I’ve had a very similar situation — I’ve went from ~200 lbs to ~145 lbs in a year. First 40 lbs were within six months, the next 15-20 lbs were within the other six months. I am 5′10″ so my BMI was similar. One of the things you mention is importance of cardio — I can’t stress it enough. Nonetheless, light weight lifting (spread around the body, vs. focused just on the upper body) *does* help — muscles use a greater amount of energy than fat, helping you burn weight. Doing *many* sets with lesser weight is also more effective towards that goal. In any case, for weight lifting to be effective one should do at least *some* cardio beforehand, else the blood simply isn’t being delivered to the muscles.

I’ve written up my own observations and my experience on this topic — http://weblog.strlen.net/?p=7. Lot of them mirror yours.

In any case, best of luck

- Alex

A traceroute to the State Bank of India (sbi.co.in) is 27 hops, 358ms RTT, and routes Amsterdam->London->NYC->San Jose->Singapore->India.

Then again, a traceroute to Reliance (www.rcom.co.in) is only 13 hops, 159ms and routes from London directly to Mumbai over Flag Telecom (n.b. a wholly owned subsidiary of Reliance telecom), showing that not everyone has bad routes. Then again, if one of the global network infrastructure leaders didn’t have a good route to their website in India, who would?

As an interesting sidenote, it seems that some of India’s largest corporations do their hosting in the US. Tata and Aditya Birla both even host with the same SF ISP, Cybercon.

These were round trip times. :)

Cheers,
David

Anger persists for several hours after you first summon it so the amount of control and indeed *perspective* that you summon before becoming angry is an almost zen-like skill. It is absolutely key to remember just how much of our brain is involved in emotional thinking, men and women both. Indeed our amygdalic structures and limbic aparati are old, deeply nestled in our brains allowing us to filter new memories as they are stored into our brains according to how they made us feel at the time. This is an *incredibly* powerful function which is why learning to diffuse the anger of anyone you are speaking to can lead to some of the most amazing communicative experiences available. Bringing someone to center, to symmetry and balance with you allows them the safety to communicate something that may have never occured to you. I would disagree, though, that most angry speech is intended to inflict pain. I believe I have never seen an angry person and not felt that they were somehow in pain themselves and if I could alleviate it we would both be improved. This, too, is a matter of perspective.

Differences in perspective require compromise. I rarely (though I have many faults) speak for speaking’s sake and have urged many to find the beauty of listening. The ultimate prize in all of this is not just a tolerance of being uncomfortable but in realizing that the mild discomfort you feel in allowing your pespective to adjust and expand is ever more broadening than anything you will convince another person to be true. This is a much more difficult challenge and, I believe, much more enriching for all involved. In all of this I agree with you that seeking to have your hypotheses tested and validated is key as it helps you develop the faculties to grow in all dimensions of thought.

I have found the greatest loneliness to be painfully evident in people who talk for the sake of talking. Most of the time, in my own experience, they were not taught to be good listeners or largely find others to be intellecutally inferior. Consequently they cut off large groups of wonderful people who may only lack assertiveness or certain verbal abilities that we take for granted. (Question all assumptions.) These people must be nurtured as undiscovered wells of thought. For these talkative people it is often because their family, friends and (esp. in technology) coworkers encourage and reward the sense of being *right*. So long as this applies only to purely logical decisions the dogpile drive to be the one who supplies it can lead to good decisions, but much is trampled along the way. The people I admire most are able to make effective decisions within a group mentality after first listening effectively. This is a great skill as discerning from a lot of information quickly is much more difficult than cutting everyone else out to be the first with *an* answer.

Humility, patience, listening, seeking dissent and expansion from other people all come from this last point, useful since and before Socrates: recognizing the smallness of your experience and perspective opens you to ever broadening and refining yourself. I applaud this at every turn.

Interesting idea about eating small portions regularly. I agree that portion size control is one of the most important parts of a weight loss program. The idea of eating foods you hate for an extended period of time feels fairly unsustainable. Instead eating what you love but in moderation feels smart.

I’m still working on the cooking bit. For one, I’m really just not used to regularly cooking. I’ve eaten out just about every night for the last several years. Neat points about why drinking a lot of water is a good idea – I hadn’t read this kind of detailed scientific backing for why it’s wise. Where did you find all this great stuff?

P90X sounds exciting but a little intimidating. I’m not sure I’m ready for that just yet – I’m enjoying my time on the elliptical at the gym tremendously and am seeing huge week-over-week gains, so I think I may wait to transition out of that until I hit a plateau and need some, um, “muscle confusion”. ;)

Thanks for the good wishes!

Chris,

Giving up sugar (in coffee), most sweets, and sugared drinks (non-diet Crunk and RedBull) have been some concrete changes I’ve made to my intake. We’ll see if I need to do more.

Thanks for the thoughtful response!

In my opinion the artist does not recreate absolutely everything with complete fidelity. That would be as uninteresting as HD reality television. Instead, the artist notices things that we wouldn’t, recasts the scene from a perspective of what matters, and lets us see the world through new eyes. It is a voyage into the other mind that is exciting, not the differing collections of facts that they have received. In other words, we don’t want to see Paris through our own eyes – that is easily enough done – we want to see it as an Algerian prostitute sees it, or as a Senegalese seeking asylum. What do they see that we do not and how do they understand it differently? Can that inform our own perceptions of what’s going on?

So it’s the distillation of this difference in what is being experienced and *how* the data is being digested that lies at the core of art (and, perhaps, science).

It’s possible we mean different things by “high bandwidth” – in the sense that I meant it it’s “transmitting without filtering”, but I could see it being read as “having high signal-to-noise ratio”. Communicating intensely is a good thing. Communicating without filtering is (definitionally) a thoughtless act. The retina does not pass all signals pertaining to light back to the brain; in fact, the vast majority of information impingent on our eyes is immediately discarded. It is this act of picking out the important bits that makes our eyes helpful organs. Unprocessed, we’d be unable to effectively see or respond to sight as there’d just be too much information to sort through and make sense of.

So I’d very much like to encourage those that see more and especially those that see differently to express themselves – and by focusing on the difference and distilling the essence of their experience it can be better and more widely understood.

Glad to hear that you are focused but realistic about losing weight. As a weight loss pro (I’ve lost 20+ pounds on three separate occasions) it’s really essential to take a patient view.

That being said, my top tip for weight loss is to make radical change. It’s difficult to have the willpower to accomplish an incremental change, like “Eat 20% less”. It’s much easier to do something like, “No bread of any kind.”

And I will stop making fun of you for the vase (though a normal bottle of water would suffice, and the fact that you are using a vase simply reflects your desire for uniqueness…not a criticism, I have strong tendencies in that area myself!)

Simple empathy can set you apart from the majority of mankind and earn you a (deserved) reputation as a good person.

My top methods:
1. Become your favorite chef. Love your ingredients, know how much you are eating(genuinely the hardest part), and keep your portions at about the size of your fist, 4-5 times a day. I eat about 200-300 calories at a sitting, no more) (That puts a Dr. Pepper in perspective, huh!?) If you find yourself needing more food reach for complex carbs, fiber and/or protein. Eat what your body (not your palette) tells you to eat. Part of this is confirmed on Atkins in the sense of how it keeps you from riding the glucose/glucagon/cortisol roller coaster. Keep glucose low and sustained so that you can enter a glucagonic state without tempting cortisol stress from too high a drop in available blood sugar. Once you use up glycogen, you will finally start to burn fat. It is really best to keep your endorphins high while in this state (i.e. running or something you enjoy sweating through) so you come home with that burn feeling around your body, a craving for an apple (it’ll happen) and a need to drink a lot of water. Rinse, wash, repeat.

2. Drink water. Why this works: When we first go on diet we use up glycogen and lose its associated water (3:1 water to glycogen ratio). During the phase of fat breakdown, urine loss of ketones caused by a high fluid intake prevents high plasma levels of ketones and avoids nausea. A good water intake encourages the breakdown of more fat to replace these “lost” calories. It can also prevent fainting (a problem I used to have when I ran 30-40 miles a week and didn’t drink enough water).

3. P90X – Seriously. I used to run 16 mile fun runs with my dog, but this will give you something *different* for you body to do every day. It is tough, I have to admit, and it is six hours+ of exercise per week, but the host is so pumped and so encouraging that the energy is really infectious. It combines core synergistics, plyometrics, weights (but not weightroom macho nonsense and machines which isolate parts of your body too much), pullups, pushups, yoga, cardio, and an ab routine which includes over 300 exercises in 20 minutes. It’s *intense*. The point is to focus on how your body *feels* rather than what the scale says. The pounds will drop off, but the feeling of being fit is worth *so* much more. Focus on that good feeling.

I gained about 15 pounds during my leaving-home adventure, but have already taken it all off in 6 months. The hardest thing to say goodbye to? Long, luxurious meals at my favorite restaurants – drinks, courses, dessert. I pick the healthy meals now, think about the work I would have put in to make it, appreciate the ingredients, look at the plate and find a fist-full, eat it, and take the rest home. Feeling satisfied is *so* much better than feeling full and is more respectful of the artistically prepared food, anyway.

Every time someone looks at your vase funny just remember how good you are going to feel and how that will cascade into the rest of your life. Good luck!

If you are, in your post, referring to the difficulty of distilling your experiences for use in a lecture, writing or other collection of observations for public consumption, I could respond with an entirely different line of commentary. To extend this idea of distilling your life, pursuing the high bandwidth experience, and sharing it with great friends is of particular interest to me at this moment. Finding others with whom this level of sharing are possible requires a compatibility of bandwidth, rather than of opinion (not that you suggest anything of the sort), in addition to communicative abilities to make this possible.

While your commentary concerns itself mostly with experience, your post reminds me of Cicero, “On Friendship” in which he recounts his missing tact in criticizing Atticus’ epicurian philosophy, but that there was a sense that time, writing and the shared requirement of both being “good, virtuous men” was held in common. This, in addition to a long set of definitions, was necessary to any high quality interaction, as between good friends. A high bandwidth level of engagement with the world, the moving moments and interactions, exist within a high level political life and between friends. It is in this spirit that I extend your post from experience to augmenting another’s experience of life through sharing and debate.

As Cicero paraphrases Laelus: “The amicable comparison and collision of thought and sentiment are certainly consistent with, and often conducive to the most friendly intimacy Friends are not infrequently the complements, rather than the likeness, of each other Cicero and Atticus were as close friends as Scipio and Laelius; but they were at many points exceedingly unlike.”

High bandwidth requires work, but most things that are easy are also least valuable. Passive entertainment, where the subsumption of the viewer is intentional is often extended to men and women I meet who intend to dazzle with their expertise, who tip the inequality such that complementary debate is impossible. Where there is an inequality, one will subsume the other or both will settle for a low bandwidth level of interaction. These interactions are common and miss a great set of opportunities to learn and grow.

It is my experience that most will settle for a low bandwidth level of experience and interaction if they are unaware that they could have more. It is hard for me to understand an acceptance of this as if the richness and vibrancy of higher bandwidth is assumed to be unavailable to them. As such I meet a lot of people who talk often of humility, of respecting one’s roots, trying not to offend, and not taking too many risks. I can only surmise, after asking many about this subject, that doing more would involve too much risk or talking about more would tempt impoliteness, or dare I say it, too much intimacy. The agreed upon low-bandwidth option is to focus on facts, details and professional or technical matters.

If anything does the subsuming, low bandwidth technologies seem to make it easier and easier to remove risk. Risk involves putting long answers up to scrutiny, achieving intimacy with a stranger, saying something that someone may correct or spending time that could be devoted to one’s individual pursuits instead. Small pieces of information are easy to digest, share and may launch another on their own path of discovery; i.e. a good url. This removes, however, the difficult and time consuming joy of holding one’s ideas up to test, augmentation and, especially, humor. Small pieces of information can only accomplish small comparisons, i.e. short quips or unchased topics at a party. The rest is up to the individual, so the process of great sharing is lost and consequently, is all the more valuable when it is attained. These small pieces allow the individual to remain, sometimes lazily and selfishly, in their own heads, missing the opportunity of more.

I would be interested to know how most of the real-time, as you say, can be low bandwidth, unless it is constantly divided up into small pieces. This is all the more common these days, and I often feel I am, with a few exceptions, fighting it singularly. I am often too reserved in person, self-moderating a mind flowing over with a high-bandwidth movie-like set of experiences. I try to fight this as best I can. It is better to release it in a fluid, balanced exchange so it may be augmented and tested. Again, this is too much for many, but those who learn of it often tell me they feel bettered by the experience. I know I am.

On the whole I agree with you, though, that cultivating refinement in perception – to see more and experience more will give you a rich (high bandwidth) engagement with the world. Take this launching pad of a perspective and find it in others. No doubt you already do. Take this as encouragement that this is central to achieving the best of life’s possible experiences, those which are often truly transcendent.

Distillation, while it may seem like a favor for others, it is a convenience with associated drawbacks. Many need encouragement, a safe place to say more, and people with this level of sensitivity are rare and should be encouraged wherever possible.