I once again managed to skip snacking today. I would clap myself on the back but it hurts when I try.
The closest I came to Unauthorized Snacking was when I added a 50 gram serving of Havarti cheese to my dinner. I later found out this has 189 calories, which is a lot more than I’d expected. Oops. Fortunately I still came in under my calorie goal and cheese is a better snack than, say, a bag of chocolate frosted Skittles.
Also, my weight was different this morning–down 1.5 pounds. Now I am really expecting to be up tomorrow. We will see.
The last time I was on the treadmill was on July 11, when it rained.
It rained again today, so instead of my now customary one hour after-work walk, I hit ye olde treadmill. I actually felt pretty energetic, so I guess all of the walking is paying off. My heel, which is still sore (exciting update very soon) held up without issue, at least as I type this a short time after finishing the workout.
I accidentally tracked this as an indoor run rather than an indoor walk, but it doesn’t seem to have affected anything, other than making it look like a rather sluggish run.
As you can see, I was a bit zippier (beating the official treadmill pace of 9:13/km, which assumes an incline of zero, not 10), burned a few more calories and had a marginally higher BPM, which is pretty much a rounding error.
I also continued my alphabetical music listening and have now made my way into the B’s. I skipped a few ore songs than usual because walking on the treadmill requires peppier tunes than walking outside. You know how it is.
The stats:
Pace: 9:19/km (9:22 km/h)
Time: 30:03 (30:03)
Distance: 3.22 km (3.20 km)
Calories burned: 293 (318)
BPM: 140 (146)
I have allowed myself to indulge in healthy snacks of the fruit and veggie variety. Today I had the following:
A small banana
Some sugar snap peas
A few baby carrots
Other than that, it was another day of meals-only. I am noticing that I am feeling hungry at certain points through the day now, but this is good–it means my body is noticing the loss of food and over time will adapt to less snacks and more normal eating.
Curiously, my weight has remained unchanged for the last three days. I would not be surprised if it went up tomorrow.
An interesting thing happened while I spent today being snack-free. Actually, it happened many times throughout the day.
I thought about snacks. Specifically, I would be sitting (or standing) and suddenly think, “A snack would be nice.” This would happen regardless of whether or not I felt hungry or if I had just eaten. The first time it happened today I had just finished breakfast. I sat down after cleaning the dishes and instantly thought about getting a snack.
My amateur psych analysis of this is simple: snacking has become a substitute for something I need or crave. I don’t snack because I’m hungry, I snack because it provides comfort, it makes me feel better (unless I plow through half a box of crackers and feel gross and somewhat regretful after). The phrase “comfort food” looms large, like a giant box of chocolate glazed donuts. Mmm, donuts…
Anyway, I ended up not having to engage in any of the cheap tricks I listed yesterday to keep myself from snacking, because I also felt headachy and kind of listless for most of the day, so getting up and gathering snacks never registered as more than a distant thought. On top of the headaches today, allergies the past few weeks have been beating me up like never before. I can see myself becoming a nasal spray addict before the end of the year and having to join Nasal Sprayers Anonymous or something.
However, to bring things back to a positive note, I made it through the day and did not snack. Go me! If I’m up in weight tomorrow, I’ll just chuckle at how day-to-day fluctuations don’t matter, it’s the long term trends that show the real results. (I’ll still be mildly peeved, just because.)
It is time I faced a certain reality: I like shoving things into my face–specifically, snack-type things which go into my mouth, then to my stomach, then to the fat reserves around the mid-section of my body, which are now sufficient to sustain me through several winters.
Although my weight has been starting to trend back in the right direction recently, it is moving downward at a pace I would describe as extremely gradual. Given my current weight loss goal, my on-a-napkin calculation is I will reach that goal when I am 576 years old.
While I hope to live a long and fruitful life, I suspect I will not live top be 500+. But science has worked miracles before.
Barring scientific miracles, I need a new plan, and here it is:
Going cold turkey on all snacks. This starts tomorrow, as I’m considering the last two weeks of August to be a trial period of sorts. Here are the rules I have invented:
No snacks at all. This includes:
crackers
cookies
muffins
strudel things
potato chips
chocolate bars
Turkish Delight
brownies
donuts
even things that are technically not donuts, but are really donuts, like chocolate eclairs
anything else that is high calorie, comes in a bag and is not exactly “natural”
One exception: the chocolate I share with my partner each night as a ritual sort of thing (he started it, I am not as big on ritual sort of things, but when they include chocolate, I am more willing). These are 46 calories each, which is not too bad.
Cheat days? No! No cheat days! Cheating is not just wrong, it weakens my resolve, because a little cheating leads to a little more cheating and suddenly the pantry is devoid of all snacks.
If not full cheat days, how about an occasional cheat, but only if I exercise enough that same day to cover three times the calorie cost? So a 100 calorie snack would require me to burn off an extra 300 calories to make up for it. This seems like a reasonable approach and I may hold it in reserve, but for now, I am still in the NO camp, because it’s too easy to snack, promise to workout, then whoops, I forgot to workout and it’s too late now oh well.
I figure for this to work I need to have two things ready to go:
Snack substitutes. I figure peas and carrots will do, along with the occasional banana or other piece of fruit. Small cubes of cheese might be okay, but that can lead to a calvalanche, because cheese is yummy.
An immediate counter-action to take when the urge to snack hits. I have a few things I can try:
Drink water
Meditate
Listen to a favorite song to distract myself
Write 300-500 words about anything, as long as it isn’t a lovingly detailed description of blueberry cheesecake
Go for a walk of suitable length
The above could also include hitting the treadmill
Play a game
Take a shower. Not a cold shower, just a shower
We’ll see how long this bold new plan works. Today I stepped on the scale and was 175.8 pounds, 25.8 pounds away from my target of 150. We’ll see what the scale says in two weeks.
The final exercise of the Lines part of drawabox.com’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes is Planes. The exercise requires two pages of work and I have only done one, so I have one more to go.
A few observations:
Rushing will always yield poor results. There is not a single time I rushed on the ghosting (drew in the air over the paper as I would when applying pen to paper) and it turned out well. Fast is bad.
Every time I loosened my grip on the pen my line quality improved, and quite often my accuracy did, too.
Likewise moving away from using the wrist, which is one of the main focus points of these exercises–to get you to draw using your shoulder and elbow, and not your wrist.
Focusing on the ghosting made it easier to stop at the endpoint instead of overshooting it. As you can see, my focus needs work. 😛
I did one plane using a ruler, so you can see what the page would look like it I had the precision of a robot or a really good artist. Or a really good artist robot named Drawbot 8000.
As mentioned before, when I finally complete Lesson 1 (in ten months), I am going to switch over to ctrlpaint.com’s traditional drawing lessons and try the first few there to see how they compare, then decide which one to go whole hog on. Because I never half-hog.
And speaking of hot, I took a long walk on this toasty day and appreciated that the sky was actually blue and not a dull yellow from forest fires. Here is Burnaby Lake, which I was tempted to jump into.
The irony is that it is 33ºC as I type this. But for the second summer in a row temperatures have stayed low enough and we’ve had just enough precipitation to stave off the appearance of those FIRE WARNING signs that appear on the Brunette River trail and at Burnaby Lake.
A few years ago we went an entire calendar month–July–without any official rainfall. Grass was turning yellow in May. I thought, “Well, climate change is slowly turning southern BC into a desert, whaddyagonnado?” But the past two years things have tracked more normal, with no long stretches of nice weather, just days of nice weather punctuated by clouds or some shower, then sun again and back and forth until The Rains of the fall start in earnest.
I’m not complaining, exactly. Some precipitation in the summer also means no out of control forest fires and the sky has not turned a hazy amber that lasts for weeks on end, either. These things are nice and good. I guess we’ll see if extremely dry summers return next year. Based on current events, I don’t think humans are going to do much to stop or even slow climate change.
This is the second book in Austin Kleon’s trilogy of motivational books for creative (and other) types. I read it after the other two, but they can easily be read in any order.
Much like the other books, Show Your Work is peppered with Kleon’s quirky illustrations and art as he provides insights and tips in easily digestible bites. The advice is sound, smart and simple, with each piece built around its own chapter.
This time the focus is on getting your work seen, your presence known and to push aside some long-held conceptions, such as how selling art leads to the corruption of it. One example Kleon points to is how Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel).
The advice ranges from sharing some small part of your process with your audience every day (usually on the social media outlet of your choice) to dispensing with the notion of keeping everything secret, openly sharing how you work, how you do things, so that others can benefit from your knowledge as you may have benefited from the knowledge of others. Kleon is big on community, basically.
This is a good book and a short book, so it’s easy to dip back into it when inspiration or motivation is lacking, or when you feel you are drifting and losing focus.
This one leans more toward creative types, people who make stuff for others to enjoy, but I think anyone who can appreciate the same is bound to get something out of this book.
I came across this video on YouTube last night from Struthless, in which he discusses the drawing advice given to him in 2016 that changed his life.
Leaving aside how quaint the world seemed in the long ago time of January 2020, I found this advice resonant, especially when I look back at my creative shenanigans when I was younger. Here are some of the things I did:
recorded audio plays/skits
acted, directed and wrote skits in school; acted in school plays
worked with clay (and plasticine)
painted
sketched
wrote short stories, started several novels
wrote and drew multiple comics
learned to play one song on acoustic guitar
played the recorder in music class (to be fair, I had to do this)
That’s a pretty extensive list. And for a kid, it’s actually okay to be scattered. I was trying stuff out. Looking back, I enjoyed pretty much all of it, too. I was a Renaissance Lad.
But as an adult, with much more limited time to not just do stuff, but to learn to do stuff, I need to focus. I can’t do everything.
I kind of still want to, though.
But with my fiction writing currently in a comfortable coma, blissfully unaware of the hellscape that 2020 has become, I have decided to focus on drawing and sketching, first by honing my analog (pen and paper) skills, then moving into the digital realm of pen and tablet. I’ll occasionally tell myself, “But I could learn acoustic guitar, like, actually learn it this time” and then I have to remind myself, “No, stay focused. Do one thing well, not ten things using 1/10th of your ass on each” (ass analogies have been popular ever since that one episode of The Simpsons).
This video makes that point and goes even farther, by showing how he (Struthless) initially focused on not just drawing over other creative outlets but drawing just one thing–ibises. Many, many ibises. By narrowing his focus, he was able to do this one thing really well, and used it as a means to expand beyond, creating more elaborate tableaus around ibises.
It’s a good way to approach art.
I am not going to draw ibises.
But I do have my own thing: Gum Gum People.
And now I own the domain for them. This will eventually become my home for all art, not just GGP-specific stuff.
We’ll see how it goes. For now, I am putting writing on the backburner, guilt-free. If I get drawn (ho ho) back to it, it was meant to be. If not, well…hopefully I’ll have settled onto something even more rewarding. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching cat videos.
I have walked by a house under construction in the neighborhood* many times and only today noticed a sunflower growing on the boulevard in front of it. How weird.
* Why do I use American spellings? Conservation of letters, and it makes it easier to sell my writing to American markets, which makes no sense in context of this blog, but it just became a habit after awhile.
