health.

I decided I wanted to lose weight, and what I have energy for now is simple calorie counting, using the MyFitnessPal app, which makes it pretty easy. I tell it I want to lose 1 pound per week, it says I need to eat 1700 calories per day, and off we go. This ignores everything I learned while eating Ayurvedically: that there's more to it than calories, some foods are more easily processed than others by your particular constitution. Even by Ayurvedic standards, though, I'm not doing too bad.
I bought a modern scale, which gives the exact same reading every time, and does so no matter where on the floor you put it. Not bad for thirty bucks.

I'm definitely not losing 1 pound per week. The general trend is downward, but more like a pound every 2-4 weeks, which is not so bad. I'm not in a hurry. Some of it may also be muscle mass, because...

...for exercise I've been going on bike rides. Anna dragged me to the bike shop a few months ago to get a Trek 7.2, and starting with a rack and pannier, I've slowly been adding what motorcyclists call "farkles." Turns out I did really want the water bottle, and of course I need lights, and a bar-end mirror would be really helpful, and a riding jersey really is much more comfortable...

I don't ride the dozens or hundreds of miles like my friends. The longest I've ridden was 19 miles, which was sort of accidental and ended up misaligning my body a bunch. (Also, that is well into the distance where you should be wearing padded shorts, and I wasn't.) Usually it's more like 6 miles, or 10. I had started biking to work in Palo Alto and back (7 miles one way), and now that I'm working from home I just make sure to kick myself out the door every other day or two and go for 45-60 minutes. I even ride uphill, though not for long.


I liked running and aikido better, but the best exercise is the one you actually do, so here we are.

I still don't quite sleep like a normal person, the way I used to. I often surface near consciousness throughout the night, or (whether or not that happened) randomly wake up completely unrested. If I go to bed before 10 PM, my body thinks I'm napping and I'm wide awake at 1:30 AM, so I have to go to bed after 11 PM. To answer your next question, I can't sleep late, so there's a pretty hard limit on how much sleep I can get, and when I can get it. I can bounce back from 1 or maybe 2 nights of dodgy sleep, but 3 just knocks me down and takes days to recover from.

I miss sleep, but this will do for a while.