The ideal pill

I don't know of this story first hand. What I mean is that I didn't know personally the mice who were part of the experiment. I don't know the scientists who conducted the experiment either. I read about it in a book.

Some mice drink from a bowl, and are given a shot so that a few hours later, they become nauseous. They learn very quickly not to drink from the bowl anymore. Some other mice drink from the same bowl, and two hours later they are given an electric shock. They do not learn not to drink from the bowl. The interpretation is that the mice are prewired to associate certain stimuli with certain reactions. It makes perfect sense.

(My girlfriend just gave me a present: some nougats from Le Pain Quotidien. I had to have one out of appreciation. Then I learned that she had bought them a long time ago and had just found them buried under papers in a drawer.)

On November 30, 1984, I went to the birthday party of a friend of my cousin. We were young, then, less than 21, even less than 18, in a country where you didn't have to wait. In the sense that I had gin with Coke, then more, and so much so that I had a black out. I couldn't drink gin for fifteen years after that. The smell was enough to make me feel like a mouse drinking from the wrong bowl.

I imagine a radical new diet, with a pill, that we will call N, that gives you nausea. You can eat as many sweets as you desire. Each time you do, you also swallow an N. If we follow the teaching of the mice, you should quickly stop going towards the sweets. On the other hand, please do not try to achieve the same with an electric chair. The mice would smirk at you.

Sinning

It is a sin to look at noisy data without averaging. Yet I cannot help but notice that my weight today is 152.8 lbs, down from an average of 156 between August 8 and August 25. The body fat is 18.1% down from a 18.6% computed over the same period.

It is not completely a sin. There is a correlation between the amount of food one ate the day before and the weight in the morning, even if this correlation is not perfect as it depends on the amount of dehydration. In any case, because of this correlation, I get direct feedback, both negative and positive. If I ate a lot the night before, I see within ten hours. Without an obsessive weight recording program, it would take several months before I would see the effects of drifting eating habits.

Skinny Bunny is tempted to throw the towel. Please, Skinny Bunny, don't do that. You are my motivation and my inspiration.

Establishing a new routine is the second most difficult endeavor in one's life. I am French and hence grew up without hygiene. You can imagine how hard it was to learn to floss everyday. I am still fighting for it. It is precisely because it is so hard that I need to have a daily task in my Outlook to remind me to do it. The only routine that I have been able to establish firmly is to look at my due tasks on Outlook everyday. Call this the mother-of-all-routines.

Getting rid of a well-established routine is the first most difficult endeavor in one's life: thought patterns, behaviors in relationships, nail-biting. How much would I give to be a blank slate and only have to establish new routines rather than getting rid of old ones.

Last night, I had some 'soy chips' before leaving the office. It is a slippery slope, as the real chips are less than a foot away. When one extends one's hand, who is in control of what it will grab?

Skinny Bunny, we will get together to the promisedland of low girth. Only twenty-five more days to go.

The routine

We are now firmly established in a daily routine, after two days. Routine is rather boring, actually, and I am thinking of moving on soon to another goal. Soon could be tomorrow. The goal could be set so as to answer the question: 'How does it feel to weigh 200 pounds?'

I have a spreadsheet that records my weight since March 1st 2003, sometimes on a daily basis, sometimes with long periods of silence, like when I was in India for a few months. Sometimes, I show it proudly to an acquaintance. They think I am crazy. More data is better than less, I say. And: Look, here I went from 164 pounds to 154 in three months. This means I can do it again. If I didn't have this data, I couldn't know for sure I had been able to do that. I don't trust memory.

Indian food tonight with N. I ate thirty grains of rice.

Skinny Bunny, I noticed you left some comments on my previous postings. How kind of you.

Piece of cake

Skinny Bunny IM'd me a little earlier today. She wrote:

I just ate a piece of cake - cheese cake with chocolate mousse and chocolate cake and icing.

"You deserve it," I replied. That's just because I am nice. In fact, I don't think she does.

I met with B. this morning. He used to be fat, very fat. That was one year ago. He is now super skinny. Diet, apparently. I spent the morning evaluating people's girths. Problem: I can't check my guesses.

A test dinner

I am invited for dinner tonight. These friends cook well. They like wine. Skinny Bunny will be there too. We are going to watch over each other.

Wearing glasses

'I don't think I can resist the desert,' says my colleague L. after we've had our usual orange (we are members of the citrus club). "I won't have any, I am losing weight," I reply. Yet I insist that we pass by the desert table to see what's there.

S., who sits just outside my office, has a white board above her desk. An arrow drawn on it points to her left. It bears the legend: "Cookies and Chocolate," and indeed points to cookies -- and chocolate.

And so it is that L. and I go to the desert table. There is a strawberry mousse, chocolate cookies, and an apple cobbler. That's what the labels say. However, this is not what I see. I see a fluorescent pinkish cream that, when applied to your legs, removes hair painlessly. I see some clogs of sand. I see small yellow trays with epoxy glue laid on them.

The arrow. It points down. I look up. There is no cookie there, no chocolate. And even if there were, they would be too high to reach.

Starting

Skinny Bunny and I have decided to lose 5 pounds over the next five weeks. Skinny Bunny, who for mysterious reasons still sticks to her old name -- Fat Bunny -- can be reached at her blog. And yes, I am the one who called her fat over IM. I would never have dared do that in her face.

A long part of our IM discussion revolved around body fat, and the much controversial Tanita scale, which is to body fat measurement what the electric chair is to the death penalty, that is, an unreliable method that uses electricity. However unreliable it is, you can eliminate the noise by averaging over enough days, and you can hope that the bias is constant so that the changes really mean something.

For your information, Skinny Bunny, I computed my body fat from my BMI according to the site you mention (please, use links, you will save three seconds to each of your ten thousand readers), and I get 20.25%, which is more than Tanita's claim about my lipidic self, that hovers around 18%.

There is a good reason why I want to lose weight. It is easier to lift 97 pounds than 100 pounds, and hence it is easier to lift oneself on a trapeze if one is 3% lighter. It is also more elegant not to have flabby shapes emphasized by the tight top I will wear during my forthcoming trapeze recital. At last, I would like to see what it's like to be less than 150 pounds. Just to see what it's like. It is difficult to imagine a better reason.

If you want to lose 5 pounds out of 139, and you want this to be fat only, you need to reduce your body fat percentage by 5/139. It happens to be 3.6%. This assumes that the Tanita doesn't have a bias, and we know it has, so if Skinny Bunny succeeds in this reduction, it probably means that she will have lost more than five pounds.

As a treat, at the end of these four weeks, we will do the same measurement in the evening, in a very humid bathroom. This should give us good numbers.

Strategy: snoop on Skinny Bunny's blog, steal her best ideas. Not a single sweet thing, no more fast carbs, and running (I went this morning, for the first time in months).