hit with my daughter last year. It appears to have been replaced by the deep fried brownie.

A few years ago, I could eat a funnel cake, a battered onion, a doughnut chicken sandwich, some Indian fry bread, and follow that with various and sundry deep fried candy bars. As each year passed, we ate a little less of the food. Last year I could only stomach a couple bites of funnel cake after helping my daughter eat her deep fried s’more.

I took my oldest daughter to the fair today, to get her out of the house and shower her with attention after the birth of her baby sister. We even stood in front of the vendor pictured above. In the end, I ate nothing at the fair. There wasn’t anything that looked at all appetizing. Actually, the smoked turkey legs always look awesome, but I refuse to pay $10 for something I can make so easily myself. Maybe finally removing these foods from my diet has had an effect on my taste. Maybe the fact that I’ve been slowly replacing my wardrobe with size small shirts and, just yesterday, purchased several pairs of size 32 shorts, kept me from partaking of such disgustingly unhealthy fare. Either way, I don’t really miss eating that stuff.

Welcome Brenna Rose

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Brenna Rose

Brenna Rose

At 12:25 AM on Sunday, 12 June 2011, we welcomed our second daughter, Brenna Rose, into the world. Weighing 5 pounds, 14 ounces (2.67 kg) at 19 inches (48.26), she’s a tiny thing. Mom and baby are doing great. We think she’s another redhead, but we’re not entirely sure yet.

Trying Out a CSA

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csaweek1CSA is short for community-supported agriculture. Last summer, the company I work for set itself up as a delivery location for the Sage Mountain Farm CSA. I’d been talking about signing up for it since it was announced and, last week, finally did so. I pledged for four boxes, just to try it out, and my first box was delivered on Wednesday. Getting the food home was interesting. I take the train to work, so I felt a bit strange standing on the train platform holding a box of fruit and vegetables.

Wow, what a lot of food. The picture on this post doesn’t do it justice. I was only able to fit about half of the included produce in my refrigerator and left the rest on the counter. Unfortunately, after Saturday’s heat, this meant that we had to throw some of it out. But, I was able to use most of what was on the counter before we did. I’ve never taken the time to try cooking beets or parsnips, and rarely buy chard, so having it selected for me was fun. That was one reason I wanted to try a CSA.

The sheer amount of food in the box caused me more stress than it was worth. I had expected the box to be much smaller and that we would still be able to visit the farmers market, which we enjoy attending. Suddenly something I thought would be a joy has become a burden. Why is there so much lettuce? I don’t even like salad. How can we possibly eat all this food? Where can I store it every week? How will I fit other food in my refrigerator? The small box, which I ordered, is advertised as being able to feed a family of two or three for one week. The members of that hypothetical family must be big fans of Michael Pollan, because they’d have to be eating mostly plants. We are not that family.

I have three more boxes coming over the next three weeks, so I’ll see how it shakes out. I’ll need to figure out what to do with the food when I receive it. I’m thinking of starting an extended family dinner and game night on Wednesdays, cooking as much of the food as possible and sending everyone home with leftovers. The rest I’ll prepare just enough so it won’t take up too much room in the refrigerator. Even so, I think that after the fourth box, we’ll go back to making our regular Saturday trips to the Vista Farmers Market. The market is more enjoyable for us. It gets us outdoors, we can pick our own food, and we can interact with the farmers and vendors.

For Want of a Newline

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Today I had the pleasure of spending three hours debugging an obscure bug. An obscure bug I caused by introducing a newline. That little punk, 0x0A.

I released a new version of a command line program. It’s an elegant piece of work, combining a marvelously complex-but-intuitive configuration for system administrators with a absolutely simple interface for users. To use the command, the user runs it with a couple of arguments and it prints out a single line of useful text derived from the marvelously complex configuration.

But, it doesn’t print a newline.

Anyone who has encountered a command like this knows well my irritation. You end up with something like this:

my awesome prompt> some_lame_command
my awesome prompt>e answer

Argh!

The workaround most of us use is to see the above, face-palm, then run something like this:

my awesome prompt> echo `some_lame_command`
42 is obviously the answer
my awesome prompt>

Being the arrogant bastard programmer that I am, I decided to fix this. Since all commands print newlines, everyone should already be assuming that this one does too and should already be handling it in the proper manner. When writing a shell script, the distinction between newline-printing and non-newline-printing commands is irrelevant. In either Bourne shell,

FROBBED=`frobnosticate`

or C shell,

setenv FROBBED `frobnosticate`

the shell is benevolent enough to remove the newline, if it exists. After all, this is the most commonly desired behavior when assigning command output to a variable. However, things are a bit different when switching to a programming language, like Perl:

$ENV{FROBBED} = `frobnosticate`; # Caution, newline ahead!

Sure, it looks more or less the same, but veteran Perl programmers will immediately grimace when reading the above. Unlike the shell, Perl, like other programming languages, will preserve the output of the command. In this case, preserving data and letting the programmer decide how to use it is the most commonly desired behavior. Since everything coming from an external command ends with a newline, the environment variable being set in this case will have a newline. This will almost always cause a problem. One that, as I’ve learned, is not always easy to find. Since stripping input of newlines is just as common as the desire to preserve data, Perl makes this easy and most Perl programmers will habitually write this:

chomp( $ENV{FROBBED} = `frobnosticate` );

Now it doesn’t matter if the command prints a newline or not, the chomp function has your back. It’s just like being in the warm embrace of the shell, only with a little extra syntax.

So it turns out that one of the engineering groups I support was using a Perl script that set an environment variable as in the first example. The value of this environment variable was then being passed off to the batch system and used by an engineering program as a network address to connect to. Of course, the program made the fatal mistake of trusting user input and, in a spectacular fashion, failed to connect to the server whose name just happened to contain a newline.

After chasing down a couple of red herrings which left me flummoxed, one of the affected users shared with me an error log and the script that generated it. There, in all its syntax highlighted, monospaced glory was the environment variable being set without attempting to trim off the newline. I quickly released an update that reverted the newline behavior and the problem went away. My engineers—at least, the subset using this particular script—could once again get their work done.

By far, this isn’t the worst thing I’ve done to our batch system. One time I caused all jobs that launched on Solaris hosts to immediately fail. Whoops.

Anyway, what’s the lesson to be learned from today’s experience?

Never—and I’ll repeat that, never—assume everyone will be doing the right thing. Inevitably, someone won’t be.

There’s a corollary to today’s lesson. When coming across something that could be improved with a small change, don’t. Seriously, just don’t. Inevitably, someone will be depending on the current behavior, no matter how right or wrong it may seem.

A 30 Day Challenge, of Sorts

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Over the weekend, while reading posts from Richard Nikoley about Leangains and Primal Toad about his 30 day Paleo challenge, I got to thinking. Why not do a 30 day challenge of sorts myself?

Why of sorts?

I’ve never been one to stick to anything every day for an extended period of time. Even 30 days is extended for me. After a couple of weeks I tend to get bored or distracted and generally change things or abandon them altogether. This blog is a perfect example of the sporadic nature of my hobbies. I tend to make permanent changes to my life gradually. A little change here, another complementary change down the road, and so on until they add up to a big change. How I ended up in my current state of Paleo illustrates that progression pretty well. So I’m not taking this challenge as seriously as I perhaps should, but I’d like to try something.

I wrote previously that I weighed in at about 172 pounds. Well, that was three weeks ago and I’m still hovering around that number. A friend of mine, @augmentedfourth on Twitter, started tweeting his daily weight. Last week I decided to give it a shot.

Tweet Your Weight Chart, 14 Feb 2011

Granted, the data are rather limited, but the first thing I noticed is that I haven’t just plateaued, but my weight appears to be trending upward! I decided that I had to do something to break through my plateau. Fortunately, this coincided with reading the aforementioned posts. So I put a plan together.

First, I will start using the FitDay account that I opened way back on 14 September 2010, when I weighed in at 186 pounds, and hadn’t touched since. I’ll have to get over my initial annoyance with entering food and activities and my displeasure at discovering that I’ve only lost 14 pounds in the last five months.

Second, I will re-craft my workout based on the Leangains descriptions. Today I performed deadlifts, chin-ups, and some crunches. More importantly, I will stick to a gym schedule and track my progress.

Third, of course, I will stop cheating on my diet. My biggest problems are drinking milk and going back for seconds (and sometimes thirds) at dinner. It’s not like I ever eat bread or candy, but I did have a few chips at a Mexican restaurant last night.

I’ll do my best to stick with this plan for at least 30 days so I can give it a full and fair evaluation. Maybe it will help me break through my plateau and become one of those incremental lifestyle changes. As a bonus, I may even see some muscle definition.

My Paleo Success Story

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I never thought I’d post a weight loss success story. Why would anyone care? However, with my ninja post, I made the decision to start putting more stuff out there. I imagine at the very least that some of my friends and family would enjoy the writing. Heck, if even one person finds a post interesting, useful, or inspiring, it was worth the effort to write.

I don’t have any of those semi-nude cell phone bathroom mirror pictures taken before I started losing weight, because there was never a day when I said I was starting this journey. My first drivers license, at the age of 16, listed my weight as 165 pounds. Over the years, through college and my various jobs as a computer programmer, I gained weight slowly. I always told myself that I’d start eating better and would start going to the gym on a regular basis. I won’t go any more into the entire history of my weight loss, since I already wrote about it during Mark Sisson’s last Primal Challenge.

chris_pre_paleoOf course, not having taken a picture of myself doesn’t mean that I don’t have any pre-Paleo pictures. A few weeks ago, while I was watching people make New Years resolutions, I lamented on Twitter that I didn’t have any “before” pictures. Mere minutes later I received an email from my dad with the photo to the right, taken in April 2007, a month after moving into my new house. Gee, thanks, Dad.

I always knew I was over-weight, but I never looked at myself and thought I was fat. I’m looking at myself now and thinking, “Wow, I was fat.” I must have realized it at the time, because I started keeping track of my weight, on a semi-regular weekly basis, in May 2007. According to my records, I peaked at 225 pounds. At first, losing weight wasn’t easy. But then I had two breakthroughs. The first was in mid-2008 when my wife was diagnosed with gestational diabetes and we both limited carbohydrates in our diets. The second was in March 2010 when I went Paleo. This second breakthrough is clearly visible in the chart.

weight_chart_jan2011

About five years ago I started studying again at the karate dojo at which I originally earned my black belt, when I was 18 years old. Shortly after I left for college and karate became one of those things I’d “get back to eventually.” Well, 10 years passed before I finally did. Unfortunately, when I pulled out my old gi, it didn’t fit. I had to order a new gi in a larger size. I never liked this new gi, because, while it fit my rotund physique, it was clearly too large for me. But it worked, and after a couple of years I earned my second degree black belt. However, as I approached my third degree test, I set my first goal. I would get my weight to 180 and buy myself a new gi.

I finally reached 180 in November 2010, but it wasn’t enough. I looked at myself and decided that my waist circumference was still too large to justify buying any new clothes. So I kept going.

As I write this, I weigh in at 172 pounds. I’ve had to buy new pants for the cold weather and I’m just barely keeping my old shorts up with a belt cinched to the last hole. Last weekend I decided that, as a late birthday present to myself, I could buy a new gi.

As I shopped online, I realized that I had never gotten rid of my old gi, the one I wore in high school when I earned my black belt. I dug it out of the garage, tried it on, and it fit. I was ecstatic (and I saved some money). Being able to fit into something old like this is even better than buying something new (don’t worry, I’ll be doing that soon enough). It’s amazingly motivating, too. I remember five years ago, struggling to get through my kata and sucking wind during bag drills, hating every minute. Now both are so much easier and I love doing them.

Here are the closest things I have to before and after pictures. On the left, taken in July 2008, I’m wearing the one-size-too-large gi. On the right, my 17 year old gi, which I’m much more comfortable wearing.

chris_pre_paleo_gichris_post_paleo_gi

Not Ninja Enough

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Last year, at SCaLE, John made an observation. “You are not ninja enough,” he told me. As a group of us were walking down a hallway in the hotel, I walked over to what I assumed was a portal used for catering events. As I pulled on the doors, finding them locked, John pointed out that I couldn’t go there, for the aforementioned reason.

Last night, as I watched my daughter fall down the stairs, the back of her head hitting the last two hardwood steps, I realized I am in fact not ninja enough. She’s fine, by the way, it wasn’t a bad fall and only scared her a little. The worst part for me, as I reflect on it, is that I knew it was going to happen. Well, I knew it could happen.

Kaylee, who is two years old and has been walking since she was 10 months old, walked up a flight of five hardwood stairs to meet me on the landing and take a book I was offering her. As she took the book and started turning to walk up the next flight of stairs, I observed that she was close to the edge and, if her balance wasn’t just right, she could fall backwards down the stairs.

Sure enough, this is exactly what happened.

Had I taken the simple precaution of stepping closer to her and moving in behind her, I could have repaired her balance when she lost it. Instead, perhaps lulled by her otherwise incredibly good balance, I shrugged off the thought. Right before I found myself lunging forward to catch her, my arms closing on empty air.

In Kiado-Ryu, one of our tenets is, Action is Faster than Reaction. In a fight, a punch can be thrown faster than it can be blocked. To act, an opponent merely needs to think about their action before executing it, a process invisible to an outside observer. To react, the action must be observed, processed, a reaction decided upon, and finally executed. Had I acted, I would not have put myself in a position where reaction was necessary.

Further, and only partially related to the moral of this story, as I prepare for my third degree Black Belt, I’m starting to consider other activities to augment my training. CrossFit is an obvious choice. While I enjoy the gym in concept, I’ve never been a fan of lifting the same weights in the same way every day. I also recently learned about MovNat, and the idea of functional fitness appeals to me. These activities would train me to move more naturally and efficiently when I do need to act or even react. Parkour flat out looks awesome, but I think I’m nowhere near ready to start that. Finally, for tactical training, I just purchased lifetime memberships for my entire family at FrontSight, so we can take all of the offered courses, some of which (as I’m told by those who have attended, who also advise me to ignore their infomercial-esque website) are downright awesome.

In short, I have a theme for 2011. I must level up my ninja.

Resolutions for 2011

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Welcome to the year two thousand eleven. Well, not quite yet; I’m actually writing this with about an hour to go. I’ve never been one for so-called New Year’s Resolutions. After all, why put off until the first of January what you can reasonably start on the twelfth of August?

With that said, here are (in no particular order) my resolutions for the next 365 days.

Spend more time with my daughter.

Not really a resolution, since I already try to spend as much time as possible with her. Still, it seemed important enough to reiterate at the beginning of this list.

Read more.

And not just Twitter. I already do more of that than I probably should. Having several hundred unread items in Google Reader is normal for me, especially now that I have subscribed to so many great nutrition and fitness blogs.

I haven’t had a cable television subscription for months, so if I’m not at my computer (and I use Linux, so you know I’m not playing games) I have the time to read a book. It’s been a long time since I read one or two books per month. In fact, it took me several months to get through the last book I read, The Three Musketeers. I did manage to read through Manthropology since receiving it for Christmas (I should write a review), so I figure it’s a combination of picking the right books and setting aside the time to read them.

Write more.

I neglect my blog, sometimes so much I start to wonder why I bother having one. On my to-do list for some time has been to clean up my blog. I still have too many categories from the days before WordPress supported tags, and images in a lot of my old posts are broken. Worse, I’ll go months without posting anything. Worse yet, I have a handful of half-written posts; always thinking I’ll finish them later. Later never seems to come.

Writing more also applies to programming. There is at least one project I started but never finished. Sure, I can blame my last computer crashing and life generally getting in the way, but how hard would it be to just sit down and finish it? Then there all the Perl modules I write. Unfortunately, most of those are for work, so I’m unable to release them. I tried once, but didn’t get very far.

Also, all those blogs I mentioned in the last resolution? I should comment when I think I have something to say, or participate in forums when they’re available.

Be more Paleo.

While I’ve eaten a fairly low carbohydrate diet since my wife was pregnant with our daughter over two years ago (my wife was diagnosed with gestational diabetes), it wasn’t until last March when I started looking at diet from a Paleo perspective. Looking at a graph of my weight, that really marked a change. From a peak of 235 pounds around three years ago, I finally dropped under 200 in March. As I write this, I’m weighing in at 178 with my eye on getting down to 165.

So far, even though I appear to be “eating Paleo,” I still acquire my meat from Costco. From a budget perspective, this isn’t too bad, but their meat is still conventionally raised and fed grain. There is a local meat CSA which I am interested in joining. Maybe this will be the year I start spending money on quality instead of quantity.

In addition to the meat CSA, there’s one that has partnered with the company I work for to make weekly deliveries of produce at one of our office buildings. I may join this CSA to augment our semi-regular Saturday morning visits to the Vista Farmers Market.

Join a CrossFit Box.

It’s all the rage in the Paleo community and I’ve never been a huge fan of lifting weights and I’ve always loathed chronic cardio. In fact, there’s one within walking distance of my house. Looks like I’m out of excuses.

Get into MovNat.

Because it looks like fun. That’s the kind of shape I want to be in.

In 2012 (if the world doesn’t end) I might throw parkour and ninjitsu into the mix because how cool would that be?

Actually use Facebook.

It seems that all of my friends and family use Facebook now. They chat, they share pictures, they comment on each others’ wall, and when I see them in person I discover I’m totally out of the loop. I tried to wait it out, hoping it would go away (anyone remember MySpace?), but it’s about time I jumped on this particular bandwagon.

Nah, I’m just kidding. Maybe next year.

Almond Walnut Bread

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Almond Walnut BreadOne of my favorite types of food (you know, besides bacon), particularly during the winter holiday season, is the sweet quick bread. Since going Paleo earlier this year, this solstice staple is no longer welcome in my house. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a suitable replacement for a basic quick bread recipe.

The folks over at the Cooking with Trader Joe’s blog came up with a recipe for almond bread. I tried baking it a couple of weeks ago, with one substitution. Instead of the agave nectar, which is pure fructose, I used Trader Joe’s Desert Mesquite Honey (I don’t currently have any of the awesome raw local honey available at my local farmers market). I also added a teaspoon of xanthan gum, which is useful in gluten-free recipes. The result was a dense loaf of nutty bread, which was a big hit with everyone who tried it, especially my diabetic grandfather-in-law (who was happy to finally have something to soak up his egg yolks).

I recently modified a fruitcake recipe to be more Paleo-friendly (more on that in another post), which was also a big hit with my in-laws. I decided to try adapting the almond bread recipe using the same techniques that proved so successful with the fruitcake. Primarily, this involves the substitution of coconut flour for some of the almond meal. So, without further ado, the recipe I came up with.

  • 3 ½ 4 ½ cups almond meal
  • 1 cup coconut flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon xanthan (or guar) gum
  • 9 5 eggs
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • ½ to 1 cup walnuts, toasted
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine all of the dry ingredients.
  3. In another container, beat the eggs and add the remaining wet ingredients.
  4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix thoroughly (you may recognize this as the muffin method).
  5. Fold in the toasted walnuts.
  6. Transfer the mixture to a 5×9-inch standard loaf pan, lightly greased (I use butter and parchment paper in a wonderful clay baking dish).
  7. Pour melted butter over the top.
  8. Bake for 60 minutes or until a skewer or knife inserted in the bread comes out clean.
  9. Cool and slice (my dish yields 11 slices).

If you can’t find coconut flour, or simply want to use all almond meal in the recipe, use 4 ½ cups of almond meal and use only 5 eggs. The coconut flour absorbs a lot of moisture, so the usual advice is to use an additional 4 eggs for every cup of coconut flour. Hey, this is Paleo baking, right? The more eggs, the better.

I found most of the ingredients at Trader Joe’s. They sell one pound of almond meal for $3.99. The coconut flour we found at Henry’s, which is a Wild Oats store, now owned by Whole Foods. As for the eggs, we go through so many that we buy them at Costco.

Update (5 December 2010): After eating the bread for a week, we decided that it was a bit too dry. I’ve updated the recipe to be a bit closer to the original, using only almond meal. This also makes it a little easier and cheaper to make.