One week of Vegetarianism

I’m a week into my vegetarian diet and need to make some notes about how it’s going so far.

My meals have been something like this for the most part:
Breakfast: coffee + vitamin supplements (omega-3, calcium-magnesium, pro-biotic and vitamin D)
Lunch: Quinoa or Bean Salad
Supper: A Big Salad

I did lose 2-3 lbs in this first week in spite of Beerfest on Saturday.

There were a few lessons learned though.

1. It’s really difficult to feel satisfied with a vegetarian meal while avoiding the pastas, breads and potatoes.  After having a family sized bowl of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions I still feel really hungry.
2. Salads at most restaurants are terribly small for a main course.  Most restaurants have only one menu item that comes close to falling in my diet guidelines which makes picking something from the menu rather easy.
3. Salt can affect weight more than I realized.  After a few days of very low salt intake eating a very high salt falafel on Sunday I was up 3lbs day over day.
4. Eating a bowl full of vegetables feels like a chore.  (Eat to live not Live to Eat)
5. At least in the first week, I’ve been craving a burger or pizza
6. It’s really hard to avoid cheese

On the positive side:

1. I haven’t felt sick or dizzy. No headaches
2. have been sleeping well
3. still have energy in the day

One of the things that I usually re-learn when I do these dietary experiments is that it’s kind of nice to have a limited selection of food to choose from.  It makes the decision process much easier.  Simple meals with one thing on the plate are even better.  The normal meal that I would have growing up needed 3 decisions – which meat, which vegetables and what starch.  Now it’s which salad – a choice which is usually determined by what’s in the fridge at the moment.

I’ve decided that my current investment strategy for my RRSP investments of set it and forget it just hasn’t been performing very well.

The new strategy is one I got from my boss at work and it’s super simple.

I’m still open to taking on a lot of risk in my portfolio so I don’t mind putting all my eggs in one basket. The strategy sounds stupid but it should perform relatively well.

I will re-assess my investments once per month and move money into the top two performing funds (based on previous month’s performance) with a 50/50 split each.

It works because at a mutual fund or ETF level of investment you generally see the medium and long term trends very well. Sometimes growth stocks do well other times small cap stocks out perform the market. These ebbs and flows are seasonal and cyclical. Generally if small cap stocks are doing extremely well last month, they will likely continue doing well next month.

It will probably miss out on the highest performing investments but should give better returns than what I’ve done in the past.

It was several years ago now that I did a dietary experiment and only ate meat for a month. It was shortly after reading the book Good Calories Bad Calories in which I learned about several people who lived on a primarily meat based diet and were very healthy. The main argument in the book was that is was due to the low amounts of sugars and carbs.

I had expected to lose 10 lbs that month but only ended up losing 5. And towards the end of the month I was experiencing headaches.

Over the last few years I have continued to learn more about healthy eating.

While the all meat diet worked great for the Inuit who could eat wild natural meat. I believe that the quality of meat from the local grocery store is shit and not worth eating at all.

For the month of May I’m going to be switching things up with another dietary experiment. This time I’m going vegetarian. However it’s with a number of additional restrictions.

• no potatoes
• no breads or flour based products
• as little sugar as I can
• no dairy products

Instead I will be making all my meals with things like

• onions and garlic
• cabbage, carrots and broccoli
• beans and lentils
• fruits and berries
• seeds and nuts

I’m not exactly sure what to expect from this change but will never know if I don’t test it.

It’s that time of the year to file taxes and I have heard, read and discussed about which is the best place to save money.

Before getting to my thoughts and the math behind them just a quick note. The banks have done an amazing job at selling their products and convincing their customers to sign up for more stuff.

First off, at current mortgage rates being the lowest they’ve ever been it makes no sense to pay down a mortgage first. While I think that is so obvious as to not require an explanation apparently it does.

Assuming an interest rate of 4% on a $400,000 mortgage and you have an extra $1000 to invest this year then that will save you $40 in interest in the first year. Over a 25 year mortgage that will save a total of $1,702. (calulated using this calculator)

Taking that same $1000 and putting it into a TFSA in a fund earning 7% annually on average would after the same 25 year period be compounded up to a value of $5,427. That interest could then be taken without paying taxes so the after tax value is the same $5.427.

RRSPs give you the tax deduction up front. So that initial $1000 produces a tax savings of about $470 at my current tax bracket. Investing all $1,470 at the same 7% for 25 years compounds up to $7,978. After paying taxes on the withdraw it will be worth somewhere around $6,143. (calculated from taxtips.ca)

For the past week I have been putting in some time working on Art for a game.

I think it’s looking really good so far – probably my best drawings yet. The lighting/shadows are consistant between all the characters and the background image, and colors are getting close to perfect for the feel I’m going for in the game.

Not looking forward to animating all these characters though. the test animation I did of a walking zombie took all day to do. Now each character needs at least two and possible 3 different animations each.

But if it all comes together to the vision that I have, then hopefully this will be the most polished game by far that I’ve worked on.

Last week the Royal Canadian Mint launched a competition to generate some buzz, and proof of concept ideas for their new form of currency called MintChip:

I’ve entered myself into the competition which is limited to 500 participants to develop an App that will make make use of this next generation of currency. It should be interesting to see how it works and hopefully in 4 months time, I’ll have a nice polished app that ready to win one of the prizes.

Top prize is a 10oz wafer of gold worth $17,000.

The book Emergency by Neil Strauss is about one man’s journey to be self sufficient in the event of an emergency.  He goes to great lengths to learn the skills to survive in the wilderness and in an urban environment, as well as put together enough contingincies plans and supplies to get himself to a safe place if he ever finds himself in a post-Katrina like situation where the system falls apart.

Some of the things he learns about:

• knife skills
• hand-to-hand combat
• urban survival and evasion
• wilderness survival and tracking
• motorcycle riding
• First aid and emergency response
• how to fly
• how to sail
• how to obtain a second passport
• how to use a gun
• how to identify edible plants

I read the book almost three years ago and it prompted me to think about how prepared I was if something should happen.  At the time living in a high rise in Vancouver thinks could have gotten bad quickly in the event of an earthquake.  Re-reading it now that I have a house with a backyard in a new city has given me a bunch of things to think about and projects to work on this summer.

We are nine meals away from rioting.

If the food supply was ever cut off and people were unable to get food at the grocery stores it would take just 3 days for the general public to start rioting.  If the food supply disruption was due to a larger scale natural disaster such as a hurricane, flood or earthquake then power, sewer, water could also be disrupted and the rioting and looting would start much sooner.  If toilets stopped flushing what would you do?  If gas and electricity were gone for more than 2 days would you be able to stay warm and have food?

I learned that government policy in the event of a natural disaster is to not put additional lives at risk by immediately sending in support.  Policy is to let the dust settle and then come in with the cleanup later and support the rebuilding effort.  So if something does happen you need to be able to get yourself to safety without relying on the government for help.  In some situations it’s best to stay home until things clear up, in others the best thing to do might be to get out of dodge before things get bad.  Having the knowledge and plan to handle these situations is like life insurance.

In survival training there is the rule of threes.  For all your needs – food, shelter, energy, and water – you should have 3 sources to secure each at any one time.  An example for water could be 1.  your city water supply, 2. a couple of gallons of water in storage, 3. a nearby pool or stream.  (in an emergency plan for 1 gallon of water per person per day).

Last night I reviewed my BOB (bug out bag) and made a list of items to pick up to complete it.  I did some research on First Aid courses and will be signing up for the standard 2 day course from St. John Ambulance.  I also plan on building a couple of raised gardening boxes in the backyard and will be reading some books on permaculture to figure out what to plant in them, as well as a rain water collection barrel to water them.  I’m looking for a good fire safe, updated my encrypted data file and reviewed my computer’s privacy settings.  And, later this year I will sign up for a firearms course to get my license.

Yet again this book has been a kick in the ass.

I’m continually re-learning just how difficult it is to do a good job on the artwork for a game.  Photoshop and Illustrator are fairly intense tools and mastering them takes years.  yet I struggle by trying to get things to look good enough that I’m happy with.

If only I had the money to just hire people to do this kind of stuff I’d have a bunch of great looking games out there and I’d be able to focus more on making the games deeper and getting more marketing done for them.

But project after project I have been getting a little better at it all.

Here’s a zombie that I animated today in Flash:

After a personally disappointing result from the St. Patrick’s Day 10K it’s become apparent that I have gotten out of shape.  Starting this on Monday this week I started on an aggressive weight loss program to get back down to a reasonable weight and an exercise regiment to get my cardio back up for a much improved time in my next race.

To start with I’m cutting back on carbs and calories drastically and focusing on eating only vegetables and meats.  I’ve already lost about 5lbs by doing this.   Need to lose another 10-15lbs.

Secondly I’m going to be focusing on running fast.  Training with 100-200m all out sprints to help build the right muscles for running rather than jogging.  One of the biggest gripes I had with the half-marathon training programs I’ve read about and done is they put the initial focus on building endurance and then trying to slowly increase the speed later.  This time I want to start by focusing on running fast and then gradually increasing endurance/distance at that fast pace.  The reason is that a good fast run is going to activate very different muscles than a slow jog.  A fast run forces you to kick your leg up with each step, to push off with the toe more, to land on the front or mid foot, it more fully engages the core muscles and will exercise the ass muscles.  Slow jogging is not going to enforce good running posture, it encourages more of an upward jump with each step rather than pushing forward (wasted effort).

I will be working towards a 45 minute 10K race time, so I’ll be training at 5% faster pace than that at 4:18/Km.  That’s a pretty fast run, and it’s going to be a challenge to train to that level.

I don’t like TV.  It is a time sink that prevents me from getting things done like getting in shape, finishing my software projects, or practising on the drums.  However from time to time I like getting through a show or watching a movie.

Over the weekend we picked up an Apple TV.  It’s a brilliant little device that has replaced the mac mini, dvd player, and xbox for watching content on the TV.  The interface is easy to use and it connects up nicely with the iphones and macs in the house so I can easily play downloaded content.

The one downside is that for downloaded movies to show up in the menus they need to be in a file iTunes supports.  which means that I need to transcode all my videos into quicktime format.  Transcoding is a very compute intensive process and can take over an hour to convert a full-length movie.  I downloaded a program called iVI which will find and auto-convert all the files I have.

I was able to move the mac mini into the office and shut down my more power hungry and noisy Linux PC to use as an always on file server.

So far we’re really liking the Apple TV.