A Little Slice of Home

It's simple, yet true-to-life.  I love it.  Thanks Owen.

15 in '15!

I'm not much of a resolution maker.  I don't make serious resolutions when the new year rolls around.  Sometimes I'll mention a casual goal to someone, but I never have real intentions of reaching said goal.  However, this past new year all that changed.

In a moment of optimism around Christmas I determined it was time for some self improvement, and decided that as we rang in the new year I would set out to lose some weight.  In general I like my size, but over the past ten years I've been on a steady climb in the weight department, and I wanted to see if that weight was a permanent addition or if it could come off.  And so, my "15 (pounds) in '15" personal challenge was born.

I don't have a lot of extra time for exercise, so I decided to focus on a diet plan that would promote weight change.  I opted for a low carb approach, with some personal tweaks.  The rules were not hard and fast, more of guidelines really, but here's what I set as my diet parameters:

• 30 grams of net carbs per day (net carbs meaning that when you look at a food label you can subtract the fiber grams from the carbohydrate grams to arrive at a net carbs value for a serving of that food)
• All the fruits and vegetables I wanted (even though some low carb diets eliminate many fruits and vegetables because of their high carbohydrate contents)
• Only water to drink (no soda, juice, milk, etc.)
• No dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, etc. although I didn't try to eliminate milk-containing recipes or products, just stand-alone dairy items)
• No desserts

This took some adjustments at first.  It was particularly difficult to figure out what to take to work everyday, since I'm accustomed to packing a breakfast and lunch.  Once I figured out some good options and got into a rotation this became easier.  Typically I would eat:

Breakfast

• a hard boiled egg
• a nut/chocolate protein bar (9 grams of carbs)

Lunch

• Option 1: celery sticks and tuna salad (tuna+mayonnaise)
• Option 2: tuna wraps (tuna salad on romaine lettuce)
• Option 3: turkey wraps (sliced turkey on romaine lettuce)
• Option 4: salad (lettuce, cubed ham, olives, italian dressing)
• Option 5: broccoli salad (broccoli, craisins, nuts, bacon, dressing [mayo+sugar+vinegar])
• Side: grape tomatoes, mixed nuts

Dinner varied greatly day-to-day.  Sometimes I really broke the carbs "budget" for the day as the rest of the family would have a carb-heavy meal.  Most of the time I managed to keep my carb portions small, and filled my plate with meat (salmon, chicken, ground beef, hot dogs) and vegetables.  I never ate any bread  (lettuce "buns" for me with hamburgers and hot dogs).  Sometimes it took some creativity to find things to eat, but I definitely never went hungry.  I just had to concentrate more on what I was eating than I normally do.  And that was probably a good thing.

So did it work?  Actually, very well!  Here's a plot of my progress:

As you can see, the results were almost immediate.  I originally intended to stick to the diet for three months, but when the progress took off so quickly I managed to reach my goal by the end of February and decided to call it good after two months.

I've included my Fitbit step count as proof that I really wasn't doing a significant amount of exercise over that period.

And has the weight stayed off?  I've waited to record this because I wanted to see if the results were permanent.  It's now almost four months later and I'd say that the fluctuations in the graph are probably attributable to measurement error and normal weight changes.  I definitely didn't spike back up when I went off the diet.

I should note that I did stick with my new low carb breakfast and lunch options, at least for work days.  Weekends I'm back to carb-heavy options most of the time.  And I don't have restrictions on what I eat for dinner, but I do still drink water most of the time.  So there have been some longer term changes in my diet.

Would this work for everyone?  I don't know.  I've had a couple of friends try it, and their results have not been so dramatic.  Maybe some dietary variations are more important than others, or there are other factors we haven't considered.  In any case, I think it's worth a try.  It definitely worked for me, and now I'm a bonafide resolution keeper!

Horrorstör

I just finished Horrostör by Grady Hendrix.  I'm not typically one to pick up a scary story, and Christmas break is not normally the time I'd expect to find myself engrossed in something this creepy.  I heard about Horrostör back in October, but my library hold just got to the top of the queue, so here we are.

A few years ago I tried another scary read - House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  It was a lot of fun, but ultimately turned out to be too much for me and I had to give it up before I got to the end.  I'm still wondering how it turned out.  The problem was the context of the story, creepy crazy things happening in someone's home.  That gets in my head, and at the time we had a new baby that needed lots of middle-of-the-night attention.  There I was, alone in the dark, and freaking myself out.

The same thing happened even more years ago when I watched the movie Signs.  I'm a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan's early films, and Signs is no exception.  I really enjoyed it, and the ending was a great fulfillment of the whole movie.  I'm glad I didn't give up halfway through, but maybe I should have.  At that time we also had a new baby, and back then I was also spending lots of alone time, by myself, in the dark.  After Signs I was wound up for days thinking every shadow or creak was one of those creepy aliens lurking about the house.

As you may recall, the whole Signs plot is centered around this one family's home, and how the alien invasion gets personal when they have to stand their ground where they live.

Some time later I saw Cloverfield when it first came out, another alien invasion story, and you know what?  I loved it.  It was scary and exciting and new and I really enjoyed it.  But the best part about it was that I didn't "take it home" with me.  I slept like a baby after seeing it that night, and never gave it a second thought.  Why?  Because the alien invader is huge, and it's set in the big city.

Horrostör did the same thing for me, turning the haunted house genre into something I can enjoy because the story is set in a furniture store.  Brilliant!  It was scary.  It was disturbing.  And it was fun.  But best of all, at the end of the day it doesn't stick with me to the point that it makes my home an uncomfortable place to be.  Even in the middle of the night, up in the dark with yet another baby.  I suppose if I ever find myself at Ikea during a power outage I may have end up regretting my choice, but I'll take that chance.

Thanks Grady.