onfocus

Montana is my favorite Frank Zappa tune. There is just so much to love, including the complex background vocals. It turns out those were sung by The Ikettes—Ike & Tina Turner's background singers—even though they aren't credited on the track. Take a listen:



Barry Miles quotes Zappa about this song in his appropriately titled book Zappa:

"It was so difficult, that one part in the middle of the song 'Montana', that the three girls rehearsed it for a couple of days. Just that one section. You know the part that goes 'I'm pluckin' the ol' dennil floss...'? Right in the middle there...Tina was so pleased that she was able to sing this thing and she went into the the next studio where Ike was working and dragged him into the studio the hear the result of her labour. He listened to the tape and he goes, 'What is this shit?' and walked out."

Now Ike Turner was a well-documented jerk, but The Ikettes usually sang rock edged soul like Sweet Inspiration. So whenever I hear Montana I always imagine what a strange, strange few days in the studio with Zappa that must have been. The version I posted is on Strictly Commercial. I don't care if you think it's silly, folks.

Today I needed a simple RFC 1123 formatted date for a date in the future and I couldn't find a form online to do the formatting for me. So instead of breaking out Perl or something I took a few minutes to whip up a JavaScript version:


I haven't tested this across browsers, but it's working for me in Firefox 3.5. Get yer RFC 1123 here! Good for HTTP headers and whatnot.

Three months ago Nelson posted about an iPhone app that was helping him track what he was eating: Calorie counting and metabolism. The post resonated with me, so I downloaded Lose It! and started using it. The application is simple: you enter your height, current weight, desired weight, and your desired timeframe for loss. The application comes up with a daily calorie budget and provides tools for tracking/estimating calories.

On April 28th I weighed 200 pounds and I set a goal of losing 20 pounds. Lose It! set a calorie budget for me around 2,100 calories/day, and estimated I'd lose the weight by mid-September. That all sounded fine, but I figured I'd get bored with the application in a week and nothing much would come of it. Like Nelson, I thought I'd at least get a sense of how many calories I was eating each day and that alone would be worth the effort of using it.

I ended up using Lose It! religiously for exactly four weeks. I took a week off at that point and then tracked my calories for one more week. I haven't touched it since. My last entry in the application was on June 8th, and by that point I had lost 10 pounds. Here we are another six weeks or so later and I reached my goal of losing 20 pounds. Hooray!

I have never been able to lose weight. I sit in front of a computer all day and I always assumed my weight problem was due to lack of exercise. Every few months I would make a resolution to run regularly and hopefully lose weight in the process. I could stick with an exercise plan for a couple weeks, but I'd eventually twist a knee or get too busy and give up. Counting calories has been perfect for me because there is no exercise involved and I didn't need to set aside large blocks of time to do it. I do ride my bike a few miles a few times each week and that's up a bit now that it's summer, but I don't ride nearly enough to account for the weight loss.

Why did Lose It! and counting calories work for me? I think it boils down to the simple idea that if you can track something you can change it. I found that I ate similar things every day and by tweaking my routines I could stay within the budget. For example, I used to have a bagel with cream cheese every morning and that was around 400 calories or more. By switching to an english muffin with almond butter, I saved about 50 calories and didn't feel like I was missing out. I used to view them as equal options for breakfast, but tracking every single calorie for a while taught me to see differences in food.

Eating, estimating calories, and staying within my budget became a game to me those first four weeks. Staying within budget was an easier way for me to "win" at something than losing weight. So I measured my success based on staying within budget and eventually the weight followed. I measured food portions exactly, and looked up calories on restaurant websites. (I wish more restaurants published nutrition information online.) I got fairly good at estimating calories and portion sizes, and I always double-checked with the application. If I ever wanted to have a 1,000 calorie bomb in the middle of the day, I'd have to find a way to budget for it. Constantly thinking within these constraints ruled out fast food entirely because I didn't ever want to waste a whole day's worth of calories on one meal. Now I do the calorie-counting in my head, but I needed to track seriously for a while to get to this point.

Anyway, that's my story and I thought I'd post it in case it helps someone else like Nelson's post helped me. I feel better and I feel better about myself. I'm going to stick to a 2,000 calorie diet and see where it takes me. The changes I made are new habits now so why break them?