Resolutions

Last year around this time, I resolved to lose some weight as many people do every year. I wasn't that much overweight and nobody had told me that I needed to, but my spouse was going to lose weight and I thought it would be good to help her by showing solidarity. My goal was to go for my college weight which was between 145 and 150 lbs (65 kg or so in real SI units instead of silly imperial units (how many ounce in a pound again?)). Amazingly I reached that goal around May exactly on schedule (see figure on the right) and have been maintaining it since. What's the secret? Very simple. I just restricted caloric intake and exercised regularly. In my case, I was always very active but simply ate too much and drank too much beer. The body is a pretty straightforward calculator in this respect. If you take in more calories than you burn, you'll gain. Take in less and you'll lose. Take in as much as you burn and you will be stable. Of course people differ in how many calories they burn just living so the equilibrium point is different for different people. You just need the discipline to actually do it and have ways of exercising that are effective for you. My two major ways of exercising are mountain biking and hiking with heavy backpacks (photo gear) in the mountains. Both extremely caloric. So if you are considering resolving to lose weight, realize that it can be done if you stick to it, be honest with yourself, and don't get tempted by silly diets. Just follow Pollan's excellent advice to eat food, and not too much. Food meaning something that our great grandparents would have recognized as food.

The screenshot on the right is from the excellent iPhone app Loseit. It is very effective and free. There are many tools like this to help you if you need it, but simply being aware of what you eat and not eating as much as you might normally works just fine too.

Now I just need new New Year's resolutions for next year.

Ag-gag laws

I find it deeply disturbing. It is being made illegal (and already is in parts) in some states of the United States to tell people how their food is being "produced." This is going to the point of attaching prison time to filming inside slaughterhouses exposing terrible conditions for the animals and workers. Horrible! I wrote about this before but just wanted to reiterate after reading the above linked blog entry. Mark Bittman also recently wrote another, longer blog entry recently about this.

"Food" industry run amok

And it is apparently buying itself legislation that prohibits anybody from taking a photograph of a "farm". Many states in the US already have absolutely crazy laws that prevent simple free speech that criticise the food industry (the so-called veggie laws) but now they also want to prevent anybody from taking simple pictures of farms even from public roads. Clearly they want to prevent the public from finding out about the abusive practices that some say occur in these highly industrialized places. If you have Netflix, I recommend you stream Food Inc to your TV/computer/iPad/iPhone to learn a little more but that is not as graphic as the video linked to in the New York Times article above. The book that the movie is based on "the Omnivore's dilemma" is better but takes a little longer to read. An instructive rant on the farm photography Stalinist laws is at silber studios.tv. Clearly this is not about the small farms that they make it sound like in the laws but about protecting the grind-them-up-alive operations that "produce" so much of today's "food". Of course the laws are written so that it applies to any food producing entity, not just the factory feedlot operations.

I don't know about you but I think something is deeply wrong when you could get thrown into jail for taking a cell phone picture of a farm next to a road. Note also how diametrically opposed this is to the well known right of photographers to photograph what can be seen from the public road excepting maybe a few national security related places such as certain DOE and DOD installations.