Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums - Blogs - Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/blog.php/16129-Slothy The Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums are the premier place for Final Fantasy fans to meet and discuss this classic video game series. Join our community today. en Sat, 09 May 2026 11:39:47 GMT vBulletin 60 http://home.eyesonff.com/images/images_neoclassic/misc/rss.jpg Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums - Blogs - Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/blog.php/16129-Slothy <![CDATA[Selling "some" comic books]]> http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/3660-Selling-quot-some-quot-comic-books Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:00:01 GMT I wanted to post this here in case any of you nerds were interested in purchasing some comics. After dragging my heels for more than a year because of how terrifying the thought of organizing them all was I'm finally starting to sell off most of my comic collection. I'll be keeping some things, but not much of it.

If anyone's interested you can check out my ad at this link:
http://www.kijiji.ca/v-art-collectib...1-4f36ffff98ce

Everything I've got listed there is what I have sorted out so far, but feel free to ask about anything you might be interested in I haven't gotten to yet. If anyone does buy anything, I'll knock a bit off the price of whatever you get for being forum members, and since you'll have to pay the shipping. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/3660-Selling-quot-some-quot-comic-books I actually updated my Mystic Quest LP http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1508-I-actually-updated-my-Mystic-Quest-LP Mon, 19 Aug 2013 13:51:32 GMT Must be a sign of the end times. http://home.eyesonff.com/general-final-fantasy/148972-lets-play-final-fantasy-mystic-quest-4.html#post3304746 Must be a sign of the end times.

http://home.eyesonff.com/general-fin...ml#post3304746 ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1508-I-actually-updated-my-Mystic-Quest-LP Workout log: week 1 http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1411-Workout-log-week-1 Sat, 22 Jun 2013 16:23:23 GMT I've been back to the gym for a little while now, but have been busy lately so I haven't been as consistent as I'd like. Figured starting a workout log might help to keep me on track to get there at least 3 days a week. Anyone who wants can feel free to post their workouts for the week in the comments as well if they want to partner up to keep each other motivated.

One thing which I won't post every single time is the warmup we do. We always warm up before starting strength work at the gym, but it's the same thing every time. It consists of:

10 burpees
10 air squats
10 lunges
10 chinups
10 pushups
10 situps
2 Turkish get ups with a kettlebell
15 second samson stretch (both sides)

I usually get in one or two rounds depending on how early I get there. I usually do some work on a foam roller to work the tightness out of some problem areas in my legs too so that affects whether I get a second round of warmup in sometimes too.

Anyway, here's my workouts for this week:

Tuesday, June 18th
Strength
Squats (6 sets of 5 reps each)
I realized I lost my journal when I got to the gym so I don't have the weight buildup written down. Went up to 175lbs. on the last set.

Conditioning
5 rounds of:
15 air squats
4 ring rows
4 pushups
Had a time of 9:27

Friday, June 21st
Strength
Deadlift (6 sets of 5 reps)
100, 120, 140, 160, 175, 185

Conditioning
As many rounds as possible (AMRAP) in 20 minutes of:
400m run
20 medicine ball situps
10 sumo stance deadlifts at 95lbs.

3 rounds even

This was a team workout so you were paired up with someone and everything was done together. You threw or passed the medicine ball to the other person as you alternated on the situps. I hated running even before I put on some weight so bleh. But having a partner is always cool when it happens since everyone pushes a bit harder. It was a literal race against the clock to finish that third round as I had about 15 seconds to fly through those 10 deadlifts. Made it just under the wire.

Only made it the two times this week, but it felt pretty great. I haven't been back long so I'm still building back up on the weight with strength work. Squats and Deadlifts felt pretty easy this week, but give it another month and that will start to change. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1411-Workout-log-week-1 Would you like a copy of FTL: Faster Than Light? http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1222-Would-you-like-a-copy-of-FTL-Faster-Than-Light Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:31:26 GMT SC2 events seemed to fail to coalesce, so anyone interested in winning a copy of FTL: Faster Than Light on Steam just go to the events thread below and post. I'll be doing the draw on Friday and we're having an FTL get together this weekend which will include a special guest. :D

http://home.eyesonff.com/general-gam...ml#post3243012 ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1222-Would-you-like-a-copy-of-FTL-Faster-Than-Light April Steam events: join for your chance to win free games http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1216-April-Steam-events-join-for-your-chance-to-win-free-games Sun, 07 Apr 2013 01:43:59 GMT Nope, I am not suddenly a spam bot (as far as I know).

I just wanted to mention for those that don't usually pay much attention to the Steam events that this month we're doing something a bit different. If you're able to join in for some games of Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm tomorrow, or FTL: Faster Than Light a few weeks from now, you'll have the chance to win FTL and the original Deus Ex.

You can check the thread linked below for the details. It should be lots of fun so i hope to see a decent turn out. Anyone interested in playing SC2 in particular but worried about having bronze league skills shouldn't be. All you need to do for a chance to win is just show up and play, and odds are we'll play some team games or something otherwise not very serious.

Depending on how many people turn up I might even be tempted to play a game of everyone vs. me and see if I survive very long. :)

http://home.eyesonff.com/general-gam...-surprise.html ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1216-April-Steam-events-join-for-your-chance-to-win-free-games Dietary Adventures: where we dissect science! http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1028-Dietary-Adventures-where-we-dissect-science! Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:34:35 GMT Okay, so not all scientists suck, but roll with me on this for a minute.

So I've been waiting weeks for a study to come out that I could really sink my teeth into in this blog. Any study would do since most nutrition studies are pretty bad, nutrition study reporting by news media is even worse, and I wanted an recent example to share and dissect to demonstrate the point. I wanted to do this maybe a month or two ago. Of course, because I wanted to do it, I didn't see any until last week because that's how the world seems to work. As soon as you want a bad piece of nutrition and health reporting you can't find squat. Luckily, the NIH were kind enough to oblige last week, and the Washington Post decided to report on it. I'll apologize up front because this will probably be a long on, but I promise it will be worth it.

Before I get started, I also want to give some credit to Tom Naughton at the Fat Head blog for being the first place I saw this study pop up, and doing some analysis of this article initially, and give him due credit for initially raising some of the questions I'll be covering here. I would have asked many of the same questions after years of reading up on this stuff, but I read his analysis when first hearing of the article, so it's only fair to give him credit so I don't come off as simply plagiarizing his work. So here we go (finally!).

(SPOILER)The Washington Post

Losing a small amount of weight doesn’t appear to lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes in people with diabetes who are already getting good medical care, according to a long and expensive clinical experiment whose results were announced Friday.

While modest weight loss has benefits in how overweight diabetics feel, sleep and move, whatever benefit it may confer in preventing cardiovascular disease — which is what most diabetics die from — is too small to measure, the study found.

...

The researchers recruited 5,145 people with Type 2 diabetes, which is the form that generally comes on in adulthood and is strongly associated with being overweight. Type 1 diabetes, an auto-immune disease, is the opposite. It comes on in childhood, and its sufferers are usually thin.

About 60 percent of the volunteers were women and slightly more than one-third were minorities. The average age was 58.

Half of the people were randomly assigned to get intensive dietary counseling on how to limit their calories. They were provided meal substitutes such as Slimfast drink. They were also urged to exercise more and instructed how to do so safely. They met weekly in support groups and once a month with a counselor, although that amount of attention was eventually reduced to a monthly visit and a monthly phone call.

The other half of the participants got less intensive diet and exercise advice, at first four times a year and later just once a year. Everyone was treated by her or his own doctor, who got an annual summary of the patient’s progress.

In the first year, the people with the intensive counseling lost 8 percent of their weight. They gained some back, but over the decade of the study maintained an average 5 percent reduction from their starting weight — about 10 pounds. The people in the less-intensive “arm” of the study lost, on average, about 1 percent of their body weight.

By the end of 11 years, there was no difference between the two groups in the rate of heart attack or stroke.
Okay, so that's in spoiler tags for obvious reasons. It's pretty lengthy. Here's the TLDR version: the study was done with type 2 diabetics. Half the participants got intensive dietary and exercise counseling over 11 years. The other half got less intensive counseling. The people in the intensive counseling group lost maintained an average weight loss of 5% or about 10 pounds. The other half maintained about 1%, or 2 pounds based on the math for the intensive group. The researchers expected to see a drop in heart attack and stroke risk for the more intensive group compared to the control. They didn't. There was no substantial (meaning a decrease not likely due to random error in this case rather than magnitude) decrease in risk between the two groups.

Now believe it or not, this is not the end of the story, despite what the scientists publishing the results, and the person who wrote the article may believe. The first big question that needs to come up is what this intensive dietary advice included? What diets were everyone eating? This is a pretty important question to ask for future studies, because maybe a different diet could have different results.

Luckily for myself and for all of you, Tom was kind enough to find the link to the study protocol for us, saving me some google searching.

(SPOILER)Look AHEAD protocol

Restriction of caloric intake is the primary method of achieving weight loss. In order to aim for a weight loss of 10% of initial weight, the calorie goals are 1200-1500 kcal/day for individuals weighing 250 lbs (114 kg) or less at baseline and 1500-1800 kcal/day for individuals who weigh more than 250 lbs. These goals can be reduced to 1000-1200 kcal/day and 1200-1500 kcal/day, respectively, if participants do not lose weight satisfactorily. These calorie levels should promote a weight loss of approximately one to two lbs/week.5

The composition of the diet is structured to enhance glycemic control and to minimize cardiovascular risk factors. The recommended diet is based on guidelines of the ADA and National Cholesterol Education program96,97 and includes a maximum of 30% of total calories from total fat, a maximum of 10% of total calories from saturated fat, and a minimum of 15% of total calories from protein.
So now we're getting into the meat of this a bit aren't we? The diet was 15% protein, 30% fat, leaving us with 55% of the diet being carbohydrates. That is a high carb diet if ever I saw one. So what did this study really demonstrate? Was it that weight loss doesn't affect heart attack or stroke risk, or is it that losing weight via caloric restriction on a high carb diet doesn't affect risk? It's really the latter, but this gets lost in the actual article. What would happen if the participants were losing weight on a low carb, high protein diet? Or a low carb, high fat diet? Or other combinations of macro nutrients? We can't say based on this study, but it's something worth pursuing.

Based on what we know about fat storage and insulin from my previous posts though, my bet would be that participants would have lost more weight on a low carb diet. Their risk of heart disease and stroke probably would have dropped as well, but we can save the reasons why for a future post I want to do specifically on heart disease.

But aside from simply debunking that weight loss on a high carb diet has any effect on heart attack risk, the study also works to debunk something else, almost unintentionally. Take a second to read the quoted sections above and try to figure it out before moving on. No shame in not figuring it out though because it's not immediately obvious, particularly if you've been told the wrong information your whole life as many of us are.

...

So here it is. In the dietary protocol above, calories were restricted to a level which the researchers believed, based on the caloric deficit, would promote a one to two pound per week weight loss. Do the math there and that should be about 50-100 lbs./year. But how much did participants actually lose on average? Remember, the people receiving the more intensive coaching and education maintained about 10 lbs. of weight loss over the 11 year study. The people receiving less intensive coaching maintained maybe 2 lbs.

Now there are two possible explanations which immediately spring to mind that could explain this. The first is that out of these more than 5,000 people who had the dedication and willpower to stick with this study for 11 years, many of them cheated on the protocol and lost little to nothing, or perhaps even gained, dragging the average down so low. I'll have to have a look around for the actual published results if they're freely available because the distribution of weight loss would help shine some light on this question, but realistically, I doubt that people ignored the study protocols in sufficient numbers, and to such a degree as to result in such underwhelming weight loss averages if they had the wherewithal to stick with a study for 11 years. If I do manage to track down the results later I'll edit them in.

The other option, which I'm sure anyone who was paying attention to my previous posts about fat storage and insulin, and the role carbohydrates play in the process might have picked up on, is that the old notion of weight loss being a matter of calories in minus calories out is bulltrout. These participants reduced calories to a degree which that hypothesis says should have resulted in them all being quite lean within a year or two. But they barely lost anything, and the reason is likely due to the amount of carbs they were eating. But again, this is the sort of stuff which should be investigated on the same level and scale as this NIH study. These are questions these researchers should be asking themselves as they move forward so they can design future research appropriately. Who knows if they actually will though.

Finally, I'll end with a quote from the article which demonstrates better than probably any other part of the article why I hate the present state of nutrition science and health reporting. I'll even let Mr. Naughton cut right to the heart of how terrible the following statement is:

Quote Originally Posted by Washington Post
The results will probably surprise many physicians and patients but are not likely to change the advice they give and get.
Quote Originally Posted by Tom Naughton
Well, of course not. You wouldn’t want failure to inspire a change in your beliefs, much less in your strategy.
]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/1028-Dietary-Adventures-where-we-dissect-science! Dietary Adventures part 4: Getting unfat http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/956-Dietary-Adventures-part-4-Getting-unfat Fri, 14 Sep 2012 12:19:27 GMT Just to recap part two since it was almost two months ago, we talked about how people get fat. The process is largely driven by the hormone insulin. When we spike blood sugar, insulin is released, some of the glucose is burned by our bodily tissues, any excess is stored. Spike glucose really high... Just to recap part two since it was almost two months ago, we talked about how people get fat. The process is largely driven by the hormone insulin. When we spike blood sugar, insulin is released, some of the glucose is burned by our bodily tissues, any excess is stored. Spike glucose really high too often and congratulations, you're obese.

So what do we do about it? The answer is really simple and should be pretty obvious: stop spiking blood glucose. It's very hard to lose weight and tap into fat stores if every time you eat your body is trying to store more fat. It's even harder if we've become insulin resistant so every time we eat, we're storing most of the glucose as fat and then we're hungry two hours later.

So the key to controlling glucose? Avoid foods that spike it. The big offenders are sugar (obviously), wheat products including whole grains and starches such as potatoes (less obvious). These things have a big impact on blood sugar, and if you're already obese, your ability to tolerate them without storing more fat is even less than someone like Jiro who will never be obese.

Instead, your diet should be based on things like meat, vegetables, some fruit (too much will also spike glucose), nuts, seeds, etc. Meat and other such sources of fat and protein are pretty good. They have a much lower effect on glucose and they keep you feeling full longer. Same with vegetables though they aren't quite as satiating as something high in protein and fat. And keep in mind, things like saturated fat in meat are actually good for you (something I hope to address in a future post), so load up.

Since that was pretty short I'll post a link to this blog post as well. If you haven't gotten the idea already, I like Fat Head and Tom Naughton is a pretty cool guy. Go watch it.

But this most recent post of his is a good run down of why calories in minus calories out doesn't work, using his dogs as unexpected test subjects. They got both dogs from the same breeder at the same time. The dogs are the same age, started with only a couple of pounds difference in weight, and (here's the key point here) eat the same amount of food everyday. But one of them is now 18 pounds heavier several months later.

Now calories in minus calories out would tell us this dog must be less active and isn't burning as much of that food (again, they eat the same amount). According to him though, the larger dog is actually more active than the other. If it's burning more calories but eating the same amount, conventional wisdom tells us this is impossible.

I figured I'd share that since it's an interesting real world (even if totally anecdotal) example of the idea that the conventional wisdom doesn't work. If you're trying to lose weight by cutting calories and exercising more and it's not working as fast as it should be, if it's working at all, there's probably more going on than you realize.

Next time, I plan on offering up some useful tips for eating out, including at fast food restaurants, since real world advice that's easy to follow is pretty cool. Stay tuned. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/956-Dietary-Adventures-part-4-Getting-unfat Diet, computers and other miscellaneous stuffs http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/949-Diet-computers-and-other-miscellaneous-stuffs Tue, 11 Sep 2012 11:24:15 GMT Now that the whole CK competition is over I finally have some time to get back to this and I figured I'd give an update on some things.

First, the diet has been treating me well. Last time I weighed myself (maybe two weeks ago I think) I was down to 290lbs. So that's about 10-15lbs. weight loss. I really should have weighed myself when I started, but the minimum I lost is 10lbs. My depression has been quite manageable as well. Most days it's not even an issue.

For anyone wondering when the follow up to Part 2 is coming, it should be soon. I wish I hadn't left it hanging for so long, but there's been a crap ton of stuff happening lately so bare with me.

Speaking of leaving things hanging, I'm going to get back to the Census and get at least one post in tonight.

And I'll also add a congratulations to the other winners of the CK competition, as well as to all of the participants. A lot of people worked really hard in that and did a great job. I can't imagine it was easy for the staff to come to a decision with so many great people involved.

And finally, one last thing: unless the tracking info on my Newegg order has lied to me I should have all of the parts for my new computer today. I know the processor is in the city and will be ready for pick up today. The rest was shipped separately and should be here today as well.

For those who've never built a computer before, it's a pretty exciting time when new parts come. Doubly exciting, and slightly nerve wracking right now since I'm reusing the case, graphics card, power supply and wireless card from my current machine. So if things go horribly wrong and any of the new parts are DOA, I might be without a computer tonight or stuck having to reassemble the old one until I can get things replaced.

What can I say? I like to live dangerously.

But don't any of you think that you'll be able to run wild and destroy the forums while I'm gone (if I'm gone). Shorty will be watching you, and I'll still have a computer at work. I may actually bring it home tonight actually so I'm not totally smurfed if this all goes pear shaped.

EDIT: Something else I almost forgot to mention regarding diet, I recommended watching the documentary Fat Head in one of my first posts on the subject. I'm pretty sure it's available on Netflix in the US for those of you who have it, but for those who don't it's also up on Youtube now, and is an actual legit version so ad revenue goes to Tom Naughton, the man who made it.

I can't recommend watching it enough for anyone interested in learning about how people actually get fat. He goes into a lot of what I've talked about in more detail, but always keeps it understandable, and even funny. Probably helps that he used to be a stand up comedian.

You can see it here: ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/949-Diet-computers-and-other-miscellaneous-stuffs Dietary Adventures Part 3: Where I give you an update http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/906-Dietary-Adventures-Part-3-Where-I-give-you-an-update Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:01:27 GMT I haven't had time to get to the follow up for my last post, so I thought I'd give a quick update instead.

My first week was something of a wash. My wife was in the hospital for some minor surgery in the middle of the week so I was grabbing meals where I could get them and wasn't always making great choices due to general fatigue and disinterest since I was spending my time either working, or with her in the hospital for a few days. But of course, the most important thing to do when you fall of the wagon is to simply shrug and say, "oh well, time to get back to it again." Too many people fail because they have a minor setback and then figure why bother?

Last week went much better though. I've been eating almost nothing but steak, ground beef, almonds, some parmesan, a few vegetables here and there and Caesar salad dressing. I also supplement with a multi-vitamin and fish oil. I might not bother with the vitamin if I could count on my meat being grass fed and if I liked organ meat, but neither of those is the case so I'm playing it safe on that front since I get little in the way of nutrients from plants now. I'm also testing my urine for ketone bodies daily. Ketone bodies are formed from fat by the body and used as fuel in the absence of carbohydrates providing glucose, usually as a result of diets extremely low in carbs. Since I'm getting, by my estimates, less than 20 grams of carbs most days, if my body were still burning only glucose I probably wouldn't feel too well.

So last Monday I noticed the first trace amounts of ketone bodies present in my urine meaning I'd started down the path of my body using fat for fuel instead of glucose. The levels increased gradually for the first few days and seem to have leveled off now. And the good news is that a week later, I've dropped from 298 lbs. on Thursday night, to 295 lbs. this morning. I actually didn't weigh myself at the start (needed to dig out the scale) and based on how loose my clothes are feeling already I think I was probably over 300lbs. when I started this whole process. So far though, it looks like I may be losing a pound a day or a bit less, and I'd like to point out that I've been to the gym once in the last month. This is all diet. My depression is also almost non-existent now. My bad days (or at least the one bad day I had) are better called mediocre days, and most days my mood could almost be described as cheerful.

One other interesting side effect I've noticed is that I don't crave carbohydrates anymore. It used to be the case that even seeing the candy aisle in a grocery store, or smelling the bag of chips my wife just opened would get my mouth watering and have my brain screaming at me to eat some. That's actually stopped completely now. Whereas it used to take a surprising amount of willpower to turn down these cravings, and I would fail more often than I care to admit, it's now pretty trivial for me to say no and go back to eating what I usually do. It's one of the things that surprised me the most. I thought it would be difficult to avoid the foods that would kick me out of ketosis faster than an olympic sprinter finishes the 100m, but it's actually become the easiest part so far.

Now for the bad news, though it's not really bad news I suppose: there's a transition period when you go on a ketogenic diet where your body stops burning glucose for fuel and starts using ketone bodies instead. I'd read about it before, it lasts about 48 hours and most people describe it as being in a kind of fog for that period. I don't know if it just hit me harder, but I felt like shit Thursday and Friday. I had plenty of energy, wasn't hungry, but felt like I had no energy and was hungry. It's very hard to describe because I've never really felt anything like it. It was like that feeling you get when your blood sugar crashes, minus the crashing blood sugar and shakiness that usually accompanies it. Luckily, a short 18 hour fast from Friday night to Saturday afternoon seems to have set things straight and now I feel great. Better than I have in years actually. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/906-Dietary-Adventures-Part-3-Where-I-give-you-an-update Dietary Adventures Part 2: How we get fat http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/902-Dietary-Adventures-Part-2-How-we-get-fat Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:47:01 GMT I realized after my last post that glossing over the details of what I'm doing and why in a few paragraphs and recommending people read a book or watch a documentary to better understand what I'm doing is a silly way to go about things. So I'm going to talk a bit today about how the body stores fat, and why I'm choosing specifically to go with a low carb diet (or more accurately for me at the moment, extremely low carb). I realize that all of my talk of aiming for so many grams of this or that with little consideration for calories in minus calories out is outside the conventional wisdom, so it warrants some more explanation so everyone can follow along. To keep things a little more concise I'll tackle how we store fat today, and why low carb works later this week if not tomorrow.

Now I'm going largely from memory here so it's going to be a bit of a simplification, but I can recommend some sources for anyone looking for more detailed information about all of this. I'm also willing to put in some research to try and answer questions anyone may have if I don't know the answer.

To start, we need to understand how the body stores fat. Most people think it's a simple matter of eating more than you burn. Eat too much, you can't burn it all so you store the excess as fat. The problem with this notion, aside from not being accurate, is that it's at best an oversimplification of some complex metabolic processes.

Fat storage is actually hormonally driven. The hormone which is most directly involved in, and has the largest impact on, the process of fat storage is insulin. You know, the stuff diabetics need to inject so they don't die because their pancreas doesn't work properly anymore.

Insulin's primary role is to shuttle glucose, sugar, in the blood stream to where it can be used. This means sending it to the muscle tissue to be burned for fuel or stored there a glycogen if you're lucky (which is important for any kind of endurance exercise), or storing it in fat cells for later use. The more glucose in the blood, the more insulin the pancreas has to produce to remove it so bad things don't happen (ie: you die).

Now here's where things get problematic. The muscles can only make use of glucose so quickly. If blood glucose gets too high, we release more insulin than normal but the muscles can't burn it quickly enough and it has to be stored as fat because that's the only other real option. But to make matters worse, if blood glucose is spiking very high on a frequent basis, we actually become insulin resistant. What this means is that the muscle and other tissues are less responsive to the signals insulin sends them so for the same amount of insulin we burn less glucose, forcing us to store more of it as fat. High blood glucose also has the problem of overworking the pancreas to produce more insulin which causes permanent damage, and in the long term, can result in diabetes.

So that's it in a nut shell. Spike blood glucose, increase insulin in the short term, insulin resistance in the long term, and store more fat as the end result. There are other problems which spin out from this as well which I'll get into next time before getting into what we can do about this. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/902-Dietary-Adventures-Part-2-How-we-get-fat Dietary Adventures Part 1: Making Dieticians cry http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/897-Dietary-Adventures-Part-1-Making-Dieticians-cry Tue, 17 Jul 2012 16:41:50 GMT Ok, so to start off, I'm not going to go to much into the theory behind the diet I'm embarking on. Suffice it to say, I'll be eating a low carb, high fat diet. I could spend the entire post elaborating on concepts like insulin's role in fat storage, the role carbohydrate control plays in managing blood glucose, and any number of other topics but that's not what I'm interested in jumping into right now. I've talked a bit about a lot of this stuff lately, but frankly I think other people do it better.

Anyone who'd like a primer on the science behind how fat storage works, I'd recommend the documentary Fat Head by Tom Naughton. You can find his blog and website here. I often recommend his movie because it's both funny, and well researched. He also has a nice tendency to break things down so the concepts he talks about are clear and understandable so for people not familiar with low carb eating it's not a bad place to start. If there's enough interest in the comments though I'll probably do a post or two about the nitty gritty details with this stuff. I'll probably do that when necessary anyway, but if the interest is there I'll try and get their sooner.

More specific than just eating a low carb, high fat diet though, I'm going to try and force my body into ketosis. You can read more about the basic concept on Wikipedia. Suffice it to say, the plan is to get my body to switch from burning mostly glucose for fuel, to burning fat instead. For most people, this is relatively easy to accomplish by simply switching to a low carb, high fat diet since there are too few carbs to readily convert to glucose, and a much more abundant supply of dietary fat.

But after reading this post by Mr. Naughton, I was surprised by the idea that too high a protein intake could sufficiently raise insulin levels to prevent someone from hitting ketosis.

Prior to this, I had been messing with my diet a bit based on the recommendations of the trainers at my gym. I don't have the spreadsheets here with me, but my first run at it from memory saw me eating roughly 185-195g of protein, around 50g of carbs, mostly from milk and some vegetables, and around 100g of fat from various sources.

This initial experiment, something of an attempt to set a baseline if you will taught me a few things:

1) I had trouble eating that much protein without supplementing some protein powder. My original goal was to eat closer to the 210-225g range for protein, but getting their was painfully difficult, quite literally in some ways because I just can't eat that much meat despite being a badass Starfleet captain. Even getting an extra 40-60 g from protein powder was difficult.

2) Protein Powder was making my depression worse. I'd have some every morning with breakfast, feel full until lunch easily and have good energy, but I could feel the depression creeping in within an hour or two tops and my mood would be shot for most of the day. I only realized it after skipping the protein powder for a few days and feeling fine, then starting it again and feeling worse almost immediately.

3) My performance in the gym improved quite a bit. I think this was mostly because I was being more consistent about getting sufficient amounts of protein and avoiding foods high in carbs, particularly sugar and starches which I knew from past experience made me feel slow and sluggish.

4) Despite only eating about 2,000-2,200 calories a day and working out a lot I lost no weight. At first I thought it might be me putting on muscle again, and I think there was some of that going on, but there was still no appreciable downward change in the scale or the way my clothes were fitting. In fact I actually put on a couple of pounds in the few weeks I was trying this.

There are a number of possible explanations for this last one. It did involve a lot of protein so it's possible muscle gain was outstripping any fat loss, but regardless, I wasn't trying to gain significant amounts of muscle mass so this isn't entirely desirable since I'm quite heavy right now and I'd rather maintain muscle mass while dropping body fat at the moment. My diet also included dairy and whey protein which may have been an issue. Some people have trouble losing weight with too much dairy, though I was at my leanest early in my days doing CrossFit despite drinking 2-3 glasses of whole milk a day, so I'm not totally convinced. Still, it's something to consider.

So with those things in mind I've made some tweaks to the diet. Some of this is born of the idea that excess protein may be keeping me from reaching ketosis and slowing fat loss, and some is the result of spending much of last summer eating quite a bit more fat than that and having a better handle on my depression than I'd had in years.

What I'm shooting for right now is around 120-125g of protein, 145g of fat, and 40g of carbs at the moment. I'm going to see how things go and try tweaking a bit from there. Unless I've made a mistake in the numbers there (again, my spreadsheet is at home right now) that comes out to about 2,000 calories. I'm still drinking a glass of milk (with some 35% cream added no less) with breakfast but whey protein is out for the time being. I may try adding some post workout in a few weeks, but for now I think it's best to avoid it. I'm also supplementing with fish oil capsules to get Omega-3's in there. The goal being a combined 5g a day of DHA and EPA for now and I may up it in the future. I've used fish oil at various points in the last few years, and aside from being great at fighting inflammation, I find it helps manage my depression. Hopefully I get my hands on some more concentrated stuff at a decent price soon though because I'd rather not take 16 capsules a day past the end of this bottle.

Some preliminary results from day 1: I felt full from breakfast until about 11am when I could feel hunger creeping in. I did wake up feeling a bit depressed this morning but noticed it going away about 1-2 hours after I ate my breakfast. It kind of felt like the symptoms were coming back at around 11:30-11:45, but since eating lunch an hour ago that's abated again. I'm thinking I may need to tweak breakfast a bit so it keeps me full longer and hopefully I don't find myself getting hungry and depressed so early. I'll keep running with it for the next few days, but if the same thing keeps happening I may replace the milk and cream with a small salad, maybe cook my steak with some butter to get a bit more fat early in the day, and leave the milk for supper time/post workout.

One other thing to note: eating 1/3rd of a cup of almonds in one sitting can suck some days, particularly if you don't have a drink close at hand. Doing it twice in one day? About as much fun as it sounds. I may need to work on an alternative and cut back a little bit.

One final note to explain the title of today's post: my fat intake at the moment is at a minimum twice what Health Canada, the USDA, or any Dietician would recommend. Probably more than that to be honest, and I'm considering upping it a bit more if need be. Actually, if I told most doctor's what I'm eating, they'd probably want to skip the blood test and head straight for prescribing me a statin. Note that I'm not all that worried I'm going to die of heart disease... well, pretty much ever. :D ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/897-Dietary-Adventures-Part-1-Making-Dieticians-cry <![CDATA[Vivi22's Dietary Adventures Prologue: The Beginninning... inning!]]> http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/896-Vivi22-s-Dietary-Adventures-Prologue-The-Beginninning-inning! Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:45:30 GMT Before we begin, I want to say that if you're coming in here expecting recipes or for me to try new foods, you should probably just turn around and head on back to the forums. I'm a terrible cook, care little for the effort that making interesting food takes, and would be perfectly happy to eat nothing but ground beef all day everyday for the rest of my life.

So what am I going to be doing here? My plan is to do a regular series of posts on my diet, the experiments I plan on performing with it, and the results I experience. Not just results in terms of fat loss though (although I'm hoping for some of that). I plan on recording as much as I can about everything from my gym performance to my mood as I play with the variables involved in what I shove in my mouth, and be perfectly honest about how it all effects my body. I'm not only hoping to get a better handle on how food affects me physically and psychologically, but hopefully to give everyone else an idea of how food affects us as well and perhaps some ideas on how to tweak your own food intake depending on your goals. And hopefully, this process of keeping a semi-regular blog will help keep me more focused, consistent, and accountable as things go on.

My life the last several years:
Now before I get down to the nitty gritty of it all, I think it's best to share some things up front. First things first, I spent much of my younger days eating complete tit and paid for it. By the tenth grade I not only had a wicked sweet tooth, I was about 265 lbs. at my heaviest when I finally decided to try and eat better and exercise more. Like most people, that meant cutting out junkfood like chocolate, candy, and chips mainly with little attention paid to my diet beyond that. I eventually dropped down to the 225-235 range where I stayed until University where at various points I let me weight creep back up again before dropping the extra pounds. But about the only thing I did learn for certain during this time is that exercising a lot does not give you free reign to eat whatever you want.

Fast forward a few years to my post-University life and things get a little more interesting for lack of a better word. I put on some weight again while working my first job out of University, but managed to lose it while farting around with low carb eating and CrossFit on my own at home. Then I got laid off, a month or two later the hopelessness crept in, and I'm in a full blown depression. It's important to note that I've struggled with depression on and off since then. After moving back home with the wife and starting at a CrossFit gym regularly I tried to keep my diet in order and I was losing fat and putting on muscle but there were some issues. I had a much harder time coping with my depressive episodes when they'd rear up, and when I was working at a call center things eventually spiraled so out of control that I started thinking about suicide. It's two years later and obviously I'm still here so I'm handling things better now, but during that time I stopped paying too much attention to diet. Sure, I'd have periods of a few weeks where I'd eat really well, and most of my meals weren't actually that bad. I did, however, let myself get away with cheating a lot more, in large part because many days I simply didn't have the energy to even care enough to eat properly, let alone do it.

As a result, my weight ballooned up to about 290-295lbs. now. I'll add that because I still do CrossFit as often as I can, much more of that is muscle than it was when I was in the tenth grade, but it's also about 50 lbs. heavier than I was when I was at my leanest doing CrossFit, and I'm looking to change that, as well as try and get a better handle on my depression. The latter is especially important to me right now as I've noted some dietary links in the last year or so which could have been exacerbating things. And really, who the hell wants to be depressed? Even if I don't lose much weight right away I think I could settle with the short term success of being able to go a week without feeling like the world might as well be ending.

So that's where I'm starting at: 26 years old, 6'2", 295 lbs., and ready to dive into all manner of science, food logs, and journals to figure out what I've been doing wrong and fix it, and hopefully the rest of you might find this, if not beneficial to yourselves, interesting at the very least.

My next post will likely come tomorrow. I'm going to dive into a recent first attempt at changing my diet, where I benefited from the changes and where I didn't, and where I'm going to take things from there. I'll also go into some rough numbers on how much I plan to eat each day and what the composition of foods is going to look like.

We'll also see what happens when I completely ignore everything that the USDA and any other government agency has ever said about eating healthy in the last 50-60 years. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/896-Vivi22-s-Dietary-Adventures-Prologue-The-Beginninning-inning! Census results roll out has begun! http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/595-Census-results-roll-out-has-begun! Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:47:20 GMT EOFF 2011 census results!

That's right people, we've finally tallied your entries and after much delay, some possible drug abuse, and confusion over where to hide the dead hookers before you arrived, we're finally revealing them. So how did your picks in the music and visual categories do? Safe bet is that you're wrong, even if you picked the top choices, or if whatever you picked was ever so much as in the same room as FFXIII. But hey, you can't get any more wrong than someone who doesn't vote, so by my tally, Shlup is the wrongest of you all. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/595-Census-results-roll-out-has-begun! EOFF Census voting closes today http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/560-EOFF-Census-voting-closes-today Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:57:15 GMT http://forums.eyesonff.com/general-f...11-census.html

If you haven't voted yet then get them in. I'll be starting to tally things tomorrow, and reveals will begin sometime next week (I'm going to shoot for Wednesday at the latest). I will still take entries after today if they come in, so if you send me something tomorrow or Saturday I won't just ignore it, but once reveals start that'll be it. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/560-EOFF-Census-voting-closes-today 2011 Census and Part 1 of Failure. http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/462-2011-Census-and-Part-1-of-Failure Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:02:44 GMT First things first, the Summer 2011 Census thread is up. Be sure to send me your entries sooner rather than later so I don't have to board the S.S. Professor and drum solo all of you into submission.

That out of the way, I wanted to get to the blog post I talked about making last time discussing challenge in video games and ways to affect it for better or worse. The reason why I think it's extremely important to address challenge properly involves both preserving the desired flow of the game or feelings you're looking to instill in the player, and something I'll refer to as failure tolerance. Essentially failure tolerance is how many times a player can tolerate failing before they either give up or take a break from the game. Now it's going to be different for everyone, but in general, the average player probably isn't going to put up with losing too often before they give up either temporarily or for good. Now there are people who live for challenge and will retry levels in games like Mega Man endlessly until they're successful, though even people who enjoy these challenges can have a low failure tolerance in certain circumstances, especially if they view the challenge as either something that isn't fair or which they literally aren't capable of completing.

So to that end, I've thought a lot about different ways to try and increase a players tolerance for failing in a variety of games and how it feeds into making the games that do these better in general. So far I've come up with five major factors to manipulate which are:
1) Execution barriers - Is the player even capable of performing the tasks you're asking of them?
2) Transparency - Does the player understand why they failed?
3) Punishment - How severely are you punishing the player when they fail?
4) Options - Is there more than one way to approach problems in your game?
5) Problem awareness - Does the player even know what you expect them to do right now?

I'm going to start with the first one today, execution barriers, and I'll do that by tackling a few examples and the implications they have on the overall game.

Starcraft 2

Starcraft 2 is an interesting one, but in order to talk about what it did in terms of manipulating the execution barriers I actually have to start with its predecessor, Starcraft: Brood War. Brood War (BW from here on in) is the game that essentially kicked off professional gaming in Korea, and it was for good reason. With three very different races there is a lot of depth in that game and huge potential for some interesting matchups. The game greatly emphasized strategy and being able to read and predict your opponents play to be successful. BW certainly deserved the popularity it gained as a competitive game if you ask me, but there was one thing you needed to be competitive at the professional level aside from the ability to read the game and utilize some good strategy. You needed to be able to perform a few hundred actions per minute. Probably in the range of 250-300 at the minimum.

So to put that into perspective you had to be able to perform 4-5 actions per second to compete at a high level at all. You could know the strategic side of the game inside and out, know exactly what needs to be done in every situation but if you can only make about 100 actions a minute tops, then you're already out of the game. There are just too many things to micromanage in BW for you to beat someone who can out action you by that wide a margin. This is a pretty huge execution barrier.

Now I want to point out at this point that an execution barrier isn't necessarily bad. Being able to master the controls and interface can sometimes create a satisfying challenge for the player. Learning how to master the controls in games like Mirror's Edge, or platformers like Mario 64 can give the player a tremendous sense of accomplishment as the player becomes better at the game. A bit of a higher execution barrier also meshes well with those games since the point of them is essentially to master movement through the levels. In these cases they do it by giving the player a lot of options for moving through a level which necessitates some complexity in the controls. In those cases, the game itself is one of fairly complex movement if you distill it down to it's purest form. So to understand whether a high execution barrier hurts or helps BW we need to ask what sort of game it's trying to be. It seems somewhat obvious that it's trying to be a game about strategy more than a game about clicking hundreds of times a minute. Now this isn't an argument for no execution barrier. One of the interesting things that developed in BW was people utilizing their ability to micro manage their units when attacking or defending, sometimes with such skill that they can win battles in which they have a unit disadvantage simply by outmaneuvering and out controlling his opponent. This sort of control is one of the aspects that keeps BW from being just a game of throwing massive armies at each other until someone wins and where a lot of the interesting action happens both as a player and as a spectator. So the question becomes one of how do you level the playing field so people who aren't capable of 300 APM are still able to manage their army sufficiently that they can be competitive against those who can act that quickly?

The solution Blizzard came up with by and large was to make it much easier to manage unit production and in game economy in Starcraft 2. For those not familiar with the series, each player essentially starts the map with a command center for their race and some drones to mine resources. As you collect resources you build buildings which allow you to build units for your army and buy upgrades. So one of the first things they did to make it easier to manage this whole process was allowing you to hotkey buildings. Instead of having to individually select unit producing structures and tell them what to build one at a time, you can assign multiple structures to hotkeys so that you can quickly select all of the ones you want with a number key, then simply press the keyboard shortcuts for producing the units you want. So I could be mid battle with my opponent in Starcraft 2, and as long as there's a bit of a break in the action I could just hit 4 to select all of my barracks structures and then start building marines to reinforce my current army. And by setting a ralley point for them to go to once they're finished being made I don't even have to go back to my base to tell them to get moving. Rally points are a bit of a carryover from the original game mind you, but setting them was the same procedure as building units. Click the barracks, select rally and click the spot on the map to send them to. Do this for every unit producing structure there is. In SC2, you set them all at once for every building you have selected at the time, and you now do it with a simple right click of the mouse.

Some other improvements made include drone units auto-mining resources if you set them to rally on the resource nodes. Before you would have had to tell them which minerals to mine manually, but now you can do the same thing as any other units and simply select the hotkey and start producing. Essentially, to make it easier for low APM players to compete, Blizzard made massive changes to the interface to reduce the number of actions you need to make at any given point. It sounds simple, but getting a nice fluid UI undoubtedly took a lot of time, experimentation and testing on their part. It's no surprise then that players who may average 80-100 APM can compete on a much more level playing field than before, and places the focus of the game more on the part about managing your army and outplaying your opponent than on seeing who can out click their opponent and win solely by being able to do more at once.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

This is an example that goes along similar lines. For people such as myself who find rotating a joystick or D-pad for anything more than a quarter circle motion that you'd do to toss a fireball as Ryu, Ken, Akuma, or toss out Sub-Zero's freeze move in the early Mortal Kombat games very difficult, playing Zangief in the original Super Turbo would be damn near impossible. His spinning Piledrive required a 360 degree rotation followed by a quick punch input. His super move required a disheartening 720 degree rotation. Honestly, if I had to play Zangief in the original I'd probably give up and move on to another character pretty quickly. I have never been able to get moves like this out with much accuracy assuming I even get them at all. Sometimes even half-circle motions which can be fairly common as well are difficult for me, though not the impossibility that a full circle or more are.

Luckily, designer David Sirlin who handled the rebalancing of the game for it's HD Remix agreed that it may be a bit much for more new or casual players. And the reason is much the same as the reason for simplifying some of the more mundane elements of Starcraft 2. Now in a fighting game you don't want things to feel too easy to pull off or it would seem more like a button masher than what it actually is: a game about knowing your characters strengths, reading your opponent, and reacting appropriately. But as Sirlin put it, "I’d like ordinary humans to be able to play and enjoy Zangief, not just super heroes." So what he did was bring the spinning pile drive down from a full circle to a half circle motion. Still tricky, but most people should be able to do it with some accuracy after a bit of practice. And for his super move, it went from being two full circles with the joystick or D-Pad to two half circles forward. Again, still tricky, but most people should eventually become decent enough at it with practice to at least be able to do it most of the time. His reason for doing this was simply that at high levels of competition, players generally didn't have a problem executing full circle motions accurately and the interesting part of the game came from reading and reacting to your opponent. Some mastery of the controls is important because some challenge needs to come from being able to execute moves properly when under pressure, but the execution barrier was so high for Zangief that some people like myself never stood a chance unless we wanted to start practicing it for hours on end. By lowering the execution barrier, it makes it possible for slightly less dexterous players to play Zangief at a higher level, and like SC2, may even let some players play competitively who may not be able to otherwise since it shifts the focus from being really good at rotating the joystick when you have to to being able to use the right moves at the right time and out think your opponent.

That's it for this blog post. Next time I plan on taking a look at punishment and transparency to see what we can learn from other games that have deftly balanced these elements. ]]> Slothy http://home.eyesonff.com/entry.php/462-2011-Census-and-Part-1-of-Failure