On Diets

In my previous post, I described how I learned to feel fully energized and happy with my body through exercise. This post is a complement to that, in how to fuel my body appropriately to exercise and just generally be happy with my figure.

I've always generally ate healthily, or consciously so to say. I generally only ate junk food once in a while and for the routine meals it was always good foods like whole wheat pastas, meats, veggies, nuts, beans, cheese... My conception of what food is healthier than another was totally subjective based on nothing but opinions.

For my triathlon last year, I trained hard and ate a lot of complex carbs and veggies, as recommended. Essentially a vegetarian diet, with little meat, eggs, etc... I didn't feel any energy boost or anything from doing this, oddly enough. Also, I didn't lose weight despite putting in 5+ hours of decent cardio a week over the course of a few months. Something weird was going on, but I didn't think much of it then.

I started doing weights, and didn't lose any more weight, but was developing muscle which felt pretty good. After a few months of this I lost some weight but still had a lot of fat on my body (which is good for Ontario winters, but not Vancouver so much). I started looking into diets specifically and found a ton of support that the FDA food pyramid is nonsense, and that I wasn't getting enough protein/fat. My family is pre-diabetic on both sides apparently, so eating lots of carbs, even whole wheat, tend to show a lot. Carbs turn to fat if you don't use them anyway (and chances are you're not going to be using them, if I wasn't at the amount of exercise I was doing).

I did a long run once, 20k specifically not eating carbs beforehand or during, but since I kept it low intensity it felt like the best run I've done at the time. I didn't hit any wall or anything which I usually do (a sudden burst of tiredness), and kept going instead. It was wicked.

This post isn't as passionate as others as this isn't something I want to go into too much, as it may come off preachy. I'll post some links supporting these types of diet and you can decide for yourself. I'm just saying it worked for me.

Fat based diet:

http://trit.us/transition/fatfear.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2248754/pagenum/all/

http://www.fathead-movie.com/

Paleo Diet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet

http://www.neanderthin.com/

"Optimal" Diet:

http://homodiet.netfirms.com/

Fat: 62-70%

Protein: 20-25%

Carbs: 10-12%

Non Paleo Awesome Foods:

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html --> http://hubpages.com/hub/Anti-Angiogenesis-Foods

On Exercise

This is going to be a topic I've been asked many questions about. The biggest question being: "How did you get into running?". This is the back story and progression of said question, so if you don't care much for anecdotes then don't read on.

I remember when I was in elementary school, whenever I got a new pair of shoes I thought I could run really fast. I think every kid goes through this phase, but maybe not like this. I would tempt people to try and catch me, incite conflict just so I could get a chance to run away. Very odd, but hey that's me.

My parents kept me in sports and generally tried to keep me active, despite not being able to hold my breath very well. I even used to have a puffer for something. I played basketball for 6 years or so in a league. Good times. After getting bored of that sport, I switched to soccer. Again, the breath issue was more intense here as the rules in soccer were such that players had to be on the field longer. They stuck me in goal (was probably the only goalkeeper in the league who wouldn't dive for the ball haha) instead of helping me train endurance or telling me how. Awfully nice of them in retrospect... In any case, the way I'm telling this it isn't apparent that I enjoyed running quite yet... what with the running out of breath all the time.

High school starts, we run in gym class but not all that intensely. I was pretty much average if not slightly below average in the course, despite my friends at the time saying I looked kind of 'lean and muscular' for not doing any sports outside of school. Maybe it was the piano lessons, haha. This is the period where I ran for the first time for fun outside of school. Had a pair of runners from basketball, nobody told me any technique or anything, I just ran. I had a goal in mind, but it was mostly to tell me the running progression. Went pretty well, managed to train for the first time without issue. Was getting up to 5 miles in one go, a useless measure for me then but was pretty good in retrospect. Was kind of boring, I was doing this going around a track a bunch of times at night. Still not all too enjoyable but very rewarding after progressing... until my knees started to hurt.

After running five miles my knees would give out. It was an aching kind of pain that would stick with me for a week at a time. Was not good. I tried cutting down on the distances and the same thing happened. It was at that time I decided to screw it and not run like that anymore. Not to say I stopped exercising... During the summer, I would swim a lot. We would go up to Sudbury and stick around in the water during the day. Loved it. It wasn't considered exercise, it was considered 'fun' at the time. Along similar lines of fun outside was weekly soccer with Etobicoke friends.

Etobicoke Friends (2009 edition)

We played every Saturday, just before Dungeons and Dragons, video games and Pizza Hut. It was a pretty balanced day of fun. Just 6-9 of us playing. We did 4-4ish on a small field. Nothing too competitive, just good times. Naturally, high school ended after a while and university had begun. At this point summers were filled with summer jobs instead of month long trips to the family cottage up north. The Saturdays of fun would last for 7 or so years, or until I moved downtown for my fourth and final year of university. Even though I was 19 for a year at this point, it only started to take it's toll on my physique and self confidence by the end of that year.

My last year of university was filled with shitty pub food, drinking, and no exercise at all. I went from 160 lbs to 190 in 8 months or so. After I graduated, I went on a cross Canada road trip with Nicole and at one point I was lagging behind on a mountain hike. She asked me "Didn't you say you liked this kind of stuff?" and I replied with "I do, but it's hard with 20 pounds of camera gear on your back.". Hard as it is to do it with that pack on, it is still just an excuse.

I soon after moved to Montreal and tried to start running again. No dice. Knee pain came back even worse, due to the fact that It was pretty much running around a mountain. Also the breath issues came back because of the fact that I was living downtown in a city instead of glorious suburbia. After discovering snowboarding, and using that as my weekly exercise I signed up with a trainer at this gym to see how I could keep in shape. She taught me a few things, got 8 sessions for a ridiculously large amount of money. It didn't really pique my interest, plus she didn't help with my running technique at all. Only thing I learned was that apparently I got more flexible and better cardio after a while. Great. I kept doing the exercises in my apartment up to a point but it didn't last. It wasn't fun.

Needless to say, I moved back to Toronto for another exercise-less summer filled with working on a contract job. Following that was my move to Vancouver, which by random coincidence opened me up to a new, healthier lifestyle where I finally discovered my joy for running, among other exercises.

It started when my roommate Ian moved in. He was also from Computer Science and the Imager Graphics Lab. He had been weightlifting for a year. He was telling me about his diet and I found it very peculiar. I don't know what started this but I challenged him to a 'health' competition to prove his claims. Him being a larger and taller gentleman than myself, we made the competition fairer by using body fat percentage instead of mass for the deciding factor. This lasted all summer. His arsenal was weightlifting and weight related cardio. I decided against pure running for fear of knee injury again, and signed up for a triathlon. I liked swimming as well, and biking I've done a bunch, so why not? Training was hell for a while, but due to the clean air in Vancouver I managed to pass the 'puking after 10 minutes' phase after a few weeks. Those were the hardest weeks, mind you.

Ian (2009 edition)

The 'weigh in' came a few days before my triathlon and we both tied at a few percent decrease.The triathlon in September was a different story altogether, but I didn't injure my knees doing a quick 5k in my runners. During my training though, I came across a blogger who had a pain in his foot and switched from traditional runners to barefoot, then toe-sock/shoe hybrids. The point of the shoes was to mimic barefoot running. He claimed going barefoot cured all his foot based ailments. I ordered a pair mid summer, but promised myself I wouldn't run in them seriously until after the triathlon (for fear of injuring myself beforehand).

I remember my first run in them, it was short. I was advised not to go far, and progress very slowly. I did 1-2k and that was it... but man, I wanted to do more. My calves were ridiculously sore after, but a pleasurable kind of sore. It was then I knew I wanted to be a runner (at the bare minimum). I had done an earlier short 10 min run or two barefoot with Ian in the summer. This was an amazing experience. Not only was it fun (and not stressing) to run barefoot, we were sort of chasing each other around. Good summer times without booze, very familiar...

The triathlon date was well passed and I've been working up to 10k in these Vibram Fivefingers. It felt great. Guess what? No more knee pain. The endurance I got from triathlon training. Both major problems solved! I did a few more practice Olympic distance triathlons on some random Sundays and felt great. The biking put me off though, felt kind of unnatural to me and I didn't like that it was so equipment based.

Ian recommend I try the gym out, and more specifically weightlifting. I was very stubborn about this, for stereotypical reasons. "The people in there are all jocks", "I'm not going to know what anything does", "I don't want to be indoors all the time", and other excuses. He refuted every of my claims with his unassailable logic, plus he said it would help with other cardio I was doing (swimming/running/biking, though biking I wasn't that interested in at this point). I got a gym membership for the first time. He pointed me to a link to this beginner strength program and we had many a discussion of diet to figure out how to gain muscle and minimize fat, and such. I was progressing quite well.

For a while I was biking into school and back twice a week, doing weights 3 times a week, and running and swimming on the side. Vancouver doing what Vancouver does best, it started to rain for the winter season around late October/early November. Suddenly, biking and running was less enjoyable. My goggles for swimming had sprung a leak so that was no longer enjoyable. I could still run on the treadmill though (one of the convenient perks of having a gym), though I mainly went for weights.

This schedule lasted until Spring 2010 sometime (a few months later). I was getting exhausted at the gym, because the beginner schedule I was doing reached weight so heavy that I was doing too much in one day and tiring out. I switched to going 4 days a week, for different exercises each day. Running was still around my schedule a bit but not nearly that much. Then I read a very important book.

Apparently this is the life changing book, or bible of a bunch of barefoot/Vibram shod runners. I had already been using Vibrams for a few months, but one of the chapters in this book essentially quotes research papers that suggest humans evolved for running. Not only that, but running barefoot. Naturally being the scientist/experimental person that I am, I gave it a shot. A more serious shot than just 10 minute running at a time. A 1 hour/10km shot. It is an amazing feeling. I worked my way up to more and more evil sidewalks, but the fun part is constantly paying attention. There's no time to zone out. I would liken it to video games, where you try to think quickly to dodge fast-moving obstacles. If you hit one, it hurts your foot. So this is why I like running barefoot, and running in general now so much. I'm probably the only one to say it's like a video game, or more appropriately the other way around.

I hope this story answers that question "How did you get into running?". Long story short, I guess I've always been into it. I just forgot I was for a while... What's next? Well I love running so much I'm training for an ultramarathon (goal is to do 100km by the end of summer in a day, casually for fun). Also, going to run the Victoria Marathon this year too. I've been getting into swimming again, going to get into running with weights as well.

Movnat - Erwan LeCorre - The Workout the World Forgot

Most importantly, there's a type of training I'm working up to called Movnat. I believe this to be my final stop on the exercise train for me. It is essentially a movement based training approach that teaches experimentally optimal ways for walking, running, jumping, balancing, moving on all fours, climbing, lifting, carrying, throwing, catching and swimming. All of this wearing pretty much just running shorts. It seems to be the most ridiculously fun thing I can imagine at zero cost. Seems to be something parents tell their kids everywhere anyway, "Go play outside.". When did we stop playing and start 'exercising'?

Achievement Unlocked - Complete a Sprint Distance Triathlon

Hooray. It went super well. Tons of fun. Almost drowned due to cold water. Lessons learned: get a wetsuit, practice in ocean ahead of time. If doing it competitively would need a road bike.

Had a Hipster Photoshoot with Brad and Jen. Also went well. Lots of fun, very hilarious. Parody of hipster shoot more like it. Not much to say about it except how awesome and fun it was. Tried to match a more vintage style, practised photomanipulation stuff for the hoverboard picture. In the same day biked out and onto this crazy jetty with Landon.

Apart that things have been ok and sort of fallen into a routine nowadays. Wanting to do lots of exploring but alas no car or motorcycle yet Maybe a bike trip to the island would be a good idea. Started biking to school, and signed up to Gold's Gym. Should be in good shape... to randomly do a triathlon whenever I guess.

Roar Nearby Goals

So this being a blog supposedly for projects and photos I figure I'd give a heads up on what I'm working on (or rather should be).

1. Game
I've had a few ideas for making a game that should prove pretty interesting. One of the ideas is to not use polygons (i.e. no 3d models) and to instead use more rasterized/painting/drawing based techniques to make things look pretty and flow more naturally. Mathy interpolation is pretty boring looking. Progress on this so far: trying to get the damn libraries to work nicely... no dice thus far.

2. Photo Scavenger Hunt
I've made no headway on this. I have the list. I have to go develop the MF film I have now to see if it's even gonna be decent. Otherwise I'll take a pic with my D80 as well as Mamiya and hope for the best. Have a few ideas for some of the shots but that's about it. Will need models for a few of em :/.

3. Triathlon
It takes place September 7th, I'm making great progress. Hooray.

4. Piano Songs
Now that I actually acquired an electric keyboard (thanks, Jen!) I can start practicing a few of the songs I wanted to play. Maybe for CS coffee house next year. Among them are songs from a few songs from video games and the beginning of Tchaikovsky's piano concerto #1 which I would duet with myself singing and sounding like a drunken boor to achieve lulz.

5. Violin
I would like to be able to play and not sound like a cat in distress. Progress: Still sound like a cat in distress.

Also, pictured above is a dinosaur. Roar!!

Summer Toronto Trip 2009

In case this blog is the only way you get info from me (which would be quite sad and you should talk to me more by other means), I went back to Toronto a few weeks ago. The pics are up, and have been for quite some time and are located here. Here I'm going to go through a brief narration of the highlights (aka the things I can remember, as it has been a while).

Generally the trip was much needed, and towards the end I don't feel like I was overstaying my welcome. Though everyone seemed to be getting a lot more and more busy, and I managed to dodge the garbage strike and supposedly happy I stayed only 2 weeks instead of 3 or more. Vancouver's been pretty fun since. Anyhoo. So the trip started with hanging with Laura and James, and ridiculous thing #1 has to go to drinking rum and coconut water out of sippy cups in the park with James. Then got to shoot pool at the Cue do a shoot with Nicole (which I still have to edit, it's a tough project but I think will turn out well... would be much easier if I had a backdrop and D700).

Next ridiculous thing happened when hiking with Mark and Ante. Thus ridiculous thing #2 is where I had to boulder with a camera vest and some equipment on. It was a nice hike though, lots of greenery deciduous forests and conversation that involves many a mold of the volcanic and Chernobyl variety.

Next day or so hung out with Michael (from UBC CS Grad) going to get a coconut, a beer tour, a big fat burrito and Bistro 422. Then hung with people for Nicole's grad, which was bitchin as we went back to Bistro 422 later. Good times.

Hung with Liang and Dave for a while, which was wicked fun but relatively short in terms of all the other hanging out going on :(. Too many friends. Played guitar hero at their place and observed their kitty and home indoor garden.

Ridiculous thing #3 has to be trapezing at Laura's birthday party! Wicked good fun, broke up a nail which hurt for a few weeks but great times nonetheless. Lots of fun! Must do again. Good pick, Laura!

Ridiculous thing #4 goes to making a smoker out of a trashcan that was to be mounted on top of an existing bbq with Peter. For fathers day went to the lake on Dad's boat and neighbouring restaurant. Good shots of the sunset from there.

Ridiculous thing #5 has to be at my going away BBQ with mostly Etobicoke friends I didn't get to see. We ended up playing this silly game Dave suggested that worked out quite well. Everyone puts a few dares into a hat at and people draw at random (which may possibly include their own dare, so it balances out in terms of how stupid the dares get). One such dare involved "Give Dave a vigorous face massage", enacted by Mike. Lulz were achieved.

The last ridiculous thing was doing the shoot with Nicole, which involved over 400 T-lites, constant relighting by Ken, in an enclosed garage... Like I said earlier still working on that one.

Now, back in Van. Good to be back. Wouldn't call it home, but wouldn't call Toronto home at this point either. blackb0x computer is working again, which is why there was delay in the editing of photos. There's no place like 127.0.0.1.

BBQ and Bamboo

So yesterday we had a BBQ on Jericho Beach, Tom and I got a cheap one. Delicious. Few good shots, been a while since I posted a photo. Just haven't been in the mood lately for some reason. Think I'm gonna swing back into it what with it being pretty summer. Now I am sunburned and it sucks. The cheap bbqs are pictured to the left and are really tiny. They look like props from Plan 9. Maybe Ed Wood was a BBQ enthusiast....

I picked up a Wacom Bamboo for drawing and photo editing. It's been a while since I've drawn (a much longer while). Hopefully will be able to come up with some neat stuff once again. It's got blue LEDs on it. Everything has blue LEDs on it. There's at least 5 things near my computer that have blue LEDs on them now. It's ridiculous. I know it's a soothing colour but maybe have... Red or something?

Done Courses and the Summer Competition

So I'm finally done grad courses, possibly forever, possibly not. We'll see how research goes. Despite being done there hasn't really been much official celebration going on, a little disconcerting. Got pretty good grades thus far, not that they mean anything in grad school. I suppose it's time to start the 9-5 work schedule again to work on thesis and research. Slowly transitioning back into that groove, but need a swift kick in the arse pretty soon.

My roommate Ian (pictured left) and I are doing a competition until September 1st, on who is the most healthy. In quantitative terms who can lose the most body fat percentage from the initial starting point. I've been experimenting with diet and exercise and it's a little depressing thus far. We'll see how it goes. Not been feeling in the best shape and it's affecting my mood and work and sleep habits.

Not enough regular hugs in this city.