My run was already supposed to be pretty short—about 2.5 miles, across Dohme Park, up First Street to Windsor and then back—but it ended up being even shorter than that, because Ashley wasn’t up to running even that far in the heat of the day.
According to my weather app it was already 75℉ when I got home, and I’ve noticed previously that starting at about 72℉ the dog starts to suffer.
You can see on the map a short spur off to the west just after I started north on First Street. That was where we saw a groundhog, and Ashley really wanted to chase it. I indulged her for a minute, hoping the groundhog would quickly find a place to hide, but it wasn’t to be, and I eventually had to drag Ashley back to the First Street path very much against her will.
Anyway, 1.3 miles is a very short run indeed, but I still spent most of 20 minutes with my heart rate up (average was 141, peak was 169). So, a good workout.
I listened to an unintentionally amusing fitness video a few weeks ago. It was by a body-building guy, and was specifically on cutting weight after a bulk. (Topics that I’m not very interested in, but something to watch while I did my morning exercises.)
What was amusing was the discussion of what macronutrients to cut, when you need to reduce your calories.
Of course you can’t cut protein. That (along with resistance training) is key for keeping your muscle when you’re in a calorie deficit.
You can cut carbs—but not much! That’s what provides the energy you need to do your workouts! And your carbs were probably already low, if you were doing the low-carb thing.
You can cut fat—but not much! You need to get in your essential fatty acids! And your fats were probably already low, for general health reasons.
Now, I’ve gained a bit of weight over these past few years, and would be pleased to get back down to what I weighed in 2016–2021. But I’ve been hesitating to maintain any significant calorie deficit: I’ve reached an age where it’s pretty tough to put on more muscle, so any muscle I lose while dieting might well end up being a permanent loss—which is why I was interested enough to watch this video on the first place.
So, I was a bit daunted. If I can’t cut protein, carbs, or fat, how I am supposed to produce this calorie deficit anyway?
And then I remembered that there is a fourth macronutrient.
So, for a few days now, I’ve been both back on the low-carb thing (not so much for weight as because my nasal congestion has gotten bad again) and avoiding alcohol.
It’s very sad.
Along with avoiding alcohol for the calories, I’ve been keeping an eye on my sleep metrics. Nearly everybody with an Oura ring reports that drinking alcohol messes up their sleep, so I’ve been expecting to see a notable improvement, but so far not. Sleep score isn’t better. Sleep duration isn’t better. HRV isn’t better. My resting heart rate is down, but just because it had been elevated earlier—first when I had a cold, then when I had a guest.
I’ll give it another few days before drawing a conclusion, but I suspect the alcohol had not been negatively impacting my sleep because I never drank very much, and because I tended to finish drinking by fairly early in the evening, so I was pretty much sober by bedtime.
The good news is that the reduced carbs seem to be helping my nasal congestion already (although maybe it’s that the rain has washed a lot of the allergens out of the air).
My brother sent a selfie he’d taken in the coffee shop where he’s staying for the SFWA board meeting and Nebula Awards conference. I wanted to reply, but I was out walking the dog, so I quick captured this image.
After a very congenial week visiting us, my brother and nephew departed for Kansas City and the SFWA Nebula Awards. Today I am back to my usual routine, with multiple dog walks and a workout. Now I’m sitting on the window seat and reading Asimov’s Foundation for the first time since I was a boy.
What if—and hear me out here—instead of trying to bribe women with weird tax credits to try to get them to have more children, we just made it much cheaper and easier to raise a child? Free health care, free education, free day care, mandatory time off to deal with medical or family issues… Stuff like that.
In my experience cats are much better than dogs at realizing when you’re sick and need some rest and comfort. So I’m a bit surprised that Ashley is doing such a good job of it today.
The NYT article linked below talks to several people with anxiety or OCD, and somewhat reasonably comes to the conclusion that the Oura ring and similar devices are not for them.
I have a different perspective.
I wear an Oura ring and check it daily, and I’ve had none of these problems. I take what it tells me seriously, but I never let it override my own opinion on how I’m doing.
One fairly new feature is a warning when your metrics (temperature and resting heart rate in particular) suggest that you might be coming down with something. Even though I’m somewhat prone to hypochondria myself, it hasn’t been a problem for me.
Wednesday this week it warned me that I might be coming down with something. I felt fine, so I was inclined to ignore it. By evening I’d realized that I was coming down with a cold. (I felt pretty crappy all day Thursday. Today I feel nearly all better.) Although I was inclined to ignore it, I did take it seriously enough to skip my workout that day, which was probably a good idea.
I did react rather strongly the first time I got that warning, but only because I was visiting my 92-year-old mother, and didn’t want to risk passing something on to her. So I took the warning seriously enough to get and take a Covid-test and to wear a mask around my mom. Maybe that was an over-reaction—I wasn’t sick—but I am sure happier over-reacting than I would have been under-reacting and passing Covid on to my mom.
My brother teases me constantly for wearing such a thing, but I fall very much in the category of people who think, “Why not have as much information as possible?”
“They were like, ‘This is just not necessary information for a healthy, able-bodied person to have.’”
As an annoying privacy/security nerd of longstanding, I’m very pleased to hear this:
Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along.
