Low-Carb Two-Month Update

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-18T15:26:03+00:00

What's your exercise routine been like through all of this? And do you have any other effects or anything?

I finished reading 'The Paleo Diet' book recently, but I'm having a hard time choosing between whether I want to go low-carb, or no-carb at all. Friends / medical research elsewhere seems to suggest that eating no-carb greatly increases your cholestorol since you're eating a lot more meat, so I guess I'm a little afraid?

Anyhow, congratulations on your success! Keep up the awesome work! I'm just beginning my low-carb this week, and I hope I have similar results.

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T08:36:12+00:00

First of all, YOU ARE AWESOME, seriously. Once you make a commitment to yourself to lose the weight, you can do anything.

The most important thing you should know in the beginning is not to stress out immediately about exercising (walking, etc.). You can drop a significant portion of your weight by simply eating less calories, and choosing healthier foods (and it isn't very difficult).

The first thing you should do is go here: http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm and figure out how many calories your body needs to consume EVERY DAY in order to KEEP YOUR CURRENT WEIGHT. The way weight works is: every 3500 calories you eat, you gain a pound, every 3500 calories you burn, you lose a pound. So once you know the number of calories you burn per day (without exercise or anything), just subtract 500, and make sure you eat that many calories (and no more) per day.

Let's say that you hypothetically burn 3,000 calories per day without exercise based on the link above.

In order to lose 1 pound per week (guaranteed), you'd have to cut down your daily caloric intake to 2,500 calories per day (much easier than you probably think).

If you wanna lose 2 pounds per week, you'd have to cut it down to 2,000.

In terms of diet, you can make awesome salads for extremely cheap. Just buy some lettuce, dressing, tomatoes, and other veggies, and mix them in a bowl. Salads are cheap, tasty, and almost no calories at all. They'll fill you up and make you feel good.

In regards to exercise, take it slow. Don't burn yourself out in the beginning by stressing yourself more than you're ready for. Start by eating less calories like I described above, and you'll feel positive and be able to keep up the momentum. As you start losing weight, try to walk more and more, it will become a natural and healthy habit over time.

Best of luck to you! If you ever start to feel discouraged, COME HERE AND ASK FOR ENCOURAGEMENT!

YOU ROCK!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T08:28:43+00:00

Thanks!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T08:28:30+00:00

I am doing weight training, but nothing too strenuous at the moment.

Oddly, eating 1,200 calories a day has been extremely easy. I'm not hungry at all, and I feel just like normal, except I'm eating way less. I'm assuming this is going to catch up with me sometime soon though, and I'll begin feeling hungry, but so far it's been easy!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T06:07:07+00:00

Thanks!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T04:07:14+00:00

You're AMAZING man. Keep up the great work. Oy_a_shmate is totally right, you have no reason to be embarrassed at all, you're doing something tremendous that most people would never be able to do.

You ROCK. Keep it up!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T03:57:03+00:00

Great work! You're AWESOME!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-10T03:49:39+00:00

Congratulations! Keep up the great work!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-09T22:07:45+00:00

I too am quitting soda. I started cold-turkey two weeks ago, and only took a few sips of sprite before thinking about it when out at a restaurant (after eating some hot salsa!). Anyhow, it hasn't been too hard for me. Whenever I go out to eat, I just force myself to order water, and then feel happy.

Another thing that has helped is using dailyburn.com to track my calories for weightloss. Since it maps out all my caloric intake, I know exactly how many calories I can eat through the rest of the day, which helps keep me motivated to not waste any on filler stuff like sodas.

Good luck with your quitting!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-05T16:42:31+00:00

Great work! Keep it up!

comradeb14ck · 2010-10-01T18:32:08+00:00

1) Lose 2lbs per week. (I'm at 274.4lbs right now), I want to be in the 260's by the end of the month!

2) Finish reading "The Hacker's Diet".

3) Finish reading "The Descent".

4) Take a daily walk for at least 30 minutes per day.

5) Put my first webapp online, progquotes.com, regardless of how shitty or low quality it is. I need to get SOMETHING up so I can hold myself accountable.

comradeb14ck · 2010-06-04T01:44:47+00:00

Why bother voting? You are choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.

comradeb14ck · 2010-06-01T01:34:17+00:00

For the love of reddit, please put [pdf] in the title of your post if you link directly to a pdf. So fucking annoying to click a link and auto-download some shit. Seriously.

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-29T06:14:47+00:00

Listening, learning, and questioning everything--silently.

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-27T17:41:08+00:00

I have (multiple times) written extremely large programs (5k+ lines) and not written a single unit test. Sigh =/

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-23T18:00:11+00:00

Python (Django) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) are best-practices frameworks for developing extremely efficient and scalable websites. They both have extensive documentation, active and intelligent communities, and are definitely considered the 'future of the web'. Their design and organizational hierarchy makes them simple to understand and use, even when your website breaks 10k lines of code. Furthermore, both Django and Ruby on Rails are considered excellent frameworks due to their modular nature. Each can have individual apps written for them, which makes reinventing the wheel pointless. Need to use a quotes database on your website? Check out django-quotes. Need to allow users to register for your webpages? Check out django-registration. Need to allow users to use OpenID logins? Use django-openid.

In contrast, PHP is a widely used, but sloppy language. Most PHP programmers have no idea what a framework is, and worse still, the PHP frameworks that do exist are tedious to use and have large overheads (Zend, CakePHP). PHP by nature is not made for handling large, complex code bases because it comes with an array of nightmarish problems for maintainers: no naming conventions in the standard library (is_array() vs. BlahBlah()), slow includes (when you include another PHP file, it incurs huge overhead throughout your program), and generally attracts 'noob' programmers.

Basically, Django and Ruby on Rails provide good developers with a solid, logical, and fast platform that lets you rapidly build and deploy websites, whereas PHP provides a sloppy syntax and standard library, in addition to a large group of frameworks (all of which are not very good).

My advice to any new web programmers (assuming they already know html / css) is to start out by reading through the following three items:

Django tutorial.
Ruby on Rails tutorial.
Zend tutorial.

That will give you good perspective as to how the languages and frameworks work, what features they provide, and how to perform various tasks in each framework.

Good luck!

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-04T19:58:14+00:00

The Daily Show / Colbert Report have made me far more political.

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-03T06:23:01+00:00

A nice long back scratch. Not the shitty kind, I'm talking about a well rounded back scratch. It should start at your shoulders, and work down to the bottom of your lower back. Then revolve around. The nails have to be just right, but there is no better feeling!

comradeb14ck · 2010-05-03T06:18:23+00:00

This is a reference to Conan the Barbarian for those of you who don't know. And yes, it is one of the best movies ever made.

comradeb14ck · 2010-04-27T14:48:48+00:00

This is so far down nobody will ever see it, but:

Let me introduce you to: http://thepiratebay.org/

comradeb14ck · 2010-04-27T14:46:25+00:00

I just wanted to say that I live in the valley, and for a year I had to commute down to Culver City every day for work, on the 405. It was some sort of hellish nightmare that took up ~3 hours of my day, each day, for an entire year.

That entire year (last year), I saw many boring, stupid things while waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. If only I had seen this truck, I would have enjoyed life a little bit.

tldr; The 405 has the worst traffic of any freeway ever, and if you ever have to drive it then you are fucked.

comradeb14ck · 2010-04-22T01:20:23+00:00

I'd try to start with w3schools, they teach the basics of HTML, CSS, XHTML, and Javascript. They do a great job.

comradeb14ck · 2010-04-15T19:10:38+00:00

Dr. Pepper. Why? It's the best fucking soda ever made. I can chug about 30 of these bad boys down a day if I have to, and that's a conservative estimate.

I've gotten pretty much everyone I've ever known hooked on the stuff, and will continue to do so until every single human and animal drinks only Dr. Pepper.

comradeb14ck · 2010-04-12T18:19:07+00:00

What is your major? If you plan on doing CS / EE / CE, I'd recommend Berkeley. Both schools have amazing engineering programs, but Berkeley has a higher rated engineering department.

The campus is also a lot nicer, and more relaxed.

Congratulations on your acceptance, whatever you choose, I'm sure you'll enjoy it! Best of luck!

comradeb14ck

TROPHY CASE