Philosophical Quibbles with the System

Philosophical Quibbles with the System 

Saturday, August 27, 2011 

The theme for the Spark Diet Stage 2, Week 6 (which starts today for me) is finding the unexpected opportunities. The suggested action steps are a bit problematic: 

 1. "Batch cook a dish that can last 4-5 days." I live alone. I've spent 6 weeks or so learning to fix one meal at a time that fits into the diet. Batch cooking needs a whole different discipline. Batch cooking in general seems a bit silly for my situation, but I think I can do this. Pre-Spark, I made some tasty lentil & rice burritos. Part of the reason they were tasty was that I put on unmeasured amounts of sour cream and shredded cheese. I can measure the cheese with my trusty food scale, been doing that with BBQ chicken wraps and breakfast burritos anyway. And I can try substituting plain Greek yogurt for the sour cream, and measure that. 

I envision doing one burrito at a time on the food scale, instead of my former assembly line of 8. But I'll be able to use the food scale to subdivide my lentil & rice stuffing more accurately. The stuffing is made, and I'll do assembly later this evening or tomorrow. We'll see how they turn out. 

2. "Exercise entirely in 10-15 minute blocks of time this week." Ain't gonna happen. I understand the idea is to encourage people to do something instead of sitting; but I'm in week zero of training for a 5K. Coming up tomorrow is walk 1 minute, run 2 minutes times 9, which equals 27 minutes nonstop exercise. No way am I messing up the 5K training to fit a lame scheme that's supposed to make me think about fitting exercise into odd slots of time. 

I do things like walk around the block on breaks at work; but I don't count that as exercise. And yesterday (end of week 5) I rearranged to fit 5K training into the lunch hour. I think I've got down what this is supposed to teach, and the action step just looks dumb. 

3. "Exercise in one place that you normally wouldn’t (the office, the back yard, the garage)." I suppose I can look for some unusual place to exercise, just to get the 5 spark points. But it doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe take my kettlebells outside to the yard tomorrow, instead of using them inside, just to say I did it. Seems kind of silly. 

One of the things I wrestle with is, what is exercise? I don't like to count mowing the lawn (though I did once, a few weeks ago) because I'd do that anyway. I don't count taking the stairs at work, because I did that all through the period when I was off the fitness wagon. I have counted my lunch walk at work, but I wonder. If "exercise" means getting the heart rate up to 60% - 85% of the max, I don't think those walks count. I don't have a heart rate monitor, but the last two times I stopped to check my pulse was 54% of the max while I was maintaining roughly a 15 minute mile pace. 

Oh, and the exercise tracker keeps telling me to adjust my plan because I'm burning too many calories and need to eat more. I might do that, if I thought the calories burned calculation had any reasonable relationship to reality. But they don't really. They give either too many or too few for cardio exercises, and I can't tell which. They give no calories burned for strength training, when I know I burn more calories in a 30 minute weight lifting session than I would on a 30 minute walk. The basline metabolic rate is a guess based on some average. I'm seeing strength gains and weight loss on what I'm eating and doing; I think I'll keep it up for a while. Time enough to adjust calories if I stop losing weight or start losing it too fast. 

Doing the batch cooking thing brought up another minor frustration. I made a recipe for ground beef substitute, which is lentils and brown rices cooked with beef bouillon. Pre-spark, this was a basic part of several things I did. It should be healthy enough to adapt for cooking on the SP diet. (Yes, the bouillon is high in sodium. I'm not particularly sensitive to sodium, so I don't care.) 

I can't add an existing recipe to a new recipe, or to a food group. #!&^. Ended up adding the spices (which add some sodium) to the ground beef substitute to call it burrito stuffing. Then I took the recipe results, and hand entered them to create a food called burrito stuffing. I'll have to hand enter the results from the ground beef substitute recipe in order to use it to create a spaghetti sauce recipe. 

Three decades ago I noticed the inefficiency of taking numbers generated by one computer and hand entering them into another computer. You'd think a site like SP would address this issue, and let me create a recipe of a type called "ingredient," which could then be included in other recipes. 

Oh, well. For all the minor nuisances, the SP system is working for me. It has got me to eat better, and it has got me to get back on the fitness wagon. In the not too distant future, it's going to get me to move my 36" belts to the back of the closet and start using the 34" belts. I suppose I can work around a few things that don't make sense for results like that.