Wow! Memory lane.

My last post was a) from Japan, and b) about WoW, neither things of which I am involved with at the moment. Never mind that it was also from over a year ago (15 months maybe?).

Well, I guess with the plethora of time I have, I think I'll update this. Mostly random musings, which I usually do on Facebook. My friend and voracious blogger Rob seems to cross-post all the time.

So, what new? All my (very few) readers will know that I'm back in Canada. I am also currently unemployed, a fact about which I am currently ambivalent.

(Actually, not quite so ambivalent since seeing a recent credit card statement, and then paying said credit card statement, and then seeing its effects on my ever-shrinking bank balance. This has prompted me to a) get real and start tracking my finances, and b) re-evaluate my spending habits.)

Of perhaps more relevant news is my recent go at weight-loss. In the first two months of my return to Toronto, I fell into the very bad (for my health) habit of eating. A LOT. My routine was play games all day, and eat chips. Repeat for about 60 days.

No, certainly not good.

I suppose the major kicker was a photo taken for an application for my MA TESOL degree, which I hope to start in January. I have a mirror on my desk, which I use to check my teeth, trim nose-hairs, and other facial hygiene related things. As it's on my desk, I'm usually hunched a little forward, in FPS mode. This means my chin is out, which pulls the fat on my neck back. HAHA! NOT FAT!

Then of course I took a picture, in which I must stand tall, shoulder back, chest slightly out. This is the more realistic representation of me, and wow it was apparent just how fat I had become.

To give a concrete example, when I left Japan, I was probably clocking in around 97 kg. In the two months that followed, my weight went up to 103 kg. All that was pure fat.

AND IT SHOWED! Did it ever show!

I'll estimate that I was consuming between 2500 to 3500 calories a day, and the only exercise I was getting was with a keyboard and mouse.

At the beginning of November, I decided that I would begin my dieting. The old adage of eat less move more is ever my guiding principle, so the first thing on my list was to limit my caloric intake. I am now on a diet of 1800 calories a day, excepting Sundays which is my cheat day.

At the beginning, I was hard-pressed to keep to this limit. I knew immediately that I would have to cut out all the junk food. I also cut out the majority of my carbs at dinner. Lunch is almost always a 6-inch Subway sandwich.

Yes, I am on the Subway diet, and it's working.

My initial problems were hunger. I don't think there's any real cure for this but to wait until your stomach gets smaller. Now into my 3rd week of dieting, I find that I can easily to till 1 or 2 in the afternoon before getting REALLY hungry. Plus, the Subway and soup fill me up pretty good.

Next on my list was tracking what I ate. If anyone reading this is serious about losing weight, I seriously suggest this. Search this blog for dieting posts, and you will most certainly find that doing this was a key component for me for losing weight. Now, the fact that I keep rebounding is another thing entirely, but the fact remains that this is a weight-loss tool par excellence.

Next consideration is exercise. I am living a fairly sedentary lifestyle, with no work to burn calories. That's bad. Initially I started doing just push-ups (inclined, girly-man push-ups because I am weak). It didn't last long because I was doing them only semi-regularly (like every time I went upstairs), and soon they disappeared entirely.

Oh how I wish I had shipped my Bowflex dumbbells from Japan!

I toyed with the idea of buying them again here, but the price-point always seemed too high. But instead, my eyes turned to kettlebells.

Right now, these things are rocking my world.

Small, versatile, and a good weapon in a pinch!

OK, maybe not the weapon part. But the idea is bafflingly simple and perfect for my situation. Generally speaking, my routine will involve carrying them up stairs (modified farmer's carry), swings, and either shoulder presses, chest presses, or cleans.

Alright, enough blathering. What are the results? Sadly, I left my Tanita Body Fat Weight Scale at home, and all I have here is a crappy (but stylish) digital bathroom scale.

There you go. Where as previously I had done a crazy caloric restriction (which unsurprisingly led to massive weight-loss), I'm doing a more modest 3-4 pounds per week, or about 1.5 kg a week. So far so good. I went from a start weight of 101.3 kg, to my current 97.9 in about 2 weeks. I plan on keeping this up until I hit my personal best of 85 kg, at which point I'll re-evaluate my goals/lifestyle.

Phew, long ass post. Next ones will be shorter, I promise ;)

Goddamn it!

My WoW account got hacked. Fuckers.

Me is hungry

It's been a while since I did any blogging.

Last year was an interesting year for me, what with the root canal, wisdom tooth pulling, and cataract surgery and all.

But last year I also saw myself beginning to rebound in weight.

There were plenty of excuses I gave for this; I was too busy, Jon was no longer my neighbor, I wasn't THAT much heavier etc. etc. Well, like most things, there's some truth to all this, and some things that are just me ignoring the elephant in the corner.

Addressing the first of these, I really WAS busy. The combination of the wisdom teeth and the cataract surgery sandwiching my preparations for midyear seminar is what really did it. During that short 2.5 month period, due to a pressing need to catch up on work, I left work more times after 6 than my previous YEARS combined. Needless to say, my diet rapidly degenerated into whatever I felt like eating at Mini-stop, or even worse, grabbing myself a double quarter-pounder at Micky Dee's.

Jon, who wrapped up his last year on JET, moved away from the apartment. While still living in Fukuma, the idea of biking to his new place after work, working out, then biking back to my place, didn't really seem to jive. So gone were my days of going to the gym 4 times a week.

Well, the time after mid-year and before I went back home for the holidays was a party-filled affair, with more than it's fair share of beer and other liquors. And going home for the holidays was of course a treat, but I also fell into the vacation mentality, indulging my every fast-food whim.

Thus the result of about 8 months of neglect, in which probably 80-90% of the damage occuring in the last 3 months of that time, was an increase in weight from my all-time best of 85 kgs to 96 kgs this January, or about a 24 pound increase for those of you who are metric-phobic.

I knew I had gained weight. Any of my recent Facebook pictures proves that. Returning to the limelight were the all-stars, my gut and my double chin. Like I do every year, I made a resolution to lose weight.

I made this same resolution last year, but I pretty much didn't go through with it. After all, I was still working out. In a very real sense, I didn't need to watch what I ate as much.

But by August, with Jon gone from the apartment, my motivation to go to the gym dropped like a stone. I was still eating like shit, and so the inevitable creeping back of that band of fat around my torso and legs became evident. Shirts were tighter around my chest again. I went up a belt hole. My airsoft gear needed to be readjusted.

Fucking hell.

Well, I'm back in the saddle again, as it were, and dieting pretty hard. Though the gym hasn't made a return to my life, I now walk to school and back every day. I've also limited myself to a 1700 kcal diet (or as close as I can get to that), with, again, a cheat day on one of the weekend days.

Recording what I eat has also returned. But rather than a notebook I carry with me, as I did during 2008, I now track my progress on www.livestrong.com. Yes, this is the Lance Armstrong website.

Well, I'm happy with the results. Again, motivation is a huge factor, and this is one area where, for me at least, using the website is of real benefit. My morning routine involves me weighing myself first thing. I then head over to the computer and input that data into the website.

Well, what can I say. This is working! Not only that, but seeing a measurable amount of progress helps me out when that Big Mac looks REALLY good.

The initial loss is probably the most recently acquired fat, and the shock of going from a 2700 - 3500 calorie a day diet to a 1700 calorie one. I theorize that this is my "Canada" fat. I'm now chipping away at the, September to December fat, and on average going down about 200g a day.

My immediate goal is to get my weight down to 85 kgs, my personal best, a goal I'm hoping to hit before the end of February. My mid-range goal is to get to 80 kgs, hopefully by the time summer rolls around. Ultimately, my end goal is to get my BMI to under 25, and take myself out of the obese category.

Let's see what happens...

io9 analyzes the Venture Bros. trailer for season 4.

Take a look HERE.

Special thanks go to Rob for lending me his season 3 DVDs.

Wisdom Tooth the First

My Odyssey begins about a year ago, when I first started to get a pain in my lower left tooth area. Chalking it up to sensitive teeth, it turns out that slowly, over the course of months (perhaps years) my rear left wisdom tooth was grinding into my number 7 rear left molar (or the one right in front of the wisdom tooth), causing a cavity to form.

In about March of this year, things came to a head and I either bit down on something hard or otherwise widened the cavity, exposing the nerves there to the air and whatever food was going into my mouth.

Now, I think I've got a pretty high pain threshold. At least enough to be a wuss. But this HURT. It was first a dull pain, but rapidly degenerated into SHARP INTENSE MIND DESTROYING PAIN. Of course, geek that I am, my loyalties were to gaming, so I actually waited a day to play D&D before heading to the nearest dentist I could find using Google Maps.

(In my defense, I'd been pretty desperate to get a real live 4E game going, and this was the first group I had found in almost 3 years of looking.)

But those few nights, I was popping 4 advils every 2 hours, and STILL I couldn't really sleep. The pain was so bad that I was literally moaning in pain, pacing my room, eyes strained shut. During that time I tried every shitty home remedy to no avail.

A trip to the dentist, a few x-rays, and all was revealed. In the end, I had to get a root canal done.

I've heard some say that the old saying "I'd rather get a root canal" isn't really relevant anymore, because getting a root canal isn't supposed to be all that bad.

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

Getting a root canal was awful. OK, the pain itself wasn't all that bad, but the sheer uncomfortableness of it, while the dentist roots around AFTER drilling out your tooth to SCRAPE out the rest of the nerve endings with a barbed wire, periodically checking with some sort of electric contact to see in there are any nerves left, is downright unpleasant.

Anyway, this has all lead to this moment (and one more in about 2 weeks time when I get my OTHER lower wisdom tooth removed).

All told, it wasn't too bad. I laud the dentist, who despite the problems she was having, didn't one mutter the Japanese equivalent of "goddamn mother-fucking tooth". As I write this, my jaw is no longer paralyze, though I've got noticeable swelling in my jaw and cheek. It's starting to ache pretty badly, so I'll soon make some soup and take my painkillers and antibiotics.

Here are some pics of said tooth.

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

Vacation is here, 3 days early.

OK, it's not vacation. I have been ordered to remain at home and under quarantine because I came into contact with a person testing positive for the H1N1 Influenza virus.

So here I am, 9:40 in the morning, writing my blog and thinking about going back to bed. After all, what else will I do other than sleep while I wait for WoW to come back online.

All kidding aside, there are some rather uncomfortable realities at work here that make this whole affair rather unwelcome.

First is that my laptop is at work. While this isn't in and of itself a problem, there are some files on there that I need to continue work on a powerpoint presentation I'm to give at this years JET orientation.

Next is the fact that my friend Fran is coming on Saturday. I don't suspect there will be any difficulties, but I'm knocking on wood and taking my temperature every few hours just to be sure.

After that is the fact that I have asthma. In the US, I've read that 1 in 3 patients diagnosed with the swine flu has asthma, and that this is a veritable risk factor whose ultimate symptom could be death! YIKES!!

Thankfully, no symptoms yet, and if my asthma starts to get twitchy, my awesome doctor, with ingenious foresight, prescribed me a couple of days worth of Prednisone.

The last thing of course is the possible parallels with the 1918 Spanish Flu. According to Wikipedia, "[i]t was caused by an unusually virulent and deadly influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1" and there were two waves. The first wave started in March, and "the epidemic resembled typical flu epidemics." But there was a second, deadlier wave that occurred in August of that year, where "the virus had mutated to a much more deadly form." This is what infected 500 million people and killed some 50-100 million of them.

Our pandemic started in April, and so if the pattern follows, we'd see a second wave in September. With news of a new Tamiflu-resistant strain, coupled with the fact that September is notorious around the world for being a month in which more people suffer asthma attacks, this whole pandemic thing has gotten me just a little bit worried.