Tony K's Blog

We have put our San Ramon home for sale. The kids are out of he house (but still on the payroll). We decided that 2776 square feet of house and 10,000 square feet of yard with a pool is just a bit more than we want to deal with. So we're moving to Oakland. We'll be near Kathleen's work, I'll have a reverse commute, we'll be close to the city, have no yard, and only 1700 square feet to take care of. IT feels good. Here's our house for sale at 51 Sage Circle in San Ramon. Our new place is at Pacific Cannery Lofts . Next stage of life. It's exciting.

BMI is such a bad metric for measuring obesity. Better would be FMI which instead of the weight/ht^2 is weight*body fat%/ht^2 or BMI * body fat %. Or how about simply body fat percentage. It is a lot more relevant to the measure of obesity. There has been some recent press about how people with high BMIs might be healthy and people with low BMIs might be unhealthy. Well duh!!! The following article talks about people who are "skinny fat." Normal Weight Obesity: An Emerging Risk Factor For Heart And Metabolic Problems More than half of American adults considered to have normal body weight in America have high body fat percentages -- greater than 20 percent for men and 30 percent for women -- as well as heart and metabolic disturbances, new Mayo Clinic research shows. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic s...

Here is my current weight loss progress. It has been going great, but in early May I hit a bit of a plateau, so I decided to shock my system with a PSMF diet as outlined in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook . You can see from the chart that it restarted my weight loss and I hit 200 in the first week of June. I am now tapering off that diet and I will work towards a more moderate loss of about 0.5 - 1 lb per week while working harder on my fitness regimen. I hope to get down to about 180 by the end of the year. I think a good target weight range for me is 180 to 185 lbs. I had a physical about a month ago and had a lot of good news. My blood pressure had been in the high range, pushing hypertension for several years. It was in the 140-150 over 90-100 range. In early May it was 124/70. That is darn close to good on the systolic and the lowest diastolic I have ever had. I also did the full blood workup and those results were very encouraging too. My triglycerides, which had been extremely hig...

Previously, in January 2008, I reported that I was at 219 lbs and about 20% bodyfat. Last week I weighed in at 211.8 and somewhere around 15% bodyfat. My rate of weight loss is not huge, but the decrease in bodyfat is really encouraging. Given the inaccuracies of bodyfat measurement, it is really hard to know if I went from 20% to 15% of 19% to 17%, or some other combination, but the main thing is to see the decrease over time. I am hoping to be down around 13% by mid-year. I recently read Good Calories, Bad calories by Gary Taubes. It is hard to read, but has led me to believe that the US Government guidelines for low-fat eating are completely out of whack. I have been following a regimen similar to what is laid out in Emotions for Engineers . I am continuing to work hard at the gym and my weightlifts are actually increasing (very slightly), rather than decreasing with my weight loss. This is really sweet. The good news is that I appear to not be losing my hard-earned muscle mass. I...

One of my early blog postings was about my renewed attempt to lose some weight and get fit. That attempt went nowhere. I thought that making it public would give me some added incentive. Wrong. A better approach might be to use stickk.com which allows you to bring in supporters and people who you are accountable to. Well, that was February 2005. It's now three years later. It's funny, but my weight is almost exactly the same as it was then. I'm at 219 now, I was 221 then. In between though I ballooned to 235 lbs. I have lost those 16 lbs since April 2007. More importantly, my body fat is way down. In 2005, I reported 31% body fat. I think that was a high estimate, but now I am at around 20%. I can actually see and feel ab muscles now, where I could only pretend to feel them in 2005. My strength index at gymamerica.com has gone from 126 to 140. This partly reflects age as a correction factor, but it's not everything. I am stronger now than I was then. I have used kind...

OK. I'm not as young as I used to be. And I'm a little bit overweight... Actually, overfat. You see, the normal standards of weight vs height as expressed by the Body Mass Index are a bit flawed. I'm not tring to make excuses or anything, but focusing on weight alone can be counterproductive. The medical community has used the weight of average people in computing the range of acceptable BMIs, but it doesn't account for people outside of the norm. For example, Walter Payton, one of the greatest running backs ever to play football was 5'10" and weighed about 210 lbs. That gave him a BMI of 30.2--obese. He was not obese. He probably had about 10% body fat. That is why BMI has problems. It is used as a proxy for body fat percentage. The fact is though that today you can get a scale for under $100 that measures your body fat directly. So if you are an athlete or are somehow outside the norm, you can see your real progress. Which brings me to the topic of this note,...