Day 20 - Starch Solution

Today’s stats:

Well, the weight loss has really tapered off. The weight on the scales is basically matching the trend but so far hasn’t crossed it yet (remember, points above the trend will pull it upwards whereas all points below will continue to pull the trend down). I haven’t actually eaten any different from how I started the program, so I’m guessing that the weight lost is most probably water weight and residual bits and pieces that were floating around. That said, the body fat is 31.2% today from 34.9% on the day I started. Now as I mentioned I don’t put a lot of stock in this value as it seems to fluctuate more than the weather. I think if I maintain the current rate of loss (which seems to be about 150g ish per day) that would be fine and it works out to just over a kg a week (or just over 2lbs). This is generally considered to be a good safe rate for weight loss, even if it isn’t as fast as many (and I’ll freely admin I’m one of them) would like.

The other thing that might affect the weight is that I’ll be exercising more just generally trying to be more active. This will cause some weight gain such as water in the muscle (to store more glycogen) and hopefully I’ll gain some muscle mass whilst I’m at it as well. That would throw off the weight as the primary indicator, but it would be interesting to see what the body fat does. I wonder if I can plot my previous weights against the body fat percentage and see if I can find some sort of relationship. That could be interesting, maybe it’s the relationship between those two that is more telling than either alone. I’ll have to investigate :)

Today is Saturday so another day of no work, and hence, another day with a late start. I need to figure out why I’m not sleeping so well so I can avoid sleeping in so much. Historically I’ve never really needed that much sleep (though maybe that’s just the caffeine talking) so I need to figure out if there’s some way I can improve my sleep quality now. Maybe it really is as simple as going for a quick run before bed time.

For a quick pre-lunch snack I had a banana which really I should have let ripen for another day or so. It was nice but, well, it could have been nicer…

Lunch itself was a big bowl of noodle. They’re made from rice flour I believe (I should probably check that) but they’re a very basic part of the staple food in Hong Kong. Unlike instant noodle (mmmmm instant noodle…) they don’t contain vegetable oils. I really wish I could find some good pot noodles that weren’t full of harmful crap (well Dr. McDougall offers a range but it’s super hard to get them in Hong Kong sadly - might have to change that). In any case, today’s noodles were cooked with some rich soy sauce, which added a really nice taste to them. It was a subtle taste and to be honest I’m not sure if I would have appreciated it prior to starting on the Starch Solution. It also came with broccoli :D

A Quick Run

I also ended up doing a quick run, (well, sprint really) this afternoon. I was heading out to take my son to his maths class, but I was faffing about with my shoes so they (my wife and son) left before me. I decided I’d take a slightly different route to see if I could (quite literally in this case) head them off at the pass. So once I got to the right spot, I just went for it. Now I had been walking pretty quickly to catch up so I was warmed up from that and so a quick sprint didn’t seem so bad. Now it was only a hundred metres and quite clearly I’m not going to be setting a record by any means, but I did notice something different - it seemed a hell out a lot easier than previously.

For a brief moment (100m isn’t all that far), I felt what I imagine it must feel like to be healthy. That brief sprint was almost effortless. Everything just worked and it felt good. I mean really good. It felt good to be alive sort of good. And this is especially interesting because from what I can recall (although let’s be honest, human memory is not all that it’s cracked up to be - we suck at being eyewitnesses for example), I never felt like this in my previous runs. It felt like a chore and this just felt like fun. I think this is due to my body getting cleaned out and its new fuel source being of the clean variety. In any case I’m putting this down as another benefit of becoming a starchivore (I’ll get a t-shirt when I get to a stable weight)!

Dinner

Dinner was the same as usual although today there was no potato. I prodded around the bowl hoping to find some hiding under some broccoli (yay!) or under some tomato, but alas, no. Still it was very tasty and whilst I was eating that I was watching a very interesting lecture from the Advanced Study Weekend on blue zones and why the people in those zones are able to live so much longer than everyone else (blue zones have a very high concentration of centenarians i.e. people aged either 100 or over). Dessert was a small bowl of grapes which I nommed whilst watching another lecture, from the same series, this time from the cartoonist behind Bizzaro (Dan Piraro) which looked at some of his insights into food. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, these lectures are really good and well worth investing in! :)