Carbohydrate Overload, Protein Deficit

I'm on my seventh day of trying out dailyburn.com and here's what I'm noticing.

Logging in everything I eat every day has, indeed, made it much easier to avoid snacking. I start the day aware that I have 2200 to 2500 calories allotted to me. It becomes like a game. I want to be sure that I have calories left at the end of the day so I can enjoy a glass of wine. So I've been eating really healthy foods during the day. Fruits and berries and oats (in various modes) at breakfast, lean sandwiches and veggies at lunch and smaller portions at dinner. So far I've always had caloric room for wine and I've gone over my target calorie range only once. In fact, as one can see in my Jan. 27 nutrition log above, I tend to finish the day below the lower end of my calorie target range. In the course of this, I've found that a glass of wine at the end of the day is more important to me than dessert. So I've pretty much cut desserts out entirely in this first week and I haven't missed them.

But dailyburn.com also sets a desirable ratio of carbs to fats to proteins and I'm finding it impossible to get green check marks (designating hitting the target range) for all three. The problem is proteins. I've been eating a ton of fruits and vegetables and—it feels unfair—they get registered as carbohydrates (which I tend to think of in terms of grains). So I'm usually either on the upper limits of my carb range or over. I have managed to keep the fat intake to hit their range, but I fall substantially short of the proteins. The 27th was one of my closest days on the protein range and I hit only 60% of my target. I had scrambled eggs for breakfast, a turkey and avacado sandwich for lunch, a fat free yogurt for afternoon snack, a beef and tofu stir fry for dinner and a cheese quesadilla for evening snack and that's all the protein I could get. Other days, I've just diced up half a brick of tofu and eaten it with soy sauce and dried bonito flakes and I can barely budge the protein meter. This will take much more work.

My friend Ron advised me to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper to keep my weight in control. I've been trying to follow his advice by eating a lot of things at breakfast and lunch, a kind of grazing approach. But what I'm grazing tends to be so low in calories that by the time I hit dinner, I tend to be at the 800 to 1000 calorie level. Since I've been ending the day in the 1900 to 2200 range, that means that half the calories I eat in the day come after dinner. And that clearly isn't the way to go if I want to shed some pounds. So this eating thing is still going to take a lot of work.

The other thing I do on the site is log in any exercise I do that day. This has been the most fun. I've tried in the past to set up spread sheets for tracking the exercise I do because seeing the accumulation is the reward. What this site does extra for me is estimate how many calories I've burned, which is a bonus (again, I've never had a clue how many calories any exercise is burning). It also has a pretty good library of video tapes showing various exercises I can do with our exercise ball, etc. The stats on the left show my exercise for the same day as my nutrition log above. I couldn't get a convenient screen shot that would show the exercise that achieved this burn, but I biked 6 miles and did 30 minutes of yoga. While logging my food is a little nerve wracking, logging my exercise is like  the lab monkey hitting the pleasure button. That means that in sensing the good feelings that will come from exercise (not the endorphins, but the whatever those things are you get when you get praised), I am more inclined to do it. So this is a win!

I don't feel like upgrading to pro yet. The pro version is mostly enhanced social network stuff and integration with your iPhone and whatnot. There is better tracking of nutrition (all those carbohydrate fruits and vegetables would pay off in great fiber stats), but I don't need those. With just what I have on the free version, I've dropped 3 pounds in the first week (low hanging fruit, I know, but 3 nonetheless).

Tracking the Details

Some 15 months ago, I decided I would try to get a handle on our monthly finances by keeping track of every penny I spent. I didn't know if I would find anything in there that would help me save money, but I figured that confronting the facts of daily spending might at least help make me more conscious of money. In the end, it worked. I decided there was a lot of money dribbling out through daily purchases of coffee and lunch up on campus. I resolved to bring my own lunches and snacks from now on and use the hot water heater I'd gotten for Noriko's office some Christmases ago. I also resolved to do more cooking at home, especially of large meals that could meet our needs for days. In fairly short order, I cut our food expenses by, I think, $300 dollars. I wasn't as conscious of other expenses, but by being generally more consciously penny-pinching we managed to actually save money at the end of the month. That, in turn has paid off in easier management of our property taxes and the recent emergency expenditure for replacing our sewer line to the street. Once the mindset kicked in, I didn't have to track our expenditures so closely anymore, but I'll be ready to do so again, should we need to.

I have now decided to take the same approach to my health. Like many men my age, I could stand a few tens of pounds. I made the transition from active teenager to more sedate adult without properly figuring out how to adjust my eating habits until I had gone much too high. In the years since my initial weight gain, I've managed to move up and down about 10 pounds, but I'm basically at equilibrium, much higher than I'd like to be. Most of the movement in my weight has been from periods of exercise (lots of biking in the summers and lots of walking in Japan). But I've been inconsistent in my exercise from season to season, which accounts for some of the weight fluctuation. But what I've really decided I have to do is get a handle on what I eat.

So I've joined a free site to help me do that called DailyBurn.com. It has a variety of features, including some social media elements, but for my purposes it will mostly be a way to track my eating and exercise in the hopes that I become very conscious of food and can shift to a healthier diet. Basically, I do two things there. I have a page that lets me track my exercise and that calculates, roughly, the number of calories I probably burned in doing it. I have another page with a "Nutrition Log" on which I record everything I eat. I have never understood how to measure calories and while it is a very rough approximation here, when I type in a food, like, say, scrambled eggs, it gives me a number of choices from which I choose a description that is close to what I ate. That description lists the calories and the grams of fat, carbs and protein in the food. When I signed in, I got on the scale and logged in my initial weight. Then I set a desired weight for my goal. The site tells me how many calories I need to eat to sustain my current weight and then sets a range of calories that I should try to stay within if I want to lose weight (a couple hundred fewer calories than what it would take to sustain my weight). It also sets a target percentage ratio for grams of fat, carbs and protein to help me make decisions about food during the day (I'm having trouble eating enough protein according to their targets, but fat and carbs are easy).

My first day, I did well on exercise (bike ride and light hiking). Up to the end of the day, I was under my daily target calories. And while I knew in advance that this was true, it was the late night wine and snacks that killed me, put me over my target range for the day (by 50 calories, so not a disaster). So I know what I need to watch first and foremost, but it will be interesting to see what else I learn about timing of foods as I try this out for awhile. I'm also hoping that the childish sense of achievement that comes with recording the exercise that day will continue to be gratifying enough that I'll keep doing it.

In the meantime, Alton Brown's recent Good Eats episode (Live and Let Diet: part 1; part 2) in which he talked about how he lost 50 pounds in the last year will serve as my general eating guide. But his advice had some elements that are a little too hard. Only one alcoholic drink and desert per week? Ack!

Geocaching: Our New Hobby

The boys and I began a new hobby yesterday: geocaching. In short, you use a GPS device to locate boxes that are hidden throughout the landscape. The position of the boxes is precisely recorded and uploaded to a website so your GPS device can find them (it goes by coordinates, not by any signal that emanates from the boxes.

To the left is the device we bought at REI for $69.95. It has about 250,000 geocache sites preloaded into it. With a separately sold update kit (basically a USB cable) you can hook it up to your computer and download more sites for future adventures. The device is pretty stripped down and took a little while to figure out how to use. But once we figured it out it was so simple to use that the boys each took turns leading us to a cache.

When you find a box, you open it up and take out a piece of paper inside and log in to show that you found it. With the paper in the box is usually a little stash of toys (small plastic animal figures, whistles and whatnot). If you've brought something along with you to put into the box, you can take out one of the toys inside.

Before buying the device, I checked out how many geocaches were available in the Santa Cruz area. It turns out that there are nearly 3000. Several are within walking distance of our house. Others are a short bike ride. Many are located within some of our favorite hiking parks. so it looks like we'll have plenty to do. The tipping point for us in thinking about whether or not to get it was precisely the fact that so many caches are so close. We can easily see a couple of kids, complaining about boredom after school, getting off their butts with their GPS and finding a couple things in the area.

The boys were really excited about the experience and want to share it with their friends. Last night, Sammy said, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Finding toys!" I replied, "You know what I like best about geocaching? Giving away our toys!"

He didn't seem to think that was such a cool thing.

Wednesday Random Ten (in homage to TBogg)

TBogg, one of my favorite bloggers, does a weekly Random Wednesday thing that I've always enjoyed but have feared doing myself. He sets his iPod to "random play" and writes down the first ten things that his iPod plays. Of course, there is always room for ridicule (who doesn't have something publicly embarrassing on their iPod?), but it is also interesting to see what sets of songs can come up.

I finally decided to try it myself this week, and here is what I got:

Idle (The Rabbit Song) — Hem
Wolf in the Breast — Cocteau Twins
Red Clay Halo — Gillian Welch
How Deep is the Ocean — Bill Evans
How Deep is the Ocean — Lonnie Johnson
Are You Experienced? — Jimi Hendrix
A Promise You Can't Keep — Dwight Yoakam
Regret — Sakamoto Ryuichi
Lover — Red Garland
Try Not To Look So Pretty — Dwight Yoakam

And since TBogg usually adds an eleventh song, just in case:
Adventure Rocket Ship — Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3

Up until the Jimi Hendrix, I figured that this list made me look like a pretty typical modern urban "metrosexual." But I think the Jimi Hendrix probably only cements that image.

Well, it's not a bad list anyway.

J Lit I Like

Following up on the post below about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I've been pretty indifferent to Japanese literature for many years now. I just inhaled the stuff when I was an undergrad just beginning my foray into Japanese studies. I still vividly remember reading Natsume Soseki's Kokoro on a ferry in the Japan Sea in February 1984. The ferry ride was tough, thirty-one hours on a rough sea, but the novel was so absorbing, I barely noticed (or, I should say, I barely remember the ferry ride itself). I plowed through much of the modern classics—Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Mori Ogai, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Shiga Naoya and many others. But once I got to grad school, I wasn't finding that much that interested me anymore, although Izumi Kyoka was an exception.

But I have read two things in recent years that I found very powerful: Medoruma Shun's short story "Droplets" (translated by Mike Molasky in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa) and Kirino Natsue's Out. Both of these books were viscerally effective.

Medoruma's story is a magical realist piece about memory anxiety and the memory economy in Okinawa. Apart from how great it is to use in a class on war memories, I think it is just a great piece of storytelling.

Kirino's novel is ultra-creepy on so many dimensions. Set in a lunch-box factory, she captures the alienation of modern suburban Japan to perfection. Once the murders start, however, the thing takes on a tremendous paranoid tension.

These are both great reads.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicles

I recently finished reading Murakami Haruki's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle.

I read my first (and, until now, only) Murakami novel, Pinball, 1973, in graduate school and didn't care for it much. It seemed to me to be another one of those contemporary Japanese novels in which nothing much happens to a person who can't manage to give a damn or form an opinion about anything. While I'm sure I have given all of those novels (Yoshimoto Banana's works, for example) short shrift, I've also not been able to overcome my boredom. Perhaps I'm shallow, but when it comes to pleasure reading I'd actually like a story.

I first started hearing about The Wind Up Bird Chronicle from students when I'd talk about Manchuria in class. Students would come up to me afterwards, excited, saying, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!" I'd feign knowledge (not hard after the first few times) and say, "Yes, yes. Just like the novel" and then change the subject.

While I had no intention of moving beyond the feigned interest at first, I soon began to feel like I should get over my Murakami aversion and read the damned book. In part it was because I felt some slight tingle of responsibility to the students to be able to converse a bit about Japanese literature (seeing as we have no one in our Lit department who does J Lit). In part it was because the WWII memories project I was doing with Alice made me want to read across broad swathes of contemporary Japanese writing that touched on the war. Finally, I found the references to the novel coming with greater regularity once I started interviewing a Japanese man in a neighboring town who had spent eight years in Manchuria, from 1945 to 1953. Every time I mentioned his story to someone, they would come back with, "Its just like in that novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle!"

So I finally got over it and picked up a copy at the Literary Guillotine, my favorite bookstore in town. The owner, David, winced when I brought it to the counter. He said that he had tried to get through it, but just couldn't (this coming from a man who has recommended things like Don Delillo's Underworld, a novel I haven't been able to get through yet). I winced back at those words, remembering my own earlier experience with Murakami. But, I bought it, nonetheless, brought it home, started it, bogged down after 20 pages and put it on the shelf to "ripen" for several months. I finally picked it up again this past December and pushed myself through the whole thing.

I should say, at this point, that I thought it was a much better book than Pinball, 1973. The Manchurian passages were also by far the most gripping. There were, at the same time, some of the characteristic features of a Murakami novel that are far less interesting to me. (I joked with my friend Sakae that my heart sank when I opened the novel to find the main character cooking spaghetti in the very first paragraph. "What is this obsession that all his characters have with spaghetti?" I asked.) But, in the end, it is a novel that seems to be sticking with me.

For the record, the story of my Japanese man's time in Manchuria is nothing at all like the stories of Manchuria that Murakami tells. Murakami's Manchurian stories are terribly brutal. And in the context of Japanese memories of WWII, necessary. My man's stories are, to the point we've uncovered, rather different.

What I'll be chewing on for awhile is how The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is a story about post-Imperial Japan, how the failure to deal head-on with the colonial legacy creates deep psychic scars. I'm want to resist the historian's tendency to read fiction allegorically, but at this point I do read the novel as a story of several people suffering the long-term effects of a past trauma (traumas not always directly related to Manchuria, but linked by the authorial voice to a kind of primal scene in Manchuria) and the transformation of the main protagonist into (and out of) a psychic detective/therapist.

It wasn't always enjoyable for me, but it was worth reading in the end and, as I said, will likely stick with me for awhile.

Nostalgia for Five Year-Olds

A couple of weeks ago, Sammy found an old Anpanman tank top in a plastic box that had been stashed in a closet. It was a shirt he wore when he was two. Thrilled to find that he could still, kinda, get into the shirt, he has since worn it under his shirts and pajamas every single day and night. And it isn't the Anpanman picture that thrills him. It is the thought that he used to wear it.

At least we know he has gained in height, if not girth.