Category: misc

Baby Boomer Die Off

tombstoneBLEWIT

I’ve seen some variation of the reaction to a celebrity death with “This is a horrible month/year/decade” probably 50 times in the last week. Buckle up, butter cups. This is barely the beginning, and expect this to accelerate dramatically for the next 20 to 30 years. The first wave of Baby Boomers are hitting 70. The death rate of celebrities and non-celebrities alike will accelerate as the bubble of people of dying age gets larger. All those musicians and actors you paid attention to between 1960 and 2000 are old, and all of them will die sooner or later. Welcome to sooner. This is the new normal.

PS – I still have yet to score a point in the Mad at Dad Musician Deathpool.

Stamps.com

Does anyone have experience with Stamps.com? I have a lot of shipping to do for the next 6 weeks and it would make things easier. However, I’m not wild about paying $15/month forever when I’m not using it much. If I use my favorite podcaster’s affiliate code, get the bonus offer and sign up, what is my minimum commitment? If it is a whole year, that extra $150 in monthly fees makes it a far less attractive deal.

More on Eat To Live

I received a question in email asking if I felt energetic over the past 5 weeks. The short answer is yes, I do go the gym — which isn’t necessarily part of the diet. Some versions of this ask you to not exercise while you recalibrate your body’s relationship with food. Exercise makes you hungrier and there is more evidence that while it has many health benefits, you can’t exercise your way out of being overweight without changing what you eat.

I have heard other concerns that maybe eating this way means consuming too few calories to be reasonable, particularly if you start very overweight. This doesn’t seem like a concern to me. The whole point of the plan is to select the subset of food you can eat, and then eat as much of that as you need to not be hungry. The very point is to flood your body with nutrients and never be deprived of them.

I’m not schooled in the biochemistry of it, but it seems like it works because your body is almost certainly taking in fewer calories than you burn (it is difficult to eat 2000 calories worth of kale or spinach or romaine lettuce each day) but also keeping you fed at the nutrient level. Since your body knows it isn’t starving because all nutritional needs are met, fat is released pretty regularly and not hoarded.

Doing some envelope math: If I lost 25 pounds and half was water and half was fat, that means my body released 43,750 calories back into my system. Over the course of 35 days, that would be an average of 1,250 calories a day. So whatever calories I consumed, I had a good chunk of each day’s energy supplied just by the stored fat that was released. I don’t think there is much danger of lethargy on this plan, and there is no deprivation. Any time you feel hungry, you should eat. Hunger isn’t the problem, it really is more about trying to choke down giant salads. I still have the salad I made yesterday, despite eating it for both lunch and dinner.

Life After Knowledge

knowledge 15

I really enjoyed Knowledge 15 last week. As always, it was a blast meeting customers, partners and coworkers. I always leave excited and exhausted. This is the fourth day since I got home and I am still tired. It’s a challenge getting back into the swing of my normal life and ordinary daily work but I will do my best.

Now I am anxiously waiting on Knowledge 16. It will be at the same place, Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, May 15 – 20, 2016. I will do my best to be involved in pre-conference training because I find that enjoyable and valuable. If I met you this year, be gentle on me next year when I have forgotten your name. I’ve forgotten hundreds of them!

LetterMo 2015

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I just realized with horror that we are already into February. The weekend with two child’s birthday parties – one for my own – left me not thinking too hard about the calendar. That means that if I’m going to do The Month of Letters Challenge I’m already two days behind.

I’ve done it twice and then didn’t do it last year for much the same reason. Somewhere in the middle of February 2014 I noticed that I had never started, and was far enough behind I didn’t pursue it. It is great fun and a great way to connect to friends and family. There is something nice about receiving a nice piece of mail and nice about sending it. Much in the way that I am interested in zines and minicomics because they are somatic and physical, I am interested in LetterMo. So much of my life is digital and on the computer that now and then it is pleasurable to return to the tactile with things like the participant stickers you can affix to your mail.

So, I’m starting at a deficit but I’m doing it anyway. The plan is send mail for 23 days (the shortest month anyway with a mail holiday in the middle.) I’ll do that, and either make up the time on Sundays or go a bit into March. The specifics don’t matter, just doing something does.

I’m in. Who else is with me? A Month of Letters is on Google+ and Facebook, so dive right in.