You Calling Me Fat?! (or, Diet and Health)

Lately I've been researching diet and health a little bit. Lately I've tried to improve my health and lose some weight. Since Americans in general have very poor diets this is a common goal. So common, in fact, that I bet more than one of you rolled your eyes when you saw my title. Well I've come across some information that some have called controversial, but to me it's intriguing. I just wanted to share some tidbits.

First, the motivations. Last year I had reached my all-time high body weight of 240 lbs. I didn't feel good and my clothes weren't fitting well. I knew I needed to lose weight. The final straw came from the Boy Scouts of America. Recently the BSA revised their mother-of-all legal documents. It's a health form, talent release, if-you-die-it's-not-our-fault sheet, etc. all rolled into one 14-page document. As a part of that revision, BSA decided that it would determine eligibility for high adventure camps based solely on Body Mass Index (BMI). According to this I am definitely not eligible to go on high adventure camps unless I could grow 7 inches or lose 33 lbs. No matter how much knowledge or skill I worked to gain, it would be my eating habits that decided.

It is at this point that people begin to cry afoul of the BMI saying that it doesn't account for sex, body fat percentage, or other variables. "We cannot take such a simplistic view of such a complex topic", they will say. I for one have always hated the BMI since it has called me obese since the day I first heard of it. When I got home from Brazil I had lost enough weight that I had finally eeked under the obese line to be at the top end of the overweight scale. That lasted about a year, then the American diet overwhelmed me again. But as much as I dislike the BMI, there are other factors that I have discovered in my research. For example, the ratio of height to waist size. When I use this test it is as equally damning as the BMI. So, I could say that the BMI doesn't actually represent me, but when taken together with the height to waist ratio, I am forced to acknowledge that it, in fact, does.

So, I decided it was high time to put some actual effort into this. Fortunately for me, I'm married to Chelsea. She has much more discipline when it comes to eating right. She helped me identify some things that I could do differently (I only adopted a few) and I was able to lose 20 lbs over about four months. My two main strategies were:

1) Eliminate refined sugars as much as possible and
2) Meticulously track my caloric intake and keep it under a certain level (usually 2000-2200 calories)

When I adopted these strategies, I had already been cycling to work for about 8 months, which I kept up but didn't add any more exercise. Like I said, I was able to lose about 20 lbs over about four months. Then, at about 220 I totally flatlined. I have not been able to penetrate the 220 mark now for about another 6 months. During the holidays I ate poorly and rose to about 225 again, but I have since been able to check that increase and return to 220.

I'm now wondering what the next step will be. I recently watched a documentary called Forks Over Knives that outlined the virtues of whole foods plant based diets. Since then I have read Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease and The China Study. Both were written by advocates of plant based diets and I have to say I believe what they are saying. The message of the books and movie is that Americans are killing themselves with diet, but that those effects are almost entirely reversible by changing diet. They make compelling arguments as to why animal products should be reduced or eliminated from our diets. What makes me sit up and listen is their arguments are based in nutrition, not animal rights or religious views.

A less radical change would be to adopt the so-called Paleo Diet. This also advocates eating whole organic foods rather than processed foods. As far as I can tell the major differences are the Paleo diet calls for small amounts of lean meats and no bread/grain products and there should be a minimum amount of fat and protein consumed. The whole foods diet from above seeks to eliminate animal products entirely, substantially reduce fats, and maintain protein at about 10% of intake.

A more detailed comparison between these two is another blog for another day.

I'll end with eight principles that Colin Campbell outlines in chapter 11 of The China Study:

1. Nutrition represents the combined activities of countless food substances. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
2. Vitamin supplements are not a panacea for good health.
3. There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants.
4. Genes do not determine disease on their own. Genes function only by being activated, or expressed, and nutrition plays a critical role in determining which genes, good and bad, are expressed.
5. Nutrition can substantially control the adverse effects of noxious chemicals.
6. The same nutrition that prevents disease in its early stages (before diagnosis) can also halt or reverse disease in its later stages (after diagnosis).
7. Nutrition that is truly beneficial for one chronic disease will support health across the board.
8. Good nutrition creates health in all areas of our existence. All parts are interconnected.

Completion.....At Last.

It's finally done. I've been working on it since May 2010 so this day is a long time coming. The crawlspace work is finally done.

In April 2010 I decided to check out my crawlspace since I hadn't been down there. So in the name of being familiar with the health of my house, down I went. There was fresh new plastic that the previous owner had placed down there when we bought the house. He had put it there because the home inspection turned up "conducive debris". That bascially means there was wood, insulation, etc., that is a breeding ground for insects, rodents and mold. We asked them to clean it out. The reinspection showed that things were great so I didn't think more of it.

At first things looked great, but after a while I found an area that was like crawling over a waterbed. Bad news. I kept crawling around to see if I could find any more wet areas. I did find one, but what I also found was that there was lots of stuff under the plastic I was crawling on. I started to do some more poking. What I found was all that "conducive debris" that had supposedly been removed. It turns out all the previous owner did was cover it with new plastic. Classy.

Now that I knew I had a problem I started looking into solutions. My first thought was to install drains around the outside of the house. This would have been pretty invasive and pretty much wrecked my yard, but I thought that was the best way to handle it. I had a contractor come out and look at it and I described my problem. He told me that in his experience it is more effective to put the drain on the inside rather than the outside. A good part of his work had been in crawlspace repairs so I put a lot of stock in his opinion. The problem was that his opinion came with a $4800 price tag. I figured I could get this knocked out for much cheaper so I decided to basically do what he said he was going to do. So away I went.

This is basically what I did:

1. Remove all the old plastic (it turned out there was three layers)2. Dig a 6"-8" deep trench around the inner perimeter of the foundation with a low catch basin in the front of the house

3. Install a drain pipe out the front of the house under the foundation to drain the trenches

4. Fill the trenches with a pipe and gravel

5. Repair insulation in the floor that had fallen down

6. Replace the plastic on the floor

Sounds pretty easy right? That's what I thought. Step 1 took almost a month. Now I started to question my judgement. This was a dirty part of the job. The underside of all the plastic was very muddy and there was some places that it seemed the various layers of plastic were holding more water than they were keeping out.

Then I moved into digging the trenches. I don't have a big house, but the perimeter adds up. I ended up digging around 160 feet of trench. I did it all with an hand shovel and a little pick. Remember, I only had 30" of height to deal with so I was doing all this on my hands and knees with a headlamp. Here's a picture of my tools. I'll get to the cart later.

The digging went very slow. I only did it a couple of hours at a time. For the first two months I was really good about working on it regularly. I figured that consistency was the most important.

Pretty soon I had to get the drain installed in the front yard because I needed to have someplace for the water to go while I continued with the digging. I wrote a blog about digging under the foundation and across my front lawn. Check it out if you missed it. As soon as I started having some trenches I noticed they started to fill with water in wet weather and the places that were wet before were staying dry. Things were already looking up.

Now it was time to get all that gravel in the trench. This was an interesting problem. Have you every tried to wheel a wheelbarrow into the crawlspace? It's not going to work well. Well I had to get about one and a half yards of gravel into the house. That's about 8 wheelbarrow fulls. Well, how many 5 gallon buckets does it take to fill a wheelbarrow? I don't know, and I don't want to know. All I knew is that the 5 gallon bucket was all I had to get gravel into the crawlspace. Here's where that cart came it. I had to make it small. It could be no more than 10" tall so it could fit under everything down there. I don't think I could have done this job without it. I could dump two 5 gallon buckets into it from the crawlspace access and then wheel it wherever it needed to go. nice.

At long last I got all the gravel done and it was time to install the plastic. I bought a plastic roll that was 200 feet long and I needed some specific peices cut. I didn't want to do that in the crawlspace so I took it over to the church to lay it out on the gym floor. It worked great.

Today, though, I finally finished it all. I saved myself about $4000 but it took about 19 months. You decide if I saved any money or not.

Here are some pictures that I hope you enjoy.

This is the crawlspace access from underneath.

This is a cleanout that I installed in case the drain under the front yard gets clogged.

I little while before taking this picture there was water flowing through this like crazy. I wanted to get some video to show what it was actually working, but you're just going to have to take my word for it.

I decided to tape up the seams between sheets so that water wouldn't flow on top of the plastic.

Here are just some photos from under the house so you can get an idea for the spaces I've been working in.

Good to be done. At last.

More Time Under the Hood

At last I have a free weekend to do some really long overdue service to the Landcruiser. The main purpose of this round of work is to replace the valve cover gasket, which is what I'm convinced is causing all the oil stains on my driveway. Since you have to move a fair amount of stuff to get that off, I decided to also clean out the top half of the intake plenum and the throttle body.

Since this is Thanksgiving weekend, I feel it's appropriate to express some gratitude. I'm thankful for my garage. Since I've started working on cars I've spent lots of time working on them out in the street, under a carport or out in a driveway. It's so much nicer this way.
Here's my temporary work bench.
Let's get down to business. Almost everything in this next picture had to come off. The big silver thing in the middle is the valve cover and it has a gasket that needs to be replaced. Everything on top has to get out of the way first. So here goes.....

That black hose across the middle came off without a fuss. Next was the throttle body. That was a little more fussy because of all the wires, cables, and hoses coming off of it. It looked like something out of a borg ship. Here's what it looks like with the throttle body and spark plug wires removed. The next step is to remove that other big silver thing to the right. That's the intake plenum. This was very fussy.

Here is the throttle body. Note the nice caramel color of the inside. That's undesirable but it's the inevitable result of 200,000 miles. I'll be cleaning that off.

I'm going to spare you the details of the intake plenum, but I'm a little bugged at the way the Toyota people wrote how to do it. If you want the details, just ask. Here is the removed intake plenum. The jumble of hose and wire is indicative of the rest of the job. All in the name of emission control. Note that caramel color on the inside again.

Here is another view of the intake plenum. This is the surface where the throttle body attaches. There's a little channel that goes from that small hole on the left and connects to the small hole right above the big hole in the middle. Over time that little channel tends to fill up with gunk. When this becomes clogged it reeks havoc on the emission system. According to the forums there are some very tricky problems that this can cause. There are a few little quirks in the engine performance that I'm also trying to correct through this work.
Once I got that done, it was pretty easy to get the valve cover off. Here it is. Look at all that gunk in there. The little black part around the edge is the gasket that I'm here to replace. Around each hole is also a little seal. Those holes are for the spark plugs. All of these seals were ridiculous. They should have been replaced 50,000 miles ago. Seals should be flexible, but over time they lose that flexibility and become hard. That's why they start to leak. The valve cover gasket was so hard I could barely get it out. It broke into several pieces when i was removing. All those little oil seals were just as bad. All ridiculously brittle.

Here's what it looks like now. Everything that's coming out is now out. Now the camshafts can be clearly see as well as the valve lifters. Now would be an excellent time to do a valve adjustment, but I don't have the tools, expertise or time for that this time around. All that's left is to clean all the parts and put everything back together. Unfortunately, though, I forgot to order one gasket that I need. I had to head to the dealer today to order it. I won't get it until Tuesday, so I know the car isn't going back together before then. Good thing I bike to work.

Gears are cool.

New Wheels!

I took a big step this month. I finally bought a new bike. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but as you know, bikes are expensive.

This time I was lucky enough that the stars all aligned with a good deal and available resource. One of my favorite websites to buy bike stuff from is JensonUSA.com. They also sell complete bikes, but buying a bike without having ridden it is a crap shoot at best. I found this bike on their site and after thinking on it for some time, I decided to roll the dice.

I make it sound like I'm just leaving it up to chance, but that's really not the case. Bike manufacturers publish detailed charts that outline the dimensions of the bikes and it gives you lots of information to base your guess on. The "roll of the dice" part is the fact that these values for bike geometry aren't always reported the same by all manufacturers. It's not always apples to apples, but you make an educated guess. I spent lots of time researching and measuring my bike and I finally decided on a size.

Remember before how I said this was a good deal? That's the only reason I was willing to chance buying the bike online. If I was going to pay retail, I would definitely go into the local bike shop, but in this case, I was being pretty chincy. I got the bike for almost half of retail price because it was a 2010 model. It was brand new, they were just clearing out the inventory.

I've been riding it now for a little over a week. It took a little tweaking (all bikes do) but I'm very satisfied with the result.


The bike is a Rocky Mountain Metropolis YYZ. It's a commuter. One of the reasons I was looking at bikes in the first place (besides the fact that I do it a lot anyway) is I've been looking to either upgrade or replace the bike I ride to work. I was riding my old Trek 930, which is a vintage 1997 (approximately) steel framed mountain bike which I had outfitted with some decent road tires and some worthless fenders. I say worthless because they never really succeeded in keeping my but dry on those rainy commutes.

Another feature of those rainy commutes: water. I know you're surprised. That old mountain bike ran better than it should have for its age, but notwithstanding, the brakes were old. On my way to work I go down some pretty nice hills, so I rely on the brakes a lot. One hill in particular, if I were to have a brake failure I would fly across a road into the ocean. Two excellent ways to negatively impact my health. So this new bike has disc brakes, which were a requirement for any new commuter or mountain bike that I buy.

Anyway, If you've read this far on this post you're either bored, my wife or my mother. Thanks for reading, and know that I'm very much enjoying my commutes.
I guess you could say I rolled a 7.

More Landcruiser Work

Here's another installment of my work on the Landcruiser.

Lately I've been focusing on cosmetics. I want to do a little to update its look and hopefully turn a few heads.

The three main eyesores that I'm trying to correct are 1) cracked fiberglass fender flares, 2) rusty running boards, and 3) shabby looking door molding.

Here are some pics of the current state. I've removed the running boards for rust removal & painting and I've also been working on some of the fender flare pieces. In this first picture you'll see that I took off the piece on the rear door-it was easier to work on it that way.

On the other side, the fender flare is MUCH more difficult to remove so I left it on to work on it. In these pictures you can also see the side molding. It may look nice from a distance, but the chrome accents are flaking off and after seeing other Landcruisers without the molding, it's going.


Here is the repaired fender flare piece that was missing from the first picture. It's not going to get painted again. The fender flares are getting coated with Monstaliner, a roll-on bed liner.

Here are some running board pictures. The running boards are metal with a plastic cap piece. In those nasty Utah winters, ice and salt would get trapped between and rot away the metal. Here's an example. There are some places where the top of the running board is rusted through, but since there's a cap I didn't worry about it.

I cleaned it up real good with a grinder and wire wheel. (Always nice to have an excuse to buy a new tool.) After cleaning it I washed it and let it dry. To help take care of the rust I painted it with Hammerite which inhibits rust and forms a protective coating. It usually comes in a "hammer" finish, thus the name, but I wanted the gloss. I think it turned out pretty good.


Finally, we come to the door molding removal. This has been a learning experience because I had no idea how to get this off. It's a dealer installed option so i was hoping it would come off pretty easy. I read on a forum that I should "saw" it off with floss. I tried that and it wasn't working very well. In the end I just pried it off. Looks pretty nasty underneath.

Not to worry, though, after only a few minutes of rubbing with some goo-gone I had made significant progress.

I'll keep you posted.

The Pesky Heater Hose

On the Landcruiser there is this small hose. It's about two inches long. Because of it's location on the engine, the inconvenience of accessing it, and it's predisposition for failure, it has been dubbed by the online community as The Pesky Heater Hose or PHH for short. Here's a picture.

The little rubber hose in the circle is the one I'm talking about. Like I said, it's only about two inches long but it's still big enough that if it fails, it will take the engine with it. As you can see it's covered in grime. That grime and the grime on the engine around it tells me that it's been leaking for some time. I guess that explains that antifreeze smell I would get a whif of every once in a while.

The purpose of this hose is to carry engine coolant to the heater core where it uses heat from the engine to heat the air in the car. If I just said the heater hose was bad you might just tell me to deal with not having the heater until you can get it fixed. Unfortunately, though, since the heater hoses carry coolant, a leak in the heater system means a coolant leak, and if you let that go unchecked you will soon be buying another car.

From the picture you can also tell that this little hose is in a very inconvenient location. In order to take the picture I had to take off the driver's side front tire, remove part of the wheel well, and lay on my side next to the truck to get just the right angle. In order to reach the hose I had to sit in the wheel well (with the truck on jack stands) reaching into the engine up to about my elbow. Oh, and I could only fit one hand in there, so it's like working on the car with one hand tied behind your back.

It was tough to wrangle this little hose. This whole job took me about 7 hours to complete. That included flushing the coolant, changing all the radiator hoses, several of the heater hoses, and the thermostat. I think around half of that time was spent on this little heater hose alone. It was pesky indeed.

Because of the awkwardness of the location I had to try lots of different things to get this done. I had read all the methods from the forums and websites and I thought I was ready to tackle the job in no time. I was wrong. Even though I was using the proven method it still proved difficult. The last step in the process was to just slide the hose over the final connection on the engine block. I had fought the good fight up until this point and suddenly, that stupid little hose would move no more. I still had to move it just three quarters of an inch--just three quarters of an inch! But it would not move. Using my trusty Dremel I made a tool to make it easier to push on the hose, but that didn't seem to make any difference. My arms and hands were getting so tired that I didn't know how long I could keep fighting it. I was running out of ideas. Finally I decided to try some hot water. I boiled some water and poured it into the hose from up above. I hoped this would lubricate it a little as well as make it expand a little from the heat. At this point it was a last ditch effort. After pouring the water in I got down to push the hose and with only a little pressure that dang hose.........finally........slid on.

I almost cried. I was jubilant. At last I had prevailed. Really, the hard part was over. All that was left was to tighten the band clamps. Now here's a tricky one. Tightening a band clamp with only one hand. This is really hard. In fact, I decided I'm not talented enough for it so I had to use a special tool. Here it is.

It's not that it's that complicated. If I had one long extension that would have worked, but I didn't have one long enough so I had to use almost all I had. So using this tool I had one hand on the band clamp and the other hand on the wrench and I eventually got it. (Chelsea, I need some longer extensions.)

Here's what it looks like now. Note the nice new band clamps and I also cleaned up the pipe a little. It should be good for another 100,000 miles.


Here's that hose after being pulled out. The tears were caused while I was pulling it out, but the nasty gunk on it was the reason for pulling it out.

A good time was had by all.

A Quick Trip Home (Overdue)

I wrote this blog right after I got back from Japan. Shortly thereafter I began a very successful program of procrastination. Now my program has reached it's completion so it's time to post it.
Have a good read.


Not that the trip itself was that quick. It wasn't. But more on that later. What I mean is that I had less notice to fly home than I had to fly out. When I left it felt like short notice because I got notice on a Monday and left on a Thursday. This time I got notice on Thursday afternoon and flew Friday afternoon.

What would make a person leave Japan in such haste? I don't think I need to answer that. Narita Airport was in a state of exodus as thousands a day fled Tokyo. I'm bummed because my trip got cut short by two weeks, but I'm glad to be back at the same time. It is nice to be back with Chelsea and Jake.

One interesting thing about this trip is that I didn't take the normal Narita-Seattle direct flight that we usually get. I went through San Francisco. Again, this has it's pros and cons. I had a three hour layover there and I had to collect my suitcase and go through customs and security. That was a pain. Next to the confusion at Narita it seemed calm. Unfortunately, the connecting flight between San Francisco and Seattle was delayed so due to the layover, extra flight, and delay, I got home seven hours later than most of the shipyard folks. This was OK, though because it meant that my lovely wife could come get me from the airport. It made that drive home much more pleasant. Another pro is that I got to ride a 747-400 to San Francisco. I've done a little international travel here and there, but I hadn't ever been on one of these before. They are big old monsters.

The flight was pretty nice. Me and another big guy like myself were sharing a row of three seats, of which the middle seat was empty. Perfect. The view was really nice too. The moon was out as well as many stars. As we crossed the pacific the sky above was clear and the sea was hidden by the clouds. We only had about four hours of night. I managed to sleep about two hours during the night. They served dinner about 9:00 pm Yokosuka time. I was excited about it because I hadn't had anything to eat since about 7:00 am.

When we got off the plane in San Francisco we were greeted in the jetway by about eight homeland security officers. Not surprisingly, one of them was trying to be inconspicuous about the geiger counter he had. They were just standing there while people walked by. That was the second sign of concern about the nuclear accident. Right after we took off the pilot came on the intercom to assure everyone that the air traffic controllers had routed us well away from Fukushima. At that altitude we were all getting more exposure to radiation from the sun than from any earthbound source, nuclear disaster notwithstanding (as is the case with any airplane flight).

In San Francisco it was raining buckets. I'm not talking about that nice drizzly northwest rain either. While I was in a store in the airport I could hear a national weather service alerts on the radio. It was bad enough that our flight to Seattle was delayed almost two hours. That wouldn't have been a big deal except that the SF airport only gave you one hour of wi-fi for free! What was I supposed to do with the rest of the time. I'm just kidding. It gave me time to have a little lunch: $11.50 for a wrapped up egg salad sandwich and a diet coke seemed pretty reasonable.

The flight to Seattle was uneventful. Thankfully. I finally got there around 5 pm (about 7 hours later than my colleagues that got the direct flight) which was perfect because it meant that Chelsea was able to come get me after work. That was nice because I'd much rather ride home with her than cram myself onto the Airporter. Also, we stopped in Tacoma for some wings at Wingers. It was a good time.

At home Jake was glad to see me. I was glad to see him too. It's good to be home safe again.