A short collection of tips & hacks I’ve been implementing lately:

1. Move the Sugar: When I decided to go ahead and add a single teaspoon of sugar to my coffee, I had to move the sugar to a new location so that I could disassociate it from my previous tablespoon-plus regime in the old location.
2. Working-from-home Hack #1: Wear Shoes: Bare feet, socks, and slippers (I’ve done all three) put me in a chill-out mode. Switching to my newly purhcased hiking shoes makes me feel like I can stomp on anything, including software bugs. Weird, but WFM.
3. Working-from-home Hack #2: Turn On Some Lights: Sitting in a dim room staring at a monitor just makes me want to play MineCraft. A couple lights brighten my mood and my productivity.
4. Do It Now: I’m a fabulous procrastinator. Right now when I see something needing doing, I’m trying to do it — and that’s easier to do if I implement point 2.

More as the situation develops.

I posted a week or so ago that I was starting to work on my health, cutting a lot of carbs and sugar out of my diet, and focusing on foods that were actually profitable for my body. Here’s an update:

Say What?

So apparently the scale thinks I’ve lost 7 pounds this last week. #lowcarbs

— Steve Ivy (@steveivy) January 17, 2012

As I mentioned on Twitter earlier, my scale seems to believe that I’ve dropped 7 pounds in the last week, after cutting out most sugar and a lot of the carbs I was existing on. I have no reason so far to doubt it. I don’t know that those pounds missing are visible yet, but I feel much better. My energy level isn’t peaking and diving all day – I’m more consistent. This is making me more productive – both in front of the computer and not.

Changing habits, and making new ones, is the name of the game here. In my first post I talked about my coffee (more, my cream and sugar) habit, and how it was killing me slowly. Since then, I first cut back to unflavored, unsweeted heavy cream, and no sugar. That simply wasn’t tenable, so I’ve gone back to unflavored half and half (the flavored ones are sweetened to the tune of over a teaspoon per tablespoon of creamer – 1/3 the mass is sugar!!) with a flat teaspoon of sugar.

For a week I was avoiding the sugar container in the cupboard, and had almost trained myself to reach around it for the coffee. But when I decided that I wanted to start using some sugar, I knew I’d have to make sure I didn’t fall back into the Old Ways. So I moved the sugar container to the pantry, and told myself “one teaspoon” – I even used the measuring spoon. Must make new habits!

This would have been awful just 3 weeks ago – I was inured to the taste of sugar and it would have tasted terrible. But now I can taste the sweetness in just a teaspoon (4g) of sugar. I’ve also cut out a lot of other foods with “hidden” sugars (goodbye orange chicken :–( ).

Go Outside!

In addition to the food changes, I’ve started working on getting more active. I finally found a pair of hiking boots that work for me — Merrell Moab Ventilators (wide) — so yesterday the family and I tackled Piestewa Peak, a brutal climb up 1.2 miles of, basically, stairs. The Summit trail starts at 1400 ft., and ends at 2608 ft., for a 1200’ rise.

While Jodi and the girls turned around at the 2/3 mark, my 8yo son and I pushed up to the top, and he made it like a champ. I feel great today but imagine that my body will have it’s revenge soon enough!

Nevertheless, I’ve got several hikes planned in the near future at some of our favorite spots, and I’m going to get out on the bike more as well. I’m off to a good start, and I’m going to make this year count.

Erik Kastner and I have a sort of running gag going where I try and come up with some awful pun or cultural reference to greet him with in the morning, with a screeam of “KAAASSTNNEEEERRRRRRR” somehow worked in. Sometimes they work and sometimes they… don’t.

Now you can decide.

One of the results I want to see from this year is to drop about 15 pounds from my “I-sit-at-a-computer-all-day” belly. I’ve never been a “dieter”, and I’ve scorned traditional diet foods / drinks, especially those with the artificial sweeteners in them, and prided myself on my commitment to good old-fashioned American refined sugar. Oh, I do love my sugar (and likewise, the sugars-in-waiting, carbs).

But over the last year I’ve grown forwards at a much faster rate then, say, upwards. Sideways hasn’t fared a lot better. I still enjoy the occasional hike or bike ride, but I haven’t got the energy, stamina, or interest to do the outdoorsy stuff Jodi and I used to love. This started to bug me, as did the decidedly forward thrust of my various American Apparel nerd shirts.

So after talking to some friends in the medical profession about it, Jodi and I decided to check out Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure book. Now, I know. It pains me to even link to a possibly faddish diet book with the words “belly” and “cure” in it. But the research we have been doing lends credence to the main idea behind the book: that sugar and carbs (including hidden sugars in all kinds of foods) are the thing that trigger our bodies into storing fat (via the insulin produced by the body in response to sugar in the bloodstream).

So, while we may or may not stick to the exact plan outlined in the book, we’re definitely starting already to reduce the amount of sugars we intake, and carefully checking foods we already have for those grams of sugar (4g of sugar is about a teaspoon of granulated refined sugar). And the thing that’s making it tough is the collection of unconscious processes we’ve developed for living life without having to think too much: habits.

Morning Coffee Notes

Take my morning coffee, for example – this is one that’s killing me. I’m no hipster. I like my coffee sweet and de-bittered with an artificially-flavored store-bought creamer. Getting a cup of coffee for me looks like this:

• Take down a mug
• Pour ¾ full with coffee (brewed dark with about 2 Tbsp of grounds/cup)
• Reach up to coffee cupboard
• Take down Tupperware™ container of sugar
• Add a ludicrous scoop of sugar
• Snap lid back on sugar container
• Close cupboard
• Carry mug to kitchen island (I work from home)
• Open refrigerator
• Remove large container of creamer
• Cream-ify coffee
• Close creamer
• Replace in fridge
• Stir coffee
• Place spoon in sink
• Enjoy!

This all takes about 45 seconds max, and can be accompished while checking email on the iPhone, talking with Jodi about the day, or humming Prodigy tunes, and I can be back at my desk going “where did this coffee come from?”. It’s engrained. The human mind has an incredible capacity to store repetitive tasks in some kind of highly optimized, opaque data structure that can be played back without any input from the higher-order brain.

As a nerd, I love this. The times I’m paying attention, it’s a little rush going through this ritual with precision and efficiency. No time is wasted between getting a mug and that first sip. But… now I look at that ludicrous scoop of sugar I’ve been using, and get a little sick to my stomach. I have little doubt that this insidious – and oh so delicious – ingredient has been contributing to my expanding circumference.

Breaking Point

My morning routine obviously needs some changing, and with it being so ingrained, I need some ways to break up the routine so my higher-order brain can make some decisions. In programming we call these “breakpoints”, and when debugging, the program will pause at the breakpoint and let us examine the state of the decision tree and what the program is going to do next. So, I’m doing some simple life-hacking.

My first step was to put a small thing of Truvia (a sugar substitute based on Stevia) next to the malicious sugar container in the cupboard. It’s in the bright white and green packaging it came in, so it draws my attention and triggers a decision – proceed to the normal ludicrous scoop of the blissfully evil sugar, or try switching to something less likely to asplode my waistline and push me into diabetes?

Seeing as I don’t much care for the taste of Stevia (and by extension Truvia), I’ve tried (by steps):

• reducing my application of sugar by 2/3
• replacing ½ of that with Truvia
• not using sugar altogether

So far step 3 is working the best: only reducing the sugar to 1/3 my previous amount still adds enough to trigger my craving for more. Truvia is sweeter than the equivalent amount of sugar, so reducing the sugar yet again by half and adding Truvia made it sweeter, but still had the strange taste I associate with artificial sweeteners, and the added sweetness seems to still trigger my sweet tooth.

Getting rid of the sugar completely has been a hard adjustment, but in the long run is going to be the best for me. And the habits die hard: I still reach for the sugar container when fixing a cup, then have to put it back. Perhaps the next breakpoint will be to just remove it from the cabinet.

Life-Hacking

Ultimately, this whole quitting-sugar thing is one huge life-hack: we’re trying to disrupt lifetimes of sugar addiction and do some major mental and physical re-wiring. It’s too early for me to know if it’s working, but I’ll probably post on my progress over the next few months. Have any eating habit hacks to share? Ping me at @steveivy on Twitter or Google mail.

Heading into the new year, Jodi and I have been working with our bookkeeper to re-categorize some of our expenses, and we’re realizing that some of the costs associated with running a web service don’t fit easily into standard accounting categories. If you’re running a small business / web services company, how do you categorize the following?

• Subscription services like Github?
• Hosting services like Linode
• Domain name purchases
• SSL Certificate costs

Any guidance or ideas would be appreciated! Ping me @steveivy on Twitter or steveivy at google mail, and I’ll post a followup with the results.

See you next year!

Our sick 10yo watching Land Before Time movies, right outside my office.

At least it’s better than listening to the 6yo watching Barbie movies. Barely.

This brings a tear to my eye, for what was, and what is.

Maybe someday there will be a Daring Fireball app, but I still haven’t thought of a reason to make one that would be better than just reading DF on the web.

When I read John’s comments in his latest Fireball post, my initial reaction was to completely agree. Daring Fireball is a well written, simply designed, and great blog. Almost immediately thereafter, however, I had a thought: what if there was an app that, once purchased, allowed you to comment on Fireball posts? Sort of pay-for-play if you will. The app would:

• Handle some kind of authentication
• Send push notifications of new Fireball posts
• Allow the user to comment on posts
• Send push notifications of new comments for any post that the user commented on

Importantly, the comments would only be available in the app, not on the public web, similarly to how Instagram works. I think this would raise the bar on who is going to comment and what they say, in that 1) only other paying DF App users would be participating in the conversation, and 2) no publicly-visible comment view to attract trolls.

Good idea? Bad idea? Too much like the “get our app” popups on the big media sites?

Term.ly defines “obnoxious” as:

obnoxious adjective causing disapproval or protest; “a vulgar and objectionable person”

Around our house we’ve taken to defining it for the kids as “annoying, on purpose”. Everyone knows what that means.