Blessed by the Potato

Calories can be scary things sometimes. Many people let them rule their lives, obsessively counting and studying the calories in their food. But, there are many little known facts about calories that you can use to master them.

This series of helpful videos will give any would-be dieter the information they need to come up with a reason to eat the foods they love, and would be denied by other diets. Enjoy!

Meta:

I could not for the life of me make the programming to have a play/pause button within the flash animation work, so I gave up and exported the movies, then uploaded them to YouTube, which I then embedded here. Far messier than it needed to be, but it works. I wanted to dive in and get some animation going while I was in the mood, and didn’t want to spend my 15-day trial with Flash just learning how to program properly, psssh. Some of this may be clunky as a result, as I was just trying to kludge my way through making Flash do what I wanted it to do. I figured I used Hypercard, how different could Flash be? The answer: very. What I found really frustrating was that I would do the same thing at different times, and I would get different results. One particularly frustrating thing was when I tried to make a part rotate. I’d set the pivot point, do the rotate graphic, and it’d work fine. Then, I’d do it again, and instead of rotating as I expected, it would try to do a 3D-esque out-of-plane warp/rotate animation, which was just ridiculous.

Photo credits: The food pictures were both taken from Wikimedia commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waffles_with_Strawberries.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Choco_chip_cookie.png

I’ve had about 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours as I try to cram out (at the last minute, of course) some papers for an upcoming conference. It’s been a nightmare because, amongst other reasons, the ridiculous copyright policy of the conference means that we have to submit papers that are different enough from what we usually write that we can still have freedom to use our own work elsewhere. It’s hard enough to hammer out a paper in the first place, then to have to try to do it in the literary equivalent of a funny accent…

Anyhow, I’ve been battling with yet another nasty case of writer’s block — something that seems to hit me far too severely when it comes to my professional writing. I think Wayfare hit the issue on the head: I worry too much about how the work will be received for professional stuff and just lock up, whereas on my pseudo-anonymous blog I can just hammer away at the keyboard and not even worry about proof reading since I don’t have that much invested in it. Nothing to do but just try to get over it. In the meantime, Netbug suggested I take a quick break and put up at least a Tater’s Takes post, so here you go.

On the health/diet front, I found out that my scale got miscalibrated somewhere along the way. I’m not sure when it happened, but it was reading high by 3-4 pounds, which means I’ve really only gained about a pound from when I started. Still, wrong direction, but not quite as bad as I had thought. The last week was decent but not great: I’ve been watching what I eat more, but still had a few doughnuts at work through the week. I’ve started writing down my meal plan for a ~3 day period, and have been sticking to it reasonably well, and including lots of healthy stuff like vegetables and oatmeal, so that’s been good. I only had two good long bikerides in the week, but considering the week I’ve had, that’s pretty good (I plan on retrying the 36 km trip around Fanshawe Lake once these stupid stupid stupid papers are in).

“Today” though has been hell on the diet: I’ve resorted to undergrad cram tactics, pounding down full-sugar Coke & Red Bull and eating nothing but junk food to burn through the night. 3940 calories in the last 24 hour period (I don’t know what I consider a “day” anymore — best to try to stick to the subjective view of time the rest of you hold), which is simply not an efficient way to produce written words. As soon as the caffeine starts to wear off, I’m right into the head-bobbing vertigo stage of sleep deprivation, so I’m really hoping these stupid papers get finished soon.

In the news, BP’s latest cap attempt actually appears to be working. The stock shot up, then slid back down on perhaps fears that the shutting-in of the oil may have put too much pressure on the parts of the well below the ocean floor, causing oil to seep out (in a way that could be very difficult to control).

Also finance-related, a quick note that I sold my H&R REIT yesterday. Thanks to falling behind on my thesis and staying a grad student longer than my scholarship said I should I know that I’ll need to be raising cash, and also H&R is starting to look fully valued to me, so out it goes. Again, this isn’t a case of not liking the company, just thinking that the price was getting high enough…

I was going to look into the new Ontario “eco fee” tax this weekend and blog about it, but it looks like the negative publicity and poor roll-out has lead to it being canned… for now.

After running headlong into Bell’s very restrictive 25 GB data cap in May, I had to complain to any that would hear me that the $2/GB charge was very obviously excessive, and in no way actually reflected the incremental cost of that data usage. Plus, of course, the comparison to Rogers’ slightly more generous 60 GB cap (and 5 years ago the cap was also 60 GB, long before most users started watching videos on the internet, or Bell/Rogers themselves started rolling out video-on-demand portals). Netbug sent along an article that looks at this issue for US ISPs and concludes that indeed, most of the cost structure is composed of fixed-cost infrastructure type spending, and there’s no support in the ISPs’ business model for the caps and data charges that have been rolled out. Congestion issues are also unlikely to be the reason for the fees, since if congestion at peak times was the issue, the ISPs should instead implement time-of-use charges.

It looks like I am done running experiments for my PhD — just* analysis and writing up now!

To mark the occasion, we have come up with a new celebration we call “running the chocolate gauntlet“, which can be staged using items found here on the hospital campus (largely the Tim Horton’s). It involves proceeding through a series of celebratory doughnuts, each chocolatier than the last: a honey dip, a chocolate dip, a chocolate glaze, and finally: the double chocolate.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to test out the chocolate gauntlet due to concerns over the safety of the celebratants, and disagreements over whether boston creme should be included and/or allowed to exist at all outside of Boston. We are now waiting on baseline cholesterol tests from the potential test participants, and have sent the boston creme matter off to a subcommittee for a more educated final decision. Early rumour has it that one compromise option will be to leave the boston creme out, but make the final stage of the gauntlet a double chocolate doughnut with a scoop of chocolate ice cream on top. Some members of the boston creme subcommittee, including members not actively pursuing a boston creme jihad, oppose the proposed solution, warning that ice cream availability is limited at the hospital, and may lead to another round of chocolate escalation as various levels of ice cream chocolatyness are added to the gauntlet.

Nonetheless, good news. Celebrations to follow.

With chocolate.

* – this is still a many-month-long process.

I went to the Superstore today to get some sub buns, and also hope that they had restocked the bottles of Coke Zero that were on sale last week, but which they ran out of in the first day (so I have a rain check for them). I should also note that I’ve really wanted subs the last few days. I went on Wednesday and they did have some sub buns, but they were already a day or two old, and they’re only good for 2 or 3 days, so I figured I’d wait. I went back yesterday, and there were no sub buns, so I just got some pasta and cookies (which were on sale — a terrible idea I’ll get to in a bit. It should be illegal to make cookies that delicious that cheap). I’ve been eating a lot of pasta and soup and KD (by which I mean PC deluxe macaroni and cheese) because I haven’t been able to get sub stuff this week, and that’s a lot of pot washing and I was frankly getting sick of it.

So today, I’m there, and there’s no sub buns. What the fuck? I even went there kind of early (but not so early that I might have risked being there before the sub buns came out). They had fields of panini buns, but the panini buns don’t make particularly good sandwiches. I mean, you can put some garlic and cheese on them and throw that in the oven for a pretty decent garlic bread, but a sandwich? Nuh-uh. The RCSS here in London has the best sub buns — obviously I think highly of them if I went to the grocery store three days in a row to try to get some.

In the end I just grabbed 6 cases of Coke Zero and went on my way.

As I was explaining this on the phone to Wayfare, she asked “Why couldn’t you just get some wraps? You can put all the same stuff in it, and have wraps for lunch.”

And here’s the thing: on a scale of one to wraps, the best a wrap can ever hope to do is wrap. A sub, on the other hand, is like Chuck Norris round-house-kicking you in the mouth. It’s an awesome flavour parade that has incredible flexibility to be toasted, panini-pressed, or eaten just the way it is. Plus, the texture is just so much better: a wrap is basically just packaging for the sad little salad you’ve made yourself, whereas a sub bun is a major player in its own right (and Wayfare of all people should know that since she often has those sub buns all on their own without toppings). It’s an adventure into a mythical land of bready bubbles that you only get to swim in after crashing through that hint of a crust. And the RCSS sub buns are so good that, in my own home, I can make a sub that’s better than anything Subway or Mr. Sub can offer, that’s also healthier and less expensive. It’s just that variety of awesome that I was looking for, and was denied.

So at the bottom of the receipt was that invitation to go take a survey with them, and I was all like “Yarrr! I’m-a gonna give your bakery manager guy a bad review and let you know how very disappointed I was about my three trips specifically to get your sub buns that ended in disappointment!” Yet much to my surprise there was no comment field at all where I could start ranting at these clowns, so I had to settle for putting down “very unsatisfied” with the bakery department and hope they figure it out.

Then it was time to work on reanalysis. People don’t understand the importance of the re in research. There’s a lot of re going on.

So as I’m analyzing I’m feeling you know, a little stressed, a little dumb, a little bored even, and I’m trying to focus and not make mistakes and most importantly just get it done.

Then I started to wonder: what if I become an evil mad scientist when I get my PhD? Would my effort to hurry up and finish actually be to the detriment of mankind? Would my mind-controlled zombie minions overthrow the world hegemon we suffer under today, only to replace it with an iron-fisted rule of my own making that was even worse for the everyman? Perhaps procrastination is the only thing standing between my genius maniacal lust for power, and the safety of all living things?

No, no, that’s just the procrastination talking, back to work.

Now, as a scientist, I can recognize a pattern. Mostly. Anyhow, when I last finished a graduate degree, I got really, really fat. I was really, really sick through a lot of that too, so I have excuses and doctor’s notes and what-not, but the fact of the matter is that I gained 40 pounds in a really short, intensely stressful period of time, and despite my (best isn’t the word I’m looking for here, so let’s say:) incredibly average efforts, I only ever managed to lose 10 of those (many of which, I gained back this winter). I did get in much better cardiovascular shape, which I’m moderately proud of, but it’s still been a long-term goal to get back to my mid-MSc weight. I consider it a bloody miracle of self-control that I haven’t turned into a minor planetoid and haven’t even re-crossed that high water mark, so feel free to leave me encouraging accolades in the comments section, but nonetheless under normal* amounts of stress I haven’t made much progress, so I’ve decided that I have to be especially careful as I get into the intense writing-up-and-defending portion of this degree. So I’m thinking about what kind of exercise regime I should try to set up to stay in shape and how strict of a diet I should attempt to stick to, all while I’m doing analysis. I’m even starting to think about how awesome I’ll look as a slimmer Dr. Potato.

Of course, as I’m doing said analysis, I’ve got the box of on-sale cookies beside me, nomming away as I edit these files. It’s just go-go-go-go-go over here, I’m totally in the zone, backspace backspace, add 5, retypte, nom nom, down two lines… next thing I know it’s 1 am and I realize I haven’t had a meal for like 12 hours and I’m not the slightest bit hungry.

Then I realize I just ate nearly 400 g of cookies, roughly 1900 calories worth, while I was doing my thing. Damnit, this “watch what you eat during the high stress time” is going really, really poorly to start with.

Wayfare’s on the phone and I’m relating my day to her, and wondering if I should maybe go throw up a little because that surely can’t be good for me. Except that I worry that that may be the first step to a rather serious eating disorder. “Oh, it’s no surprise you feel sick if you ate almost a pound of cookies!” she says.

No, no, I don’t feel sick at all. I feel abso-frigging-fan-tastic. Think about eating a cookie or a half dozen cookies. You feel pretty good, right? They’re cookies, you had some, life is good, the universe is far more balanced with the cookies inside you rather than inside that stupid box where they weren’t doing anybody any good.

Now think about how good you’d feel if you had 72 cookies.

Yeah, it’s a party in your mouth, and your brain’s all tingly on the glucose and happy hormones. For the short-term, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario. You could race a goddamned horse and ride a tiger into battle and analyze the ever loving hell out of some data. YEAAAAH!

“You don’t feel sick to your stomach at all?” she asks.

“No,” I say, apparently really quickly, like one of the Gilmore girls, though it really doesn’t sound all that fast to me, “I’ve been trained from a very young age to be able to digest intense amounts of junk food. I’m like a samarai, or a cookie ninja, just that kind of lifelong, total dedication to intense training that produces a level of total awesomeness that’s hard to look at directly. I mean, if the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters were to come into our plane of existence and try any shit in this day and age, let me tell you, I’d handle that situation. That’s the kind of digestive system I have going here.” I’m sure you’ve seen examples of it elsewhere: my supervisor has been eating so many hot peppers over his lifetime that at this point he can basically consume fire. I’m like that, but for sugar and starches.

She giggles for a bit “Oh, I wish I was recording this right now.”

Anyway, on the subject of talking to Wayfare via the phone, the other night she says to me “How is it we’ve been going out for almost 9 years and I never knew you could draw??”

“I what? I still don’t know that I can draw, what are you talking about?”

“Your post, you drew! I’ve never seen you draw before!”

“That? That’s not drawing, it’s just a quick sketch, and it’s not very good. I’d do stick-people, but then I’d be ripping off Randall Monroe.”

“It’s pure great! It even kind of looks like you!”

“Ooookaaaaay.”

Finally, “disappointment” is a funny word. You’re never appointed with something, are you? I mean, you can be appointed to something, or appoint a room with some froody furnishings, or have an appointment for a colonoscopy, which you can then be disappointed in, but it’s really not the same thing.

* normal for graduate school, which is intense for all you sonsofbitches in the “real world” who think you have it so much tougher just because you can get fired at any time and have to be “productive” and pay taxes and don’t get to play frisbee on Wednesday afternoons just because it’s so fucking gorgeous outside that it really is a sin to stay in and look at the computer screen when spring is in the air…

And they <3 me.