3500 calories per pound

This looks set to be the concluding post in this particular little series on the subject of obesity and overweightness. So, to summarise where we’ve been so far- post 1: that there are a lot of slightly chubby people present in the western world leading to statistics supporting a massive obesity problem, and that even this mediocre degree of fatness can be seriously damaging to your health. Post 2: why we have spent recent history getting slightly chubby. And for today, post 3: how one can try to do your bit, especially following the Christmas excesses and the soon-broken promises of New Year, to lose some of that excess poundage.

It was Albert Einstein who first demonstrated that mass was nothing more than stored energy, and although the theory behind that precise idea doesn’t really correlate with biology the principle still stands; fat is your body’s way of storing energy. It’s also a vital body tissue, and is not a 100% bad and evil thing to ingest, but if you want to lose it then the aim should simply be one of ensuring that one’s energy output, in the form of exercise  exceeds one’s energy input, in the form of food. The body’s response to this is to use up some of its fat stores to replace this lost energy (although this process can take up to a week to run its full course; the body is a complicated thing), meaning that the amount of fat in/on your body will gradually decrease over time. Therefore, slimming down is a process that is best approached from two directions; restricting what’s going in, and increasing what’s going out (both at the same time is infinitely more effective than an either/or process). I’ll deal with what’s going in first.

The most important point to make about improving one’s diet, and when considering weight loss generally, is that there are no cheats. There are no wonder pills that will shed 20lb of body fat in a week, and no super-foods or nutritional supplements that will slim you down in a matter of months. Losing weight is always going to be a messy business that will take several months at a minimum (the title of this post refers to the calorie content of body fat, meaning that to lose one pound you must expend 3500 more calories than you ingest over a given period of time), and unfortunately prevention is better than cure; but moping won’t help anyone, so let’s just gather our resolve and move on.

There is currently a huge debate going on concerning the nation’s diet problems of amount versus content; whether people are eating too much, or just the wrong stuff. In most cases it’s probably going to be a mixture of the two, but I tend to favour the latter answer; and in any case, there’s not much I can say about the former beyond ‘eat less stuff’. I am not a good enough cook to offer any great advice on what foods you should or shouldn’t be avoiding, particularly since the consensus appears to change every fortnight, so instead I will concentrate on the one solid piece of advice that I can champion; cook your own stuff.

This is a piece of advice that many people find hard to cope with- as I said in my last post, our body doesn’t want to waste time cooking when it could be eating. When faced with the unknown product of one’s efforts in an hours time, and the surety of a ready meal or fast food within five minutes, the latter option and all the crap that goes in it starts to seem a lot more attractive. The trick is, therefore, to learn how to cook quickly- the best meals should either take less than 10-15 minutes of actual effort to prepare and make, or be able to be made in large amounts and last for a week or more. Or, even better, both. Skilled chefs achieve this by having their skills honed to a fine art and working at a furious rate, but then again they’re getting paid for it; for the layman, a better solution is to know the right dishes. I’m not going to include a full recipe list, but there are thousands online, and there is a skill to reading recipes; it can get easy to get lost between a long list of numbers and a complicated ordering system, but reading between the lines one can often identify which recipes mean ‘chop it all up and chuck in some water for half an hour’.

That’s a very brief touch on the issue, but now I want to move on and look at energy going out; exercise. I personally would recommend sport, particularly team sport, as the most reliably fun way to get fit and enjoy oneself on a weekend- rugby has always done me right. If you’re looking in the right place, age shouldn’t be an issue (I’ve seen a 50 year old play alongside a 19 year old student at a club rugby match near me), and neither should skill so long as you are willing to give it a decent go; but, sport’s not for everyone and can present injury issues so I’ll also look elsewhere.

The traditional form of fat-burning exercise is jogging, but that’s an idea to be taken with a large pinch of salt and caution. Regular joggers will lose weight it’s true, but jogging places an awful lot of stress on one’s joints (swimming, cycling and rowing are all good forms of ‘low-impact exercise’ that avoid this issue), and suffers the crowning flaw of being boring as hell. To me, anyway- it takes up a good chunk of time, during which one’s mind is so filled with the thump of footfalls and aching limbs that one is forced to endure the experience rather than enjoy it. I’ll put up with that for strength exercises, but not for weight loss when two far better techniques present themselves; intensity sessions and walking.

Intensity sessions is just a posh name for doing very, very tiring exercise for a short period of time; they’re great for burning fat & building fitness, but I’ll warn you now that they are not pleasant. As the name suggest, these involve very high-intensity exercise (as a general rule, you not be able to talk throughout high-intensity work) performed either continuously or next to continuously for relatively short periods of time- an 8 minute session a few times a week should be plenty. This exercise can take many forms; shuttle runs (sprinting back and forth as fast as possible between two marked points or lines), suicides (doing shuttle runs between one ‘base’ line and a number of different lines at different distances from the base, such that one’s runs change in length after each set) and tabata sets (picking an easily repeatable exercise, such as squats, performing them as fast as possible for 20 seconds, followed by 10 seconds of rest, then another 20 seconds of exercise, and so on for 4-8 minute) are just three examples. Effective though these are, it’s difficult to find an area of empty space to perform them without getting awkward looks and the odd spot of abuse from passers-by or neighbours, so they may not be ideal for many people (tabata sets or other exercises such as press ups are an exception, and can generally be done in a bedroom; Mark Lauren’s excellent ‘You Are Your Own Gym’ is a great place to start for anyone interested in pursuing this route to lose weight & build muscle). This leaves us with one more option; walking.

To my mind, if everyone ate properly and walked 10,000 steps per day, the scare stats behind the media’s obesity fix would disappear within a matter of months. 10,000 steps may seem a lot, and for many holding office jobs it may seem impossible, but walking is a wonderful form of exercise since it allows you to lose oneself in thought or music, whichever takes your fancy. Even if you don’t have time for a separate walk, with a pedometer in hand (they are built into many modern iPods, and free pedometer apps are available for both iPhone and Android) and a target in mind (10k is the standard) then after a couple of weeks it’s not unusual to find yourself subtly changing the tiny aspects of your day (stairs instead of lift, that sort of thing) to try and hit your target; and the results will follow. As car ownership, an office economy and lack of free time have all grown in the last few decades, we as a nation do not walk as much as we used to. It’s high time that changed.

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The Epitome of Nerd-dom

A short while ago, I did a series of posts on computing based on the fact that I had done a lot of related research when studying the installation of Linux. I feel that I should now come clean and point out that between the time of that first post being written and now, I have tried and failed to install Ubuntu on an old laptop six times already, which has served to teach me even more about exactly how it works, and how it differs from is more mainstream competitors. So, since I don’t have any better ideas, I thought I might dedicate this post to Linux itself.

Linux is named after both its founder, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish programmer who finished compiling the Linux kernel in 1992, and Unix, the operating system that could be considered the grandfather of all modern OSs and which Torvalds based his design upon (note- whilst Torvald’s first name has a soft, extended first syllable, the first syllable of the word Linux should be a hard, short, sharp ‘ih’ sound). The system has its roots in the work of Richard Stallman, a lifelong pioneer and champion of the free-to-use, open source movement, who started the GNU project in 1983. His ultimate goal was to produce a free, Unix-like operating system, and in keeping with this he wrote a software license allowing anyone to use and distribute software associated with it so long as they stayed in keeping with the license’s terms (ie nobody can use the free software for personal profit). The software compiled as part of the GNU project was numerous (including a still widely-used compiler) and did eventually come to fruition as an operating system, but it never caught on and the project was, in regards to its achieving of its final aims, a failure (although the GNU General Public License remains the most-used software license of all time).

Torvalds began work on Linux as a hobby whilst a student in April 1991, using another Unix clone MINIX to write his code in and basing it on MINIX’s structure. Initially, he hadn’t been intending to write a complete operating system at all, but rather a type of display interface called a terminal emulator- a system that tries to emulate a graphical terminal, like a monitor, through a more text-based medium (I don’t really get it either- it’s hard to find information a newbie like me can make good sense of). Strictly speaking a terminal emulator is a program, existing independent of an operating system and acting almost like one in its own right, directly within the computer’s architecture. As such, the two are somewhat related and it wasn’t long before Torvalds ‘realised’ he had written a kernel for an operating system and, since the GNU operating system had fallen through and there was no widespread, free-to-use kernel out there, he pushed forward with his project. In August of that same year he published a now-famous post on a kind of early internet forum called Usenet, saying that he was developing an operating system that was “starting to get ready”, and asking for feedback concerning where MINIX was good and where it was lacking, “as my OS resembles it somewhat”. He also, interestingly,  said that his OS “probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks”. How wrong that statement has proved to be.

When he finally published Linux, he originally did so under his own license- however, he borrowed heavily from GNU software in order to make it run properly (so to have a proper interface and such), and released later versions under the GNU GPL. Torvalds and his associates continue to maintain and update the Linux kernel (Version 3.0 being released last year) and, despite some teething troubles with those who have considered it old-fashioned, those who thought MINIX code was stolen (rather than merely borrowed from), and Microsoft (who have since turned tail and are now one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel), the system is now regarded as the pinnacle of Stallman’s open-source dream.

One of the keys to its success lies in its constant evolution, and the interactivity of this process. Whilst Linus Torvalds and co. are the main developers, they write very little code themselves- instead, other programmers and members of the Linux community offer up suggestions, patches and additions to either the Linux distributors (more on them later) or as source code to the kernel itself. All the main team have to do is pick and choose the features they want to see included, and continually prune what they get to maximise the efficiency and minimise the vulnerability to viruses of the system- the latter being one of the key features that marks Linux (and OS X) over Windows. Other key advantages Linux holds includes its size and the efficiency with which it allocates CPU usage; whilst Windows may command a quite high percentage of your CPU capacity just to keep itself running, not counting any programs running on it, Linux is designed to use your CPU as efficiently as possible, in an effort to keep it running faster. The kernel’s open source roots mean it is easy to modify if you have the technical know-how, and the community of followers surrounding it mean that any problem you have with a standard distribution is usually only a few button clicks away. Disadvantages include a certain lack of user-friendliness to the uninitiated or not computer-literate user since a lot of programs require an instruction typed into the command bar, far fewer  programs, especially commercial, professional ones, than Windows, an inability to process media as well as OS X (which is the main reason Apple computers appear to exist), and a tendency to go wrong more frequently than commercial operating systems. Nonetheless, many ‘computer people’ consider this a small price to pay and flock to the kernel in their thousands.

However, the Linux kernel alone is not enough to make an operating system- hence the existence of distributions. Different distributions (or ‘distros’ as they’re known) consist of the Linux kernel bundled together with all the other features that make up an OS: software, documentation, window system, window manager, and desktop interface, to name but some. A few of these components, such as the graphical user interface (or GUI, which covers the job of several of the above components), or the package manager (that covers program installation, removal and editing), tend to be fairly ubiquitous (GNOME or KDE are common GUIs, and Synaptic the most typical package manager), but different people like their operating system to run in slightly different ways. Therefore, variations on these other components are bundled together with the kernel to form a distro, a complete package that will run as an operating system in exactly the same fashion as you would encounter with Windows or OS X. Such distros include Ubuntu (the most popular among beginners), Debian (Ubuntu’s older brother), Red Hat, Mandriva and Crunchbang- some of these, such as Ubuntu, are commercially backed enterprises (although how they make their money is a little beyond me), whilst others are entirely community-run, maintained solely thanks to the dedication, obsession and boundless free time of users across the globe.

If you’re not into all this computer-y geekdom, then there is a lot to dislike about Linux, and many an average computer user would rather use something that will get them sneered at by a minority of elitist nerds but that they know and can rely upon. But, for all of our inner geeks, the spirit, community, inventiveness and joyous freedom of the Linux system can be a wonderful breath of fresh air. Thank you, Mr. Torvalds- you have made a lot of people very happy.