The T+7 Final Post

First of all, thanks to Patrick and Chen. PCP's been a great experience and I certainly feel I met my goal of getting into good shape. Some observations after 1 week off the diet:

Most restaurant food is more of a sauce than a food. What I mean is it's generally full of fat and has no fiber whatsoever. I actually doggie-bagged the main course from a local restaurant and spread it on bread at home.

Holy crap people eat a lot of salt. I had a meal at "Boston Chicken" figuring it'd be half-way healthy if one got the right sides. Incredible mountains of salt.

Lunch at a restaurant in a business district is not only unhealthy, but way more expensive than treating oneself to a fancy but PCP friendly bag lunch. Why eat a greasy bacon cheeseburger when for less money (and even less time, when you consider the lines!) you can pack a thick steak sandwich.

Jump-rope is fun and a pretty easy habit to keep.

Not so for the rest of the exercises. I'll need to work on that.

I still have no interest in sweets.

That being said, one can gain several kilos of water weight by eating a small amount of sugar and salt. Scales don't tell the story. Anyway, congrats again to my team--you all look fantastic. And to anyone reading this wondering whether they should give it a go, I say go for it. It's not easy, but I promise you won't regret it.

Done!

Will post more thoughts later, after the final morning weigh-in.

But first, a quick horribly-low light before and after:

Off to bed! Congrats to my group (you all look amazing!), and best of luck to the new team. Stick with it!

Nearing the end

Wow this is getting tough, isn't it?

Anyway, some comments on the final week:

Having the family here makes it nearly impossible to be strict with this thing like I had been. No worries, comes with the territory.

On the other hand, I love the influence this is having on my daughters. Maya, my 4 year old who has terrible gastointestinal troubles and generally refuses to eat veggies, LOVES baby carrots. Amy can't get enough rutabaga and begs me to get more at the supermarket. We ate at Costco (of all places), and she even ordered the salad (of which I could only eat the lettuce and cherry tomatoes). Still, their salad is miles better than the pizza or other junk and I was hugely proud of Amy.

Even my wife Narumi enjoys my broiled super-lean eye-round steak more than the fat-marbled health disasters generally available at the super.

Ab Challenge

Found The Yodo Advanced Ab Challenge on youtube.

"you give me 6 minutes and 48 seconds, and I'll give you your abs!"

Back in San Francisco, stats update

Thank goodness.

After a week moving, guessing weights, substituting exercises & food, and a massive indulgence, I was afraid I'd done quite a lot of damage to my PCP. Fortunately, the scale shows that I maintained my weight, lost fat, gained muscle. Thank goodness!

Now let's finish this thing properly!

more reverse-reverse culture-shock

For the last few weeks in San Francisco, I've often bought a $5 bag of sugar snap or English peas from the ferry market to eat with lunch. So yesterday I found a small package of snap peas at Tokyuu and bought three of them for the same purpose. To my surprise, my wife refused to try them. "You're going to eat that RAW!?. Apparently raw shrimp with head attached still quivering is ok, but peas would be an abomination. Go figure!

Third and final indulgence

Went with the family for dinner at our favorite ramen place (ippudo by Komazawa park). Heaps of oily bean sprout salad, gigantic Aka-maru ramen with a hard-boiled egg topping, extra noodles, gyoza dumplings on the side.

The first bites were utter heaven; an explosion of flavors setting off massive chemical releases in my brain.

And then I started to taste, to REALLY taste, the salt, the oil OH SCREW THIS IT WAS FANTASTIC.

My body is damn lucky I'm moving far away from this joint.

Extremely hectic week in Japan

Unfortunately had to cancel on a trip to Yoga-garden this Sunday. Looks like between all the many tasks necessary to move house internationally and a family I haven't seen in months, I really didn't leave any time to spare on this trip. Just keeping up with PCP is a task (and one frankly I'd never be able to do if it weren't for the early morning hours afforded to me by jet-lag). Zannen.

One thing my wife noticed was that although I've of course lost tons of weight, my posture has gotten really bad. Could use some advice.

Also, just a note about Japan and the reverse-reverse culture-shock I'm experiencing: the choice of veggies here stinks. Fish, of course, is relatively excellent.

In Japan

Basically lost a day of PCP in the process (in addition to the day lost on the dateline, but that's another story) because of horrible luck. First, my kitchen flooded an hour before I had to leave. Then at the airport I ordered a big salad w/chicken breast (no salt, dressing on the side, of course), but they forgot the order.

So I'm sad to report that not only did I cheat, but it was with airplane food. At least it was JAL, so mainly we're talking too much salt and zero fiber. Of course I skipped anything fried or with sugar. Still, I was dying for some veggies and after I got home I plowed through the carrots and salad my wife had left in the fridge.
Anyway, this morning I'll just pick up where I left off, one day back. Just did the jumprope. What a difference the Japanese summer makes--I was covered in sweat by the end of it.

Dang, I forgot my scale. Oh well, time to upgrade!

summer-squash stew

... left on my phone from 2 days back.. Loved it. Definitely, if you have delivery from a local farm, get it. Skimping on veggies is such a losing proposition.

Slippin'

Well, it's my last week on my own in San Fran. Between last minute running around (or, in fact, mostly driving around) and my brother visiting I've been doing a lot more guesswork, salads in restaurants, and swapping food portions around than normal. And I've been taking huge advantage of all-you-want veggie portions. The result is I'm basically flat for the last week.

That will not do! Time to redouble my efforts.

6 sets of Davincis!

Ouch.. I was really scared to open the mail tonight.

And it didn't disappoint!

Science News: Replacing White Rice With Brown Rice or Other Whole Grains May Reduce Diabetes Risk

from Science Daily:

In a new study, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have found that eating five or more servings of white rice per week was associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. In contrast, eating two or more servings of brown rice per week was associated with a lower risk of the disease.

All you can eat veggies

I just ate a *huge* bag of sugar snap peas from the Embarcadero Farmer's Market (along with a home-made steak sandwich). Gotta love all-you-can-eat!

Right on the money Patrick

Yup, I've been getting inquiries pretty regularly about the PCP, but indeed, like most small talk, regardless of the apparent level of enthusiasm, people only really seem interested in what I'd call the 'Family Feud' answer. I.e., which of the top ten answers do you fit into? Atkins perhaps?

And really to describe accurately what we're doing is a much more involved conversation--"Have you ever heard of Michael Pollan?'; 'Do you know how hard it is to avoid sugar?' It's Jeopardy-style, if you will, and really most people aren't looking for any sort of challenge when they're just shooting the breeze. I've probably just been annoying them.

From now on 'exercise and diet' it is!

Dinner with the parents...

Well, they're eating chicken mostly. Mine looks better.

Day 57

... exercises were hard (from the start I've been doing the exercises (except for the jumping) on the night before).

I'm delighted to learn that from tomorrow I get to choose the evening-snack-fruit and dinner-protein. What to make?!

On the other hand, my blender broke yesterday. It seems it couldn't handle the frozen yogurt cubes. Oh well, it's what I get for going cheap. Time for an upgrade--I'm looking forward to some blueberry froyo!

Tuesday it's farm-fresh deliveries

Thought of the day

Our direct ancestors--every one of them up the line--managed to stomach their dinner and stay healthy long enough to have children. Most stayed healthy long enough to care for them. Future generations will presumably be able to stay healthy eating today's diet precisely because so many are sick from it in this generation (and perhaps a future "Michael Pollan" will be writing books that advise a return to Big Macs and fries).

Likewise, our sense of taste must also be the result of millions of years of this evolutionary process, always encouraging us to eat such-and-such a food in this-or-that situation. When you really need vitamin C, lemons taste fantastic.

But now it's changed. Modern science has a hundred different ways to create a sour taste, most of them cheaper than lemon juice. I wonder what happens when one drinks a mixture of four or five "all natural food acids", like those in coca-cola, when their body really wanted vitamin C.

And when we need calcium, while our ancestors would have chewed a while longer on that mammoth bone, we grab something else white and crunchy--perhaps a Montery-Jack falvored Cheez-It®. Are we all making (a less severe version of) the same mistake as those poor mulnurished children driven to eat chips of lead paint?

And do we overeat precisely because the statistical relationships between taste and food has been broken? I'm reminded of a line from Fight Club, when Tyler pours lye on Jack's hand:

TYLER:  You can go to the sink and run water over your hand ...
JACK: yes!  yes!  water!
TYLER:  ... or you can use vinegar to neutralize the burn

Anyway, here's a promise to myself--from now on, when I want something sweet, I'll eat a berry or a satsumaimo. If I feel like something crunchy, I'll go for a carrot rather than a potato chip. What on earth have I been doing to myself all these years!

Pcp dessert

I can't believe I've been eating yogurt and drinking this much milk and only yesterday thought of turning my portion into frozen yogurt Yogen-Früz-style (cubes into a blender, I.e.)

Indulgence #2

Corned beef shipped from Carnegie Deli (not specifically for me).

Yummy but hella salty (way more so than I would have thought pre-PCP).

Still, I have my doubts about the experimental value (unless noticing how damn salty it is was the point). Born and bred in a Jewish deli Patrick, born and bred.

Healthful breaky

veggies courtesy of farmfreshtoyou.com.

Farmer cheese!

Found this at a local produce shop. Thought I must be crazy, but indeed it really says it's just nonfat milk and a preservative. Light & fluffy, spreads like cream-cheese, tastes like milk.

I'm decimated

... as in, as of this morning I've lost 10% of my body weight. Happy times!

a grain of salt

Today the nytimes is running an article about the processed food industry's latest efforts to avoid being regulated, specifically over salt in their products.

I see a parallel with something I've noticed for many years in the financial industry. Technically it's called the fallacy of composition, and applied to real-estate securitization it's what has brought down our global economy. The fallacy of composition is simple--it just means that you can't take something that's true of a small part (like a single house), and assume that you can add up thousands of such things to reach the same conclusion about the whole

In the case of industry regulation of salt, what I think everyone is missing is that people have to eat. They will buy something. So overall the food industry cannot lose business. They whinged about non-smoking restaurants, but people still eat. They cried bloody murder about the need for trans-fats, but people still buy bread.

Of course if federal regulators were to pass some law that makes your company's food (or even edible-food-like-substances) less attractive to consumers (but not your competitor's), you'll go out of business. If they pass the same law but it applies to both you and your competitors, then it should make no difference to your sales. And yet the otherwise intelligent people working for these companies pay millions to lobby our government to prevent it!

Admittedly, there will be some small cost--companies will have to do the work of reformulating their products, which costs money. Perhaps it's an opportunity for new companies with smarter recipes to knock down large companies that can't adjust as fast. Some very small percentage of people may stop eating processed food and switch to fruits and vegetables. But the costs will be tiny, especially compared to the savings in health-care. The cynic in me says that these companies know exactly what they're doing, and are actually just trying to optimize their profits to avoid these small costs & risks--that their honest argument would be "don't make us reformulate our already successful product because we'll make 0.1% less profit next quarter." Because, for better or worse, that's what our capitalist system encourages.

What I can't excuse is the journalists, who take at face value the idea that cheeze-its becoming more expensive and/or less tasty is any sort of argument against regulation.

New Pants

Well, had something of a housing disaster today. I tried doing laundry and the entire cycle ended up flooding the basement, along with just about everything I'd put down the disposer over the last few days. So after several hours of mopping, sweeping, mopping again, etc., I came to the realization that I was out of clean work clothes. Inspired by Ren's new-pants post, I figured I'd go to the store and see what I could fit into. Lo and behold, I too was able to fit (barely, but plausibly) into a 30-inch waste (I have been wearing 34). I strongly suspect that American pants have gotten a bit more "roomy" since I lived here last, though. In the end, I didn't get them--they didn't have my length in anything but the docker's "slim-fit", and those were most uncomfortable at 30. 32 is perfect. And indeed, I'm halfway through the PCP so perfectly appropriate. On the other hand, I see I've got some catching up to do if I want to keep up with my very gung-ho group, and I still have a long way to go to rid myself of the gut I started with, let alone get to true peak condition. Gotta stop typing and get to work!

Breakfast

Lunch

Hot peppers, bell peppers, chicken, mushroom, pasta

Saturday Breakfast

Pasta, cauliflower, tomato sauce, mushroom/chicken stock, lettuce

"The Silence of the Yams"

Great line from Michael Pollan's Food Rules. (he's referring to the fact that for lack of packaging and advertising, a Yam can't make any health claims)

Last Night's Dinner (+ an apple)

Blended together frozen banana + hard-boiled egg whites + milk. Gave me a headache but wow that was yummy.

Hamburger Lunch

On Friday I looked on while my coworkers ate delicious looking burgers. So this morning I ground up my own burger using eye-round steak (super lean), slapped on my veggie-tomato sauce, & whole-grain bread, and had myself a nice PCP-friendly hamburger lunch. And as wasteful as making hamburger from a good steak may sound, it was still quite a bit cheaper than buying one from the local lunch joint. Should have taken a picture but I was too excited and just wolfed it down.

Evening snack

Japanese sweet potato, veggie-puree-tomato-sauce stuffed egg whites

Simple Breakfast

Rice, salsa, egg, carrot

note to self: use a clock

Cookin' Dinner

First time one of my meals even looked remotely like a "diet."

Not that I'm complaining. Hell yes it's working.

(and for the record: steak, red pepper, and sweet potato make a great combo)

Fried rice breakfast

Corn, egg, yams, and grain mix.

Lunch

Steak, veggie/tomato stew/mixed brown rice&barely

And 8 minute abs! Yikes, it's tough but at lease it's short. Hard to find an excuse not to put in 8 minutes / day.

Tuna w/tomato sauce

Now we're cooking with crisco!

(not literally, of course)

Cold veggies seafood salad

wow. Zero carb dinner.

(posting a day late)

More scallops and veggies

'cause it was awesome before. Frantically searching for 2 chairs for tomorrow's exercises :)

I was so happy to find bitter mellon at the farmers market. So grossly bitter and yet somehow yummy at the same time.

My indulgence

Chicken sandwich at a cafe with friends. I ate half, held the mayo, bacon, cheese, and subbed out salad for the fries. What I missed most was the social aspect anyway. It was yummy.

Dinner

Loving the variation in the exercise this week. Getting lots of complements on the weight loss and even some questions about the program. Dinner just now was one of those random fantastic accidents that can only happen when a lack of time and appropriate cookware forces one to say F it and throw all of your refrigerator in a big pot. Scallops, tomatoes, mushrooms, green onions, stir-fry frozen veggies, all 3 spices I own at once, etc etc. Caught myself instinctively going for seconds.

moved house

Been crazy this weekend as I just moved into a new place, and from furnished to unfurnished. Stayed true to PCP. More later. (from my phone)

Breakfast: pasta, egg, steamed daikon & yucca-root/cassava. Wow. Saw yucca-root at Whole Foods, realized I never had it, so gave it a shot. It's wonderful, esp. left overnight in my $10 rice-cooker that produces a caramelized toasty bit on the bottom (why so long? Well, the wiki page mentions something about paralysis from cyanide poisoning if it's not cooked well and/or soaked, so I figured I'd play it safe).

Lunch: chicken, rice, more yucca root.

Dinner: Halibut, rice, asparagus, daikon & yucca. I definitely need to eat more fish but the selection is pretty limited at the nearest super. So it was very nice to find that the frozen fish I found tastes good. I was really missing fish.

Exercises: now we're starting to get serious... Nice to be able to finish (w/great pain) the 4*25 situps. Went to a climbing gym for the first time yesterday. Wow that was fun--I can't wait to see how much easier it's going to be a few weeks from now.

Breakfast: Sugar snap Peas, Rice, Milk, Egg

Lunch: (w/o picture): Lemon juice chicken, turnip, golden beets, pasta

Dinner: Lemon juice chicken, turnip, golden beets, rice

Yup, I'm getting lazy with the food. But enjoying the simplicity, to be honest. I'm noticing I'm becoming more sensitive to the sweetness in fruit as time passes--the grapes I just ate for my evening snack were fantastic.

Thought of the day: if I gain muscle %, but lose muscle in kg (i.e., muscle% * weight), is it still "gaining muscle?"

For lack of time, meals were all very simple combos of carbs + veggie + protein. Nothing fancy.

Sugar-snap peas, sweet potato, beef, turkey, pasta, egg, Chicken-breast-fried-in-lemon-juice

Made it up that hill on my bike. In granny gear mind you, but without any of the winding around side-streets that I've been doing up to now (technically I ride up Sacramento St., one street over, because it has less traffic. It actually goes a bit higher).

May 1st & 2nd

May 1st:


Breakfast: Eggs on rice, mixed veggies

Lunch: Turkey, Rice, mixed veggies (eaten on a break from cycling, not pictured)

Dinner: Turkey, Onions & shrooms, rye-bread, mustard

May 2nd:


Breakfast: Mixed Veggies, hardboiled egg, rice thinned with shirataki.

Lunch: Turkey, Steak, Sweet Potato, Rice

Dinner: Garlic Shrimp, Whole-wheat pasta, steamed asparagus

Exercise: all is well. Muscles are burning. I think we're at about the point that the last group was at when I first visited Patrick's studio, as I recall not being able to finish this number of situps and pullups. It ain't easy, but this time I got the situps done and only failed on the last set of pullups.

Breakfast: Brussels Sprouts, egg, leeks, daikon

Lunch: leeks, daikon, onions, rice, steak

Dinner: essentially the same thing as lunch, chopped for more of a stir-fry feel.

Tried to make a turkey/tomato sauce last night, only to discover upon tasting it that my canned tomatoes were full of salt (and I guess I shouldn't have been using canned goods anyway). Crap. Rinsed off the turkey, chucked the rest (which at that point was just the tomatoes and some garlic, but still it felt so wrong).

Apparently a single can of tomatoes is 13 servings, for 52% of the USRDA for salt, for the record.

Breakfast: veggie-scrambled egg (finally polished off the beets. Yeah)

Lunch: Daikon (steamed in remaining turkey stock), cucumber, canned salmon, rice and some bread.

Dinner: Hmmm... Had dinner with a coworker at a restaurant. A Mexican restaurant. I know, what am I doing eating Mexican on PCP, eh? Got a burrito with chicken, rice, and salsa (no sour cream, no guac, no beans, no cheese) and a corn on the cob (hold the butter, hold the cheese, hold the mayo [apparently people eat all three of these on corn by default!?]). The result looked PCP friendly and I figured I'd be ok--but I left feeling it just as much as one would normally expect from such a place. No more of that!

Breakfast: a winner. Rye-french toast, cold chopped "the big steam" veggies, cottage cheese on the single extra slice in my carb requirement.

Lunch: A very simple meal of bread, chicken, stringbeans, and zucchini.

Dinner: rice, chicken, steak, beets, acorn squash.

Also, I'm just loving the berries for the fruit snacks. They're so cheap and sweet here compared to Japan, I just bought every kind I could get--straw, blue, black, rasp, etc. and threw them all together. Yum!

yesterday's meals

Got home late (after badminton) so this is a day late.

Breakfast was whole-wheat pasta + cucumbers + mushrooms + a couple of tablespoons of cottage cheese & some of my milk portion. I subtracted the cottage cheese out of the milk by weight, if that really matters (I suspect not?). Anyway, it was yummy.

I have no memory of what I ate for lunch yesterday. I strongly suspect it was protein, carbs, and veggies.

For dinner we were back at Cha-ya (veggie Japanese restaurant in Berkeley). I was surprised that even in that environment it's quite hard to order PCP friendly food. Probably I should have again gotten the nabe and skipped the tofu. Instead I tried a veggie robata-yaki with a side of off-menu brown rice. Surprisingly, even though half the menu uses the word "genmai" (==brown rice), the waitress had no idea what it was. Anyway, the sticks came absolutely covered in thick sugary teriyaki sauce, which I wiped off as best I could.

Since the meal had zero protein, I pan-fried up my allocation of chicken after getting home.

Updated the graph

I hate to report this but...

I've now gained fat and lost muscle since starting PCP. Well, to some extent the scale must be wrong. If it's to be believed, I gained 298 grams of fat, lost 1.41 kg of muscle, and lost 1 kg of something else. I don't really find that muscle-loss plausible given the exercise. But it is what the scale says.

Something tells me this isn't the expected result. But hey, it's been a lot of food.

The Nutcase Who Got Me Into This

is barely half-way done and already looks absurdly ripped. Way to go Ren!

Apr 26

Dang. Forgot to snap lunch again.

Breakfast was scrambled eggs (w/turkey beet soup and jalapeños), bread, veggies from the remaining chicken soup, acorn squash, beets.

Lunch (unpictured) was more turkey breast (had a lot of this), rice, more of the veggie mix

Dinner was a sort of a messy salad--what can I say, I ran out of time. Lettuce, tomato, turkey, rice, turkey-beet soup, liquid from the chicken soup, acorn squash, jalapeños. Thought it would be terrible but it wasn't half bad. Definitely need to stock up on some PCP emergency canned and/or frozen rations.

Had tons of energy today. Felt like running around while I was stuck sitting in the office.

Breakfast: brussel sprouts, rice cooked in beet & turkey stock, fried eggs, milk

Lunch: (unpictured) Corn, tomato, turkey breast meat, leftover beet&turkey rice, sourdough rye bread

Dinner: Turkey meat, bread, lettuce, leftover rutabaga.

I steamed acorn squash and the rest of the beets as Patrick suggested. I've been using fruit-salad to the same effect. Indeed, why not chunked-steamed-veggie salad?

Sat Apr 24th

Breakfast: leftover rutabaga, eggs, veggies picked from leftover chicken soup, whole wheat pasta

Lunch: A little over 3 large turkey breast sandwiches w/lettuce, Jalapeños, dijon mustard, sourdough rye bread.

Dinner: more leftover chicken soup, with sourdough rye chunks + on the side.

Breakfast: boiled rutabaga, lentils as my carb (Patrick informs me this was an error, and lentils are to be avoided), eggs as usual.

Lunch: lesson learned--when dieting by weighing one's food, the scale is most sensitive to the amount of water in the food. A dry fluffy bread weighs almost nothing, and so it takes a *lot* of slices to make the gram count. The rest of the lunch is leftover dinner with some extra veggies (broccoli and cauliflower) thrown in

Dinner: Chicken soup-like dish made with radish, radish greens, broccoli, carrot, whole wheat pasta, and of course chicken. This was a winner, and the contrast of the small amount of (somewhat soggy) pasta vs. the bread at lunch couldn't have been greater. Definitely feeling the burn on all the exercises now. I can't wait to see what happens to my stats after a week of eating this sort of quantity of real food. Will my body use all that energy or build muscle with it?

Wow, that was too much food

... and to think I've left out the pics of two of the snacks.

Still, in defense of Michael Pollan, I suppose I could have and occasionally did eat this much pasta, pizza, ice-cream, fried-foods, etc. without so much trouble. This sort of food is just difficult to eat in these sorts of quantities (I suppose on account of all the fiber). Anyway, breakfast was fried-egg-on-rice, tomato and bell-pepper, milk

lunch: corn & celery, steak sandwiches w/dijon mustard

dinner: salmon cooked with mushroom & salsa, bread. A bit of a dangerous experiment with leftovers but it ended up tasting like bouillabaisse. Measuring weights after cooking was tricky but basically I fished out chunks of salmon and counted the rest as veggie.

Two of the snacks were berry mix, the other was a large orange.

Tonight I hope to do a better job of preparing the food as this was all a bit of a rush today. I went and bought just about every veggie in the store that I didn't recognize or don't know how to cook. As Patrick wrote, "We're living in the matrix." Indeed. For the record, as for rutabaga, you boil it.

Last meal of the uncontrolled diet.

Yogurt with banana for breakfast.

Mushroom / Kimchi / Bell-Pepper / Red-Onion / Omelet for lunch, with pita bread and grapes

bought and ate a banana while cycling around looking at apartments

I wanted to get rotisserie chicken for dinner, but Whole Foods didn't seem to have it (well, other than the whole chicken). So fried up a chicken-breast stir-fry with lots of Soy Sauce. Kept the rice and chicken portion at the largest-meal-of-the-day week-2 figures Patrick just sent us, mostly just to see how much it really was. Didn't bother to weigh the veggies which I'm sure were way over (would too much veggie actually be a problem?). Anyway, it was plenty of food and quite yummy. My whole body's sore today (from Badminton, PCP, and cycling), and the 8th day exercises were very difficult.