Category: Weight Loss

2020 goal setting

2019. What a year it’s been. There’s been a few ups and downs and I didn’t achieve as much as I had set out to when I did my last bout of goal setting. I didn’t write a book or release an app. I did however get a part time job with YOW! Conference, settle into a fufilling role (even though there was drama there), and spoke at 3 conferences.

One thing I realise, is I’m always trying to do too much. The theme for next years Mardi Gras is what matters. So, what matters to me? In terms of my personal well being I tend to view it accross 5 elements:

Health

Being healthy is the foundation to all elements of my well being. If I’m not looking after myself here, how can I grow in any other part of my well being? For me, this is physical health, mental health and sexual health.

Physical Health

The biggest thing I need to focus on for next year is beating the overweight category. I’ve beaten the obesity label once before but I’ve slipped back a little and I need to get on top of this. For my height, I need to be less than 65kg to beat the over weight label.

Mental Health

Next year will see me go through Schema Therapy. Here’s hoping it helps me correct an unhealthy mindset I have about myself.

Sexual Health

I’ve always been reluctant to put sexual content on my blog, hoping to keep it professional. However I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t acknowledge it wasn’t an important part of my well being. I’m getting back into the kink scene by attending a few munches. This also helps build up a sense of community. The kink community was the first community I turned to when I first moved to Sydney 6 years ago.

Community

This is one of my personal values too. This also covers family. Nearly everything I do is driven by some sense of community. Next year I’ll be focusing on more board games, the kink community and professional networking. My biggest goal here will be focusing on building and engaging an online community through twitch and podcasting.

Career

I still want to release that app and write a book, however these goals are a bit further down the priority list and I don’t mind if I don’t achieve the book next year. The app is going to help me grow as a software engineer and is more important for growing my side business.

Financial

I’m making progress here. I aim to pay off half my credit card debt by the end of the year. I’ll continue to chip away at it at least.

Spiritual

I’ve tried giving myself spirtual goals before (say establish a daily meditation habit), but that’s always felt more of a mental health thing. I think next year I’m going to explore pagan/magic/druidary by practicing atleast 4 ceremonies that align with each 3 month interval of the year. I read a book yesterday on Australian Druidary and it’s inspired me to try it next year.

Summary

So in summary; I have 5 goals that touch all 5 elements of my well being:

Beat the overweight label
Release a mobile app
Start a podcast
Pay off half of my credit card debt
Practice 4 magic ceremonies

2020 should be a year of focus and vision (haha, get it?). What matters to you for the next year?

Sustainability Weight Loss

My 3/4 Vegan March challenge

Post author By Bug Hunter Sam
Post date February 25, 2019
1 Comment on My 3/4 Vegan March challenge

I’ve let my weight creep up a bit lately. I got down to 75kg but I’m now hovering around 79kg. This is a far cry from the 127kg I was a few years ago but it’s still on the borderline of overweight/obese according to the BMI indicator. I’m going to try a 3/4 vegan diet for March. I’ve done a vegetarian diet for a few weeks before as a challenge and I’m been meaning to try this one out for a while.

The challenge: for the month of March, I will pick vegan for 3/4 of my meals.

Dietary requirements

Because of the stomach restrictions (I have 1/3 of a stomach) my main dietary requirements are to get to 60 grams of protein a day and have a daily multi vitamin. I should probably try to avoid going over 6000kj too but I’m not going to focus on counting calories. I’m not going to beat myself up if I have a few days over this.

Rough Food Plan

Breakfast

True protein shake – 30 gm of protein
1/2 English muffin with avocado and cherry tomatoes

Technically the protein shake isn’t vegan, it is from whey but this is one of the few compromises I’ll make to help me reach my nutritional goals. True protein sources their milk from happy grass fed cows in New Zealand. You should try out their sample flavour packs. I’ve got 2 flavours floating around; vanilla and coconut. I’ll probably alternate these so I’m not getting bored.

Lunch

Some sort of bean or lentil curry (20 grams of protein). I’ve been rocking my lentil curries recently. I could totally do these as meal prep on the Sunday and take them into work during the week.

Afternoon

Home made hummus and carrot sticks (10 grams of protein). I’ve been munchin on this awesome combo lately. Again I need to do meal prep on the Sunday or day before for this but it’s super tasty.

Dinner

Some sort of salad or soup. Edamame could be fun. Mushy peas is also a nice easy staple when I’m cooking for just myself and my tiny stomach. up to 10 grams of protein (it’s not really needed for this meal because I should have already have reached my target protein amount).

No Alcohol

I’ve had the best success with my weight loss when I’ve had a dry month or two. March will be no exception for me. I will allow myself tasters because there are too many craft beers in Sydney to not try but I won’t have a whole one myself. I might be able to stretch a whiskey on the rocks if a special occasion comes up.

Meetup events

There’s always beer and pizza at meetup events, and I now get paid to attend them – le sigh. This creates a huge temptation to each too much, drink too much and stay out too late at the pub afterwards. This challenge will help my avoid those unhealthy situations.

Friday evening steak

I go over to my partner’s place every friday and we usually enjoy a nice home cooked meal. I don’t feel inclined to force veganism on them so I’ll make sure we have some really nice grass fed sustainable beef to eat instead. This will make sure my iron levels don’t drop too. This is where the 3/4 vegan challenge comes in, there will be some compromises.

If someone else cooks for me

I will be grateful for the food no matter what it is. If they ask for my preferences I may say vegetarian or that I’m trying a vegan challenge at the moment but I won’t be asking anyone to accommodate this.

Any tips?

Have you tried a vegan challenge before? What worked/didn’t work for you? Do you have any ideas for quick solo meals that work for a tiny stomach? I’d love to hear them.

Technology Weight Loss

Let’s talk about bias

We are all biased in someway. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Biases can be considered the mental shortcuts we take to help us make sense of the world. Unfortunately these biases can make it harder for some people to progress in life or to experience the same opportunities offered to others.

Fatness and bias

There are so many elements of bias and discrimination out there. I will run the risk of coming across as insensitive if I talk about something I don’t full comprehend. So I will talk about bias from my own perspective, I once was really obese. Like BMI of 47 category 3 morbidly obese, I’m now at a borderline overweight/obese BMI of 30:

Levels of obesity, you can check out my fat transformation photos here:
https://bughuntersam.com/40-kg-down/

Our society has a large amount of bias against fat people. You only have to watch the latest news article about the obesity epidemic to see how the media shames headless fat people. As a society we are viscerally disgusted with fat people; we think they are lazy, un motivated, poorly educated and the scum of the earth.

Behold the headless fat person you are disgusted over:

Discrimination

Fat people get paid less, are offered less leadership opportunities and are publicly shamed. Often women experience more discrimination because of their weight compared to men.

“As long as we are all terrified of becoming fat, this will go on. Yes, we are terrified. Because we all know how fat people are treated in this society.”
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/30/demoted-dismissed-weight-size-ceiling-work-discrimination

Mindset change

When I was fatter and I saw another fat person I would think to myself, “well, at least I’m not that fat”. I would wrap myself up in my own irrational thinking and find comfort in not feeling, “that fat”. Now that I’m smaller my mindset has changed. I am completely disgusted with how much my mindset has changed. I now think the same nasty knee jerk reaction thoughts as everyone else, “eww, gross, how can they let themselves get that big?”. I try to balance that with empathy but I hate how easy these thoughts come now.

I changed one aspect of my appearance

The weight loss surgery (gastric sleeve) I had probably has nearly paid for itself in just the increased earning potential gained from losing weight. On top of the improvement of quality of life later on down the track too. I can’t say for certain but the more I read about bias the more it seems like it was worth it. Other parts of my appearance are a little more challenging to alter. Most people aren’t as lucky as me to be in a situation where they have the financial gains to go through what I did. Most fat people are poor.

What will change?

Probably nothing, your career is basically screwed if you are an overweight older black women working in tech. How many more biases can I add there? Not that I’m trying to be grim but the long term prospects don’t look good. Some aspects of our appearance are more within our control than others but many aren’t.

When was the last time you were disgusted by headless fat bodies in the news?

depression mental health mindfulness Weight Loss

How an offhand comment can trigger a depressive episode

Post author By Bug Hunter Sam
Post date November 12, 2018
1 Comment on How an offhand comment can trigger a depressive episode

I had a low day on Friday. I’ve had a persistent headache and fatigue for a few months now and a head cold on Friday brought out the worse of it. I’ve lived with depression for eight years now so I know when to have a day off to take it easy. Friday started with a 2 hour struggle to get out of bed. It was one of those days.

When I’m in these low moods my obsessive nature and harsh internal self critic can get completely hooked on little comments that people make. This blog is a reflection on this internal thought process to help you understand what might be going through a depressed person’s head.

The comment

In conversation someone mentioned something about, “… being a big girl”, it was related to me being able to look after myself. I responded with “I use to be a lot bigger” and someone else in the conversation added, “keep away from the pork and you’ll stay that way”. In the moment I didn’t think anything of it. But my obsessive nature got hooked and over the afternoon I couldn’t let it go.

The obsession

I became completely obsessed over everything I had eaten recently infront of said company. I replayed the dinner we had recently over and over and over in my head. I counted every calorie, it came out to about 2000KJ and 10gm of protein. Then my internal harsh critic got on board. It starting saying to me, “you are fat, lazy good for nothing, completely worthless, you should just curl up and die”. So now there was a battle going on in my head, the obsessor just going over and over and the critic telling me I’m worthless. Normally these thoughts aren’t that loud but they get overwhelming on low days.

My obsessor wanted to figure out how to write a response to those comments. This blog post is an attempt at pleasing the obsessor because I am still thinking about it after 4 days.

Good intentions

I know those comments come from good intentions, people say these things because they care. The only nutritional goals I stick too (under the advice of my weight loss clinics nutritionist) is to get 60gm of protein a day and to take my daily multivitamin. I’ve had a lifetime of people commenting on my weight. I thought I had developed a thick skin for it, obviously I hadn’t. Or maybe it just hurts more the closer to home it is?

Self Compassion

I’m at a stage now where I can try to practice self compassion (I try but it’s hard). I would catch these thoughts and tell myself, “that’s not a very nice thing to say Sam, you are one of most proactive people I know. You are so far from lazy and worthless it isn’t funny. Look, you even had lunch with someone who thanked you for your help with their CV recently and they are starting a new job soon because of you. Remember that Buddhist monk on youtube? Try and practice letting go.” Here is the youtube video I was thinking of:

How to be supportive

If someone has opened up about their mental health and they raise something like this with you, please don’t feel like you need to censor yourself. That is stressful and not healthy. Often when these things come up for me, I never raise them with the person who caused the trigger because I know deep down it’s just my mind overreacting. So being open and empathetic if someone does raise this is all I ask for.

Please be mindful of how your words can hurt. It reminds me of the common rhyme about sticks and stones I was told about as a kid. Here’s my new version:

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But harsh words from a loved one
Can make me wish I was dead

I’m grateful I’ve never been suicidal but I still live with this kind of depression on a fairly regular basis. My partner has probably seen me go through about 4 or 5 episodes now over a 2 year period.

I’m grateful I can be this open about this huge cause of internal stress. A lot of people who struggle with similar things aren’t as blunt as I am and keep the struggle to themselves.

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Goal setting for 2019

I’m starting my goal setting early. I wrote this blog for goal setting for 2018. On reflection; I haven’t slipped back into obesity at least, which I was super concerned about as I spent the first six months of 2018 recovering from a broken ankle. Here’s my thinking behind my goal setting for 2019 and why I’m starting early.

Brainstorm everything I want to do

As an exercise, I listed everything I want to do and then asked myself, What do I have time to do? What is more important? What aligns the most with my personal values? I’ve had to eliminate a lot of extra curricular ideas and I still feel like I have a lot on my plate 🙁 .

I don’t have enough time to do all the things I’d like to do

I then came up with the following list of things that are really important to me. They are themed around personal, career, family and financial goals:

Beat the overweight label (personal)
Maintain a daily meditation practice
Write a book (career)
Teach my Nan digital marketing (career and family)
Launch an app
Pay off half of my credit card debt (financial)
Speak at one international conference and take my Mum
Brew two whole grain beers
Keep Sydney Testers going
Create enough content to run a 3 day workshop

Why start the goal setting early?

I’m going to focus on developing my morning habit for the rest of this year. I’m going to get up early, meditate and write before heading off to work. If I can do this for the rest of the year, I’ll be in a good place to expand it come 2019. The green in the following table is this minimum commitment:

My ideal morning starts at 5:30, followed by exercise from 6 for up to hour. Next will be a twenty minute meditation from 7 flowwed by half an hour of writing from 7:30. I'll have breakfast at some point and be ready for work from 8:30 AM

I’ve put together an idea of what my ideal morning and ideal week looks like. If I do not put aside time to do things that are important to me, it’ll never get done. I reflected on what I could squeeze in. Unfortunately things like studying Japanese just don’t fit in financially and time wise. So here’s my ideal week to work towards in 2019:

There are some goals that I haven’t put aside any weekly or morning time for but they can’t easily be chipped away with a daily/weekly habit.

Keep goals measurable but hard to achieve

Everyone seems to be talking about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for goal setting these days. One of the important things with OKRs is that they are hard to achieve. When you reflect back on your goals you should be able to say you hit up to 80% of your objective. If you hit 100% you actually set your goals to easy. For example, I’m going to work towards beating the overweight label but I’m not going to consider myself a failure if I only get halfway there. By listing up my ideal morning/week it gives me an ideal to work towards but by highlighting my minimum commitments I won’t beat myself up if I have a bad week or two.

External Accountability

There’s no point in setting vague goals that you don’t tell anyone about. To ensure external accountability with my goals I’m going to;

Pay for a personal trainer for a twice a week weight lifting session
Go climbing with my partner every Wednesday and Saturday
Pay for a publisher’s time to help keep me focused on writing

How will you go about goal setting for next year? What measures will you take to ensure accountability? Please let me know.

mental health Weight Loss

Are you Hungry? Try the Carrot Test

Post author By Bug Hunter Sam
Post date August 13, 2018
No Comments on Are you Hungry? Try the Carrot Test

Have you ever found yourself with a strong desire to eat almost anything and thought to yourself, “why do I want eat?”, “Am I really hungry?”? Often the drivers for eating are emotions; we could be bored, stressed or feeling low. We could be looking for that quick comfort and unfortunately a lot of what we eat is unconscious; we do it without even thinking. It’s habit that feeds our desire to eat, here is an article on 5 reasons why you can’t stop eating.

Afternoon Boredom

I get this desire nearly every afternoon around 3PM when I’m at work, I just want to stuff my face. Sometimes anything will do. There’s been the occasion where I’ve pigged out on plain salada biscuits before. I’ve now started bringing baby carrots and baby cucumbers to work and sitting them on my desk for when that desire hits. I call it the carrot test. If I’m not hungry enough to eat something bland like a carrot/cucumber then I’m not really hungry. Sometimes I’m just bored/tired and looking to take my mind off work. I might be thirsty and confusing it for hunger. So after eating a carrot and having a glass of water I recheck with that desire. If it still exists, I’ll reach for some fruit. Carrots are my choice because they are a low energy density food. If I binge on carrots, how much damage can I really do?

Mmm, carrots.

The Carrot Test fails when there’s chocolate

Carrots can’t help me in the face of chocolate. I will stuff my face when there are these tasty morsels floating around. Sometimes I can’t help myself. I’ve always struggled when I’ve been in situations where there was ample food around. At a social gathering I’d be tempted to try everything and go back for seconds or thirds. Having most of my stomach removed has helped quell this desire some. My stomach physically doesn’t have the space to try everything, it has helped me curb my behaviour a little. There’s still situations where I find myself loosing control of what I eat but now the damage I can do to myself is reduced. I no longer feel guilty when this occurs, I’m trying to practice self compassion with my thinking but it’s a slow journey.

How do you control those desires? What habits do you try to form around food?

Weight Loss

Too fat to climb

Have you ever thought, “I’m too fat/injured/old/lazy to do that thing”? “I’m too fat” is still a pretty common thought that I have even after losing nearly 50kg with the help of weight loss surgery. My partner suggested rock climbing as an activity we could do together. We were both obese when he put forward this suggestion and my initial thought was, “I’m too fat for that, I’m just going to fall but I guess I’ll give it a go”. I wasn’t very good on my first session but atleast I didn’t fall off the wall. I enjoyed it so much that I signed up for membership and I’ve been climbing now for 3 months. The progress is slow, I’m still on mostly level 0, I’m often the fattest person in the gym and I’ve even seen many first time climbers make more progress in their first session than I have seen in 3 months. But I try not to care and I’m still enjoying it.

Another activity that I’ve been exploring is running. I don’t like it much yet but I’ve heard people grow to enjoy it. I’m exploring the Nike Run app. I’ve had many failures trying to start this program but that’s ok. The first set back was a foot injury that’s pretty common with being flat footed. Went to my podiatrist, got some new inner souls and stretches for the injury. The second time I started the program I had too many other things happening that it just wasn’t sticking. This third time I started I got through 2 weeks of the program, dropped off a little in week 3 but atleast picked it back up for week 4. Talking about being too fat to run, I was researching tips for getting started. I came across a support group for fat people wanting to get into running. Once I get through this Nike Run getting started program I’ll look into joining too fat to run. Today my run involved running to grumpy doughnuts for a passionfruit filled doughnuts. OMG, was so yummy. Check out their Instagram here.

There are no secrets to living a healthy lifestyle. Try a bunch of activities to see what you enjoy. Get friends and family involved. The list of things that I’d like to try include; pole dancing, rowing, roller derby and swing dancing.

So if you find yourself saying I’m too fat, just give it a go and listen to your body. Don’t push yourself too hard and you might surprise yourself with what you can do.

Finances mental health Weight Loss

The 5 elements of my health

Post author By Bug Hunter Sam
Post date June 1, 2017
No Comments on The 5 elements of my health

I have 5 elements of health/well-being that are important to me and that have a huge impact on my overall well-being when just one is lacking. They all have cascading effects on my overall enjoyment of life.

First up is my physical health. To me this is what I eat, how well I poop, how much I exercise and how well I’m sleeping. One of the easiest ways for me to experience a minor relapse of depression is not getting enough sleep. My menstrual cycle creates natural high’s and lows that impact my physical health, e.g. some women get less sleep/irregular bowel movements during PMS or during menstration. It’s not generally a fun time. My bad ankle/sciatic nerve injury have contributed negatively to my physical health. I’ve caught a cold recently which is putting a little downer on this part of my health.

Next is mental health. This can be general satisfaction with life but is more often associated with depression. When I’m not going through a bout of depression I would say that I have good mental health. Mindfulness therapy has helped me develop my mental health but it’s something I can always work on improving this. My period is a good time for a mental health check, if I’m in a poor mental state I’m more likely to turn into a blubbering mess around that poor time of month.

I also have financial well being, social and sexual health in my list. I could classify sexual health as a sub component of physical health but I find it important enough to mention on it’s own. I feel really lucky to have a partner where I’m comfortable exploring this side of me, I will save you the details but it has been rare for me to find a partner that I can explore with ;). When I don’t have my financial well being under control I’m more stressed and can’t function as well. Social well being comes from friends and family. I have worked hard to develop my sense of community and I’m grateful for it.

Since my weight loss surgery I have generally felt more in control of my life and all elements of my health have improved. It’s pretty amazing. Now I’ve still had some hiccups and I’m working on some behaviour that I’d like to tweak but these hiccups haven’t caused any long term downward spirals yet and I hope that I continue to take life’s bumps and hiccups in my stride.

Some people might also consider spiritual health to be important but it’s not critical for me. What other elements of health are important for you?

Weight Loss

Sammy’s dieting rant

TL;DR:
Try to eat a mixture of less processed fruit/vegies with less processed meats, try not to over do it with fats/carbs/sugar and you should have a pretty balanced diet. Also check out CSIRO’S total well being diet.

Now I don’t diet, it’s such a horrible word. I do try to live a healthy lifestyle and try to make healthy food choices, there are times where I go “F it, I want chocolate” and it’s ok to have those moments and not feel guilty about it. As long as I don’t do too much damage which having a smaller stomach helps control.

Lots of things are marketed as “healthy” when they aren’t. Learning how to read food nutrition labels is a good start. I look at ratios of fat to carbs to protein. I also look at ratio of carbs to fibre to assess if something really is “high fibre” if it’s trying to market itself as that.

Knowing that 1 tablespoon of sugar is 20 grams is a good guide for measuring how much sugar is in things e.g. fruit juice is horrible for sugar.

Understand that we are horrible at guessing how much we eat, even when calory counting we will still grossly underestimate serving sizes. You can combat this by using smaller plates and weighing out recomended serving sizes. We also have a tendency to eat more when we think something is healthy.

Fats and sugar aren’t really the enemy and protein is not this amazing thing just because everyone keeps raving on about it. Over consumption is the enemy, your body is an amazing self regulating machine.

Every cell in body needs sugar to survive, your body will convert carbs/fats/proteins into sugar (in that order) to support your body. Eat too many fats/carbs and your body will store it as fat, eat too much protein and you’ll have smelly expensive poo.

It doesn’t really matter if/how you skip meals. Intermittent fasting is a tactic that lots of people use to keep their overall food consumption low and stomach capacity down. E.g. I’ll often skip breakfast if I haven’t been to the gym in the morning. It doesn’t matter when you eat your large meals. There is a lot of misinformation out there around this though so tread carefully.

There are some things you can only get from your diet and they usually start with the name essential, e.g. essential amino acids (the building blocks for protein) can not be created in the body and need to come from your diet. This doesn’t mean essential oils are essential in any way though, that’s just misleading marketing.

Try to eat a mixture of fresh-ish fruit/vegies (nothing wrong with frozen) with less processed meats, try not to over do it with fats/carbs/sugar and you’ll have a pretty balanced diet. Processed foods tend to have higher amounts of fat/carbs because these are really tasty and these tasty enhancements help companies sell more food. If you need recipe ideas check out CSIRO’s total well being diet, it’s backed by science and isn’t the latest fad.

You can even try cutting out meat/dairy for a little bit if you are up for it. I’ve seen many people have success on the vegetarian/vegan diet. You don’t need to worry about protein if you are eating a mixture of things (e.g. peas, beans, legumes and nuts have some protein). Be careful with nuts though, it’s easy to over do because of the high fat content. I’ve challenged myself with periods of vegetarianism.

It’s easier to overconsume when alcohol is involved. I’ve challenged myself with dry periods when I’ve wanted to focus on my health.

Weight Loss

40 kg down

I had weight loss surgery just over 5 months ago. I’m now down to 87kg which equates to 40kg lost. I’m starting to notice a bit of loose skin but I’m ok with that. This is what 40kg weight loss looks like in photos:

I still have another 8kg to go before I beat obesity and another 20kg before I’m no longer considered overweight.