Category Archives: Ramblings

For when I just feel like writing something random and off-the-cuff.

All Things Dad, Ramblings

The origin of the stupid rule

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This morning, I was contemplating stupid rules and how they come about. There’s some pretty bizarre laws on record in the state of New York. Here are some that I enjoyed:

  • Slippers are not to be worn after 10:00 P.M.
  • A person may not walk around on Sundays with an ice cream cone in his/her pocket.
  • While riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.
  • A license must be purchased before hanging clothes on a clothesline.

Please note that I made no effort whatsoever to verify that these actually are law. I am well aware that I may be spreading misinformation, and in the likely event that I am, I apologize.

Disclaimer aside, stupid rules actually do exist all over the world. Even in my own house, I have some pretty stupid rules. They all stem from a desire to maintain the kind of order that Marlene and I feel is appropriate and necessary. Here are some interesting examples that I was reminded of while getting ready for work this morning.

Children may not talk while in timeout

On the surface, this may sound good and innocuous. It originates from some very real problems:

  • Loud complaints about the reasons for, or enforcers of, the timeout
  • Verbal play with other children while in timeout
  • Constant pleas to be removed from timeout

However, there are some logistical problems with this rule:

  • What if there is an emergency?
  • What if the child needs to go to the bathroom?

Marlene and I have made the decision that the number and variety of exceptions to this rule are too many, and could pose confusion for a 2 to 5-year-old who is (presumably) trying to comply with the rule. More likely they are trying desperately to find loopholes in the rule.

Regardless, the easiest thing for all involved is to enforce the rule that absolutely no talking of any kind is permitted in timeout. If this strict ruling backfires, for example if a child really does need to go to the bathroom and pees all over the floor, Marlene and I will deal with the fallout. The downside this morning was that Jasmin was not allowed to say “goodbye” to me when I left for work, because she was in timeout and could not talk to me.

Jacob, specifically, is not allowed to anticipate his parents’ desires

Jacob has a real problem with just doing what he thinks is the right thing, regardless of instructions. This is a consistent, repeated, longstanding pattern throughout his life. Couple this with a very strong tendency to misunderstand and misinterpret situations, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Let me tell you authoritatively, disaster happens with distressing regularity.

For this reason, Jacob is reminded again and again, “Do what I told you to do, and not what you think you should be doing.” It’s a very strange message. Do I want my son to grow to be a mindless puppet who blindly follows the direction of authority? Absolutely not. But he must learn obedience before he learns the much more complex topic of when it is right and good to disobey. Here’s a hint kiddo… it’s actually right and good to disobey far less frequently than you seem to think it is. Jacob is still far from mastering the obedience lesson.

The fallout from this rule today? Jacob was helping me pack my lunch for work, and I very specifically cautioned him, “Bring me exactly the foods that I ask you for. I don’t want you to bring me everything in the refrigerator just because you think it might make a good lunch food.” Well, at one point, I sent Jacob to get me tomatoes, and he came back with tomatoes and grapes. His reasoning: “Dad, I assume you want grapes for lunch today too.”

In this instance, he was correct! I had seriously considered having grapes for lunch, and very well might have asked him to get them for me next. So how did I respond? I told Jacob that he was correct, and I did want grapes, but that he specifically disobeyed my instructions, and if it were to happen again in the future, I would not allow him to help me pack my lunch any more.

If any child mentions cows or mooing while singing “Happy Birthday”, that child will not get any birthday cake

This is the rule that got me thinking along these lines today. Jacob was playing “Happy Birthday” as part of his piano practice time, and was singing along with his playing, as he sometimes has a tendency to do. While listening to him, I was reminded of this rule.

For the last few years, the children have enjoyed adding the phrase “Cows go moo!” to the words of the “Happy Birthday” song whenever we sing it at a birthday party. It seems that each time, their ad-libbing gets more and more exaggerated. At the end of last year, at Jacob’s birthday party, the mooing and giggling were so intense that I couldn’t even hear any singing over the cacophony. Hence the rule.

So far, no child has broken this particular rule, despite its stupidity. I guess the consequences are pretty dire indeed.

– danBhentschel

Health

On losing weight (Part 4 – Volumetrics)

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Calories and grams: the building blocks of a slimmer you.

What is volumetrics?

My previous post in this series was about a cell phone app called Noom. Noom builds its program (and its food database) on a concept called volumetrics.

CNN article on volumetrics

Put simply, volumetrics is all about eating food that has a low calorie density so that you will feel satisfied, but will not gain weight. The measure used by Noom is calories per gram, and it’s very easy to calculate. Take a look at the following label:

image

You only need to look at two items in the list to figure out the calorie density of this food: 200 calories per serving, and 172 grams per serving. So, for this food you would divide 200 by 172 and you come up with 1.16 calories per gram. That’s actually quite a good calorie density.

Why do I care?

There’s two numbers here:

  • Grams – The total amount of food you eat. In theory, the higher this number, the more satisfied (or full) you will feel after eating a meal.
  • Calories – The amount of the food that is absorbed by your body. In theory, the higher this number, the more weight you will gain after eating a meal.

It makes sense that you want the grams to be high, so that you feel satisfied, and you want the calories to be low so that you don’t gain weight. It’s that simple.

Now, given that 3600 calories is roughly a pound, and also given that 454 grams is a pound, we can calculate that a density of about 7.9 calories per gram indicates that every single bit of a given food (after you have exceeded your basal metabolic rate) will go directly to your gut. Wegmans brand butter, for example, has 100 calories in a 14g serving, yielding a density of 7.1 calories per gram. That’s pretty close to the worst possible number.

NOTE: This is a major simplification of the topic. There are many other issues that can come into play that will affect how calories relate to weight gain / loss. These factors are taken into account in something called the thermic effect of food. For a very interesting application, see this article on number of calories in a banana. This is a relatively new topic of research, and the contributing factors and implications are not fully understood at this time.

Noom’s color coding system

Noom uses a red / yellow / green system to indicate how likely it is that a particular food will cause you to gain weight. This is largely based on the calorie per gram figure, although other factors are considered as well.

Typically, foods with less than 1.0 calories per gram are considered to be green. Between 1.0 and 3.0 is yellow, and above 3.0 is considered to be red. Considerations such as how long a food takes to digest (keeps you feeling full longer) and how much fat content the food has can also come into play, but the calorie density is the main indicator.

Noom recommends that you try to structure your diet in such a way that about 50% of the calories you consume are in the green category, about 35% are yellow, and about 15% are red. Based on my goal of 1800 calories per day, that means that 900 of those should be from green foods, 600 from yellow, and 300 from red.

Some food examples

Let’s take a look at several examples of calorie density calculations:

Green foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Egg whites30570.5
Wheaties100273.7
Quaker instant oatmeal160433.7
Whole wheat mini pitas110482.3
Red grapes901280.7
Watermelon401400.3
Italian blend salad15900.2
Fat free milk902400.4

Yellow foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Whole egg70501.4
95% lean ground beef150851.8
Pork chop160851.9
Haddock 1001130.9
Extra virgin olive oil120148.6
Apple juice1102400.5

Red foods

 CaloriesGramsDensity (cal / g)
Bacon80451.8
Turkey bacon45281.6
Pop tart210504.2
80% lean ground beef210852.5
Pretzels100283.6
Potato chips160285.7
Whole milk1502400.6

The color categorizations above are all according to the Noom food database. I’m not sure I completely agree with all of the assigned colors. For example, I would personally consider haddock to be a green food. Noom doesn’t, though.

Some of the anomalies have a very good reason for being categorized the way they are, though. Take whole milk, for example. While its calorie density is well under 1.0, close to half the 150 calories (70 of them) are delivered in the form of fat. Given that this is in a quickly digested liquid form, it makes sense for it to be a red item. Try to “fill up” on milk sometime. Good luck with that.

That’s a lot of food

If you follow Noom’s suggestions and eat 50% of your calories from “green” (very low calorie density) foods, then it will take a lot of food to meet your daily calorie goals. For example, if you were to eat only baby carrots all day, and your daily caloric intake goal is 1800 calories, then you would need to eat almost 5 pounds of baby carrots to get 900 calories (50% of your goal).

This is a silly example, but it illustrates the concept that you need to eat large portions of green foods to provide sufficient nourishment for your body. It can take a very long time to eat such large quantities of food. You wouldn’t be able to easily do it within 3 normal meal times. You would need to be almost continually eating throughout the day.

So plan ahead! What foods will you eat? How much will you eat? How long do you think it will take to eat it all? In the next post, I will discuss the specific changes I have made to my diet.

– danBhentschel

Health

On Losing Weight (Part 3 – Noom)

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Marlene and I have had “smartphones” of a sort since the early 2000s. Our first was the Kyocera 6035, back in 2001. It was an ugly brick of a phone based on the Palm operating system; clunky, and barely functional. Over the next 10 years, I limped along with various incarnations of Palm OS. The Treo 300 lasted me from 2003-2007. The Centro followed, and served me until the summer of 2011.

“What does this have to do with weight loss?” you may ask. Nothing and everything. Please bear with my ramblings a bit longer. In late 2007 I found myself once again in the market for a new phone. When I surveyed the smartphone landscape at that time, I was faced with the choice of shelling out the big bucks for the recently released iPhone, or getting the latest incarnation of Palm yet again. I knew that the Apple option was a phenomenon, and had been heralded as a game-changer, but it was very expensive, and I saw it as somewhat of a yuppie, Mac-user toy.

I decided to stick with tried-and-true. The Palm Centro was only $99. I was familiar with its capabilities and limitations. I knew what I was getting, and was satisfied that it was a good bargain. So, for the next four years, I contented myself with the “trusty but limited” Centro phone while I watched various incarnations of iPhone and the new rival AndroidOS-based phones flood the market. Finally, in 2011, I felt that it was time to test the waters again. In early summer of 2011, I started talking to Marlene about getting us both a new smartphone. I remember those conversations very clearly. She had also been rather underwhelmed by our previous smartphones, and was currently using the decidedly not-so-smart LG Rumor LX260. She was satisfied with the simple interface that did everything that she wanted from a phone, and she was wary of the huge price tag that came with, from her perspective, a pointless array of bells and whistles.

Phones_noom

Smartphones will make us healthier!

I set to work doing some research, and I came back to her with a proposal for two Droid X2 Android phones, and a list of their benefits. Included on that list was “health management”. I argued that there were applications out there to plan a diet, count calories, keep track of exercise, etc. She responded with something like, “If you want to do that, it’s fine with me, but I have no interest.”

The “get healthy by buying a new phone” idea was shot down, but we did end up buying the phones. They very soon worked their way into almost every facet of our lives. Timers, reminders, photographs, Facebook, games, research, shopping, surfing, texting, reading… No “health management”, though. Not yet, at least.

What do I have to lose?

As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, sometime around February 2013 I reached a turning point in my struggle with weight loss. I was the heaviest that I had ever been in my life, and I remembered my earlier conversation with Marlene (almost 2 years prior) about health management applications for our phones. I thought to myself, “what do I have to lose?” (Pun intended.)

In my search for an app, I only remember two criteria: professional looking and free. There are certainly other professional, free apps available. I haven’t tried any of them. I don’t know how they compare. I decided to download the Noom application on Saturday, March 16, 2013, and I almost immediately started seeing results. I had intended to use it briefly and then try something else, but after the first week, I was enjoying Noom so much that I wasn’t really interested in shifting my focus.

It’s a game!

Noom is structured like a game. When you first start the application, it asks for some information: age, height, weight, etc. It also asks about exercising habits. After this brief questionnaire, it gets right into the program. Each day, Noom provides several tasks to complete:

  • Eat three meals, and record what you ate
  • Record your weight
  • Read a concise article or two, usually focused on diet or exercise
  • Occasionally accept or reject a challenge
  • Walk a certain number of steps each day
  • Do your scheduled exercise, and record it

For each task that you complete, Noom awards “points”. After a certain number of points, you “level up”. The app presents a progress bar showing what level you are on, how many points you have, and how many points you need to get to the next level. As with all video games, the first couple of levels are pretty easy to achieve. You will likely be on level 2 within the first week. The higher the level, though, the more points needed to level up again. As of this writing, I have 37,361 points and am on level 20.

Noom awards points for everything you do. Record your weight? Doesn’t matter if your weight went up or down. You get points either way. Record your meal? Whether you ate well or not, you get points. So then what’s the point? (Pun intended.) Noom apparently assumes that if you are paying attention to your health – recording weight, recording meals, reading articles, etc. – then you will ultimately make wiser decisions. In my case, it worked.

– danBhentschel