proud n00b

I did a #juicefast. The results & why I’ll do it again.

Two weeks ago I watched Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. The gist is an overweight guy juiced himself back to health after an extensive juicefast.  While I was not overweight (210 lbs), I have gained a few pounds since my rowing days when I was 195lbs. My goal was to go for an entire week - but after 3 days I decided to stop.

From my crew days -

More recently after filling out a bit-

An overview of my fast was : drink lots of water, and drank a juice for each meal. I didn’t really follow any recipes on the juices - just mixed what I had in the fridge. 

• Carrots
• Green & red apples
• Celery
• Kale
• Spinach
• Parsley
• Pear
• Lemon
• Ginger

Saturday, Day 0: For dinner, I made a test juice to eat with a normal meal. Shockingly, the juices taste much better than I thought. The idea they taste like ‘grass’ or ‘disgusting’ is just wrong. After that drink, I knew this was doable.

Sunday, Day 1: Starting Weight: 210lbs.

This was my hardest day. In the afternoon I was hungry, but I was in for the long haul.  

Monday, Day 2: Dropped 4 lbs. Weight: 206lbs.

 In reading about fasts, it seems people get headaches, a lack of energy, or dizziness. I didn’t get any of these. I did find it harder to focus though. Mentally I felt distracted. At night, this was really bad - it was impossible to fall asleep.  I also started getting the sore throat & odd feeling on my tongue. This seem like normal symptoms - but they are unpleasant.

Tuesday, Day 3: Dropped another 3.4 lbs. Weight: 202.6lbs.

Physically I felt great. Lighter, more alert, generally just more healthy. However I also began to get concerned about the amount of weight loss. Most articles I read about juice fasting had people losing that amount of weight over their entire fast- I lost over 7lbs in 2 days. I was staying hydrated so it is a bit tough to believe all of that was water weight. Because you aren’t consuming salt, you should drop a lot of water weight. How much- I have no idea. 7lbs of water seems like A LOT to me. If you know more about this, please leave a comment. 

I continued the fast for Tuesday’s Breakfast & Lunch but stopped at that. Final weight: 203.4lbs. 

Lessons

As far as fasting is concerned - I now know you will lose a good amount of water weight. How much, I’m not sure, but I do want to look into this further to better understand where the weight loss is coming from. At my pace, I was going to lose about 10+ lbs in 3 days. Even when I was wrestling (maintained weight of 160lbs throughout 4 years of high school), I wouldn’t cut weight that much, that fast. On the surface, it seems very unhealthy - but I could be wrong.  Maybe I should have drank more juice throughout the day? 

For my first meal Tuesday night, I went back to my old ways. Mainly it was to test how I would feel vs the juice diet. I was shocked how quickly my body had adjusted to the juice, and how bad I felt after eating the usual. For that meal, I had leftover celery plus mushroom ravioli, cheese pizza, and red wine. I told you I went back to the usual…

Quickly I learned, I eat/ate way too much sodium. As I write this post nearly 12+ hours later, I can still taste the sodium in my mouth. It is kind of disgusting. That is the first thing I will be changing - eating less salt. It isn’t necessary. 

Also, how much food is enough to make you full? After Day 1, I really never felt hungry. That surprised me. Last night during my gorge fest, it became obvious the body needs much less than I ate. I hit the full wall, but kept going. Why, I’m not sure. When I was rowing, I couldn’t eat enough. I would eat more food than most people eat in 2 days, but I was also burning it off with our multiple practices a day.  Those days are behind me so recognizing ” What is Full?” is a new mission. 

Overall Thoughts

As far as juicing, I am definitely going to keep it up. It is a great way to get veggies & fruits into your diet quickly and easily. I am still trying to figure out how to juice leafy greens, but apart from that, it really is nice. Before I do another juice fast, I will do more research on it and the effects on your body. I wasn’t prepared for that much weight loss that quickly. However I do feel great, and it was an interesting body hack/experiment. 

Editing online courses like modern browser development

After watching the first videos released for Stanford’s AI Course, it is clear the course is still quite rough. Traditional problems both in Academia & online courses are pervasive throughout the short clips. However by just following modern browser development, like Google Chrome’s release strategy,  I think the AI course can remedy most of these issues.

Here are the problems as I see them : 

• Some people will think a non-native English speaker is hard to understand
• The video quality & editing wasn’t very sharp
• The experience wasn’t fluid - ex. the quizzes did not auto-progress after the right answers were submitted

These are bugs that are definitely easy to overcome - and that is where the 100k+ students can help. We should be able to help contribute towards the content - like browser testers already do with Chrome. Instead of releasing one final version of the course, Stanford should release the unedited video & let the community help test & polish it.

Following the Google Chrome analogy:

• Canary - the unedited film
• Dev - A crowd-sourced, edited version (better audio?)
• Beta - A bit of polish, editing, and effects added 
• Stable - Final version intended for public consumption

This would alleviate much of the burden from Stanford on editing the course material while also producing a more polished end-result. 

What do you guys think?

Why do tickets to tech company conferences cost so much? (f8 - $400, WWDC- $1,599)

F8 was just announced, and the tickets are priced at $400 a pop. I don’t know about you guys, but for an individual developer (who would love to go), $400 is crazy money. Why do tech company conferences cost so much?!?

Facebook is charging the people who expand their ecosystem to attend an event which will result in Facebook growing further. This doesn’t make sense to me. I understand they want to cover their costs, but I have personally spent more than $400 of my time digging through their documentation & hacking on their APIs.

Tech events like this should be free. Facebook should want every developer to come to f8 for networking, learning more about the platform, and getting developers’ creative juices flowing. By charging so much, you limit who attends, and therefore directly hinder Facebook’s potential growth as a platform.

Yes this is a bit of ranting and raving, but I think the high costs of these events is a real problem. These events should be free for the people who create more value for these companies. Why don’t they understand that and reciprocate the favor? (Apple I’m also looking at you.)

Google+ Study Hall #idea

Recently I became interested in Google+ Hangouts as a platform - tons of uses for a group video chat. Tonight, I had one idea that seems really easy & useful for procrastinators.

Google+ Hangout Study Hall. 

Join the group, put your audio on mute, and learn whatever you need to learn. Maybe someone else in the room can help out when you have a question - but the core is to get people together at a set time, for a set period of time, to just learn. People do this for their fitness so why shouldn’t we do it for self-learning? 

If you are interested in finding a few hours a week for a hangout, just leave a comment. Maybe people aren’t that interested - but I think the peer pressure created by a Google+ Hangout could be effective in getting people to finally learn that thing you’ve put off for years or months.

What do you guys think?