The lazy technologist’s guide to fitness

In the past 8 months, I’ve lost 60 pounds and went from completely sedentary to well on my way towards becoming fit, while putting in a minimum of effort. On the fitness side, I’ve taken my cardiorespiratory fitness from below average to above average, and I’m visibly stronger (I can do multiple pull-ups!). Again, I’ve aimed to do so with minimal effort to maximize my efficiency.

Here’s what I wrote in my prior post on weight loss:

I have no desire to be a bodybuilder, but I want to be in great shape now and be as healthy and mobile as possible well into my old age. And a year ago, my blood pressure was already at pre-hypertension levels, despite being at a relatively young age.

Research shows that 5 factors are key to a long life — extending your life by 12–14 years:

Never smoking
BMI of 15.5–24.9
30+ min a day of moderate/vigorous exercise
Moderate alcohol intake (vs none, occasional, or heavy)
- Unsurprisingly, there is vigorous scientific and philosophical/religious/moral debate about this one, however all studies agree that heavy drinking is bad.
Diet quality in the upper 40% (Alternate Healthy Eating Index)

In addition, people who are in good health have a much shorter end-of-life period. This means they extend the healthy portion of their lifespan (the “healthspan”) and compress the worst parts into a shorter period at the very end. Having seen many grandparents go through years of struggle as they grew older, I wanted my own story to have a different ending.

Although I’m not a smoker, I was missing three of the other factors. My weight was massively unhealthy, I didn’t exercise at all and spent most of my day in front of a desk, and my diet was awful. I do drink moderately, however (almost entirely beer).

This post accompanies my earlier writeup, “The lazy technologist’s guide to weight loss.” Check that out for an in-depth, science-driven review of my experience losing weight.

Why is this the lazy technologist’s guide, again? I wanted to lose weight in the “laziest” way possible — in the same sense that lazy programmers find the most efficient solutions to problems, according to an apocryphal quote by Bill Gates and a real one by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Gates supposedly said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Wall wrote in Programming Perl, “Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.”

What’s the lowest-effort, most research-driven way to become fit as quickly as possible, during and after losing weight? Discovering and executing upon that was my journey. Read on if you’re considering taking a similar path.

Cardio Fitness

My initial goal for fitness was simply to meet the “30+ min/day” factor in the research study I cited at the beginning of this post, while considering a few factors:

First, this is intended to be the lazy way, so there should be no long and intense workouts unless unavoidable.
Second, I did not want to buy a bunch of equipment or need to pay for a gym membership. Any required equipment should be inexpensive and small.
Third, I wanted to avoid creating any joint issues that would affect me negatively later in life. I was particularly concerned about high-impact, repetitive stress from running on hard surfaces, which I’d heard could be problematic.

Joint issues become very common for older people, especially knees and hips. My program needed to avoid any high-impact, repetitive stress on those joints to preserve maximum function. I’ve always heard that running is bad on your knees, but after I looked into it, the research does not bear that out. And yet, it remains a popular misconception among both the general population as well as doctors who do not frequently perform hip replacements.

However, I just don’t like running — I enjoy different activities if I’m going to be working hard physically, such as games like racquetball/squash/pickleball or self-defense (Krav Maga!). I’m also not a big fan of getting all sweaty in general, but especially in the middle of a workday. So I wanted an activity with a moderate rather than high level of exertion.

Low-impact options include walking, cycling, swimming, and rowing, among others. But swimming requires an indoor pool or year-round good weather, and rowing requires a specialized machine or boat, while I’m aiming to stay minimal. I also do not own a bicycle, nor is the snowy weather in Minnesota great for cycling in the winter (fat-tire bikes being an exception).

We’re left with walking as the primary activity.

LISS — Low-Intensity Steady State

Initially, I started with only walking. This is called low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio (cardiovascular, a.k.a. aerobic) exercise. Later, I also incorporated high-intensity interval training (HIIT) as the laziest possible way to further improve my cardiovascular health.

To bump walking up into a “moderate” level of activity, I need to walk between 3–4 mph. This is what’s sometimes called a “brisk” walk — 3 mph feels fast, and 4 mph is about as fast as I can go without changing into some weird competitive walking style.

I also need to hit 30+ minutes per day of this brisk walking. At first, I started on a “walking pad” treadmill under my standing desk, which I bought for <$200 on Amazon. My goal was to integrate walking directly into my day with no dedicated time, and this seemed like a good path. However, this violates the minimalism requirement. I also learned that the pace is also too fast to do much of anything at the desk besides watch videos or browse social media. So I broke this up into two 1-mile outdoor walks, one after lunch and another after dinner.

Each 1-mile walk takes 15–20 minutes. Fitting this into a workday requires me to block off 45–60 minutes for lunch, between lunch prep, time to eat, and the walk itself. I find this much easier than trying to create a huge block of time in the morning for exercise, because I do not naturally wake up early. In the evening, I’ll frequently extend the after-dinner walk to ~2 miles instead of 1 mile.

It turns out that walking after meals is a great strategy for both weight loss and suppressing your blood sugar levels, among other benefits. This can be as short as a 2-minute walk, according to recent studies. In fact, it’s seen as so key in Mediterranean culture that walking is considered a component of the Mediterranean diet.

Overall, I’ve increased my active calorie consumption by 250 calories/day by incorporating active walks into my day. That’s a combination of the 2 after-meal brisk walks, plus a more relaxed walk on my under-desk treadmill sometime during the day. The latter is typically a 2 mph walk for 40–60 min, and I do it while I’m in a meeting that I’m not leading, or maybe watching a webinar. Without buying the walking pad, you could do the same on a nice outdoor walk with a headset or earbuds, but Minnesota weather sometimes makes that miserable. Overall, all of this typically gets me somewhere between 10,000–15,000 steps per day.

Not only is this good for fitness, it also helps to offset the effects of metabolic adaptation. If you’re losing weight, your body consumes fewer calories because it decreases your resting metabolic rate to conserve energy. Although some sites will suggest this could be hundreds of calories daily, which is quite discouraging, research shows that’s exaggerated for most people. During active weight loss, it’s typically ~100 calories per day, although it may be up to 175±150 calories for diet-resistant people. That range is a standard deviation, so people who are in the worst ~15% of the diet-resistant subset could have adaptations >325 calories/day. So if you believe you’re diet-resistant, you probably want to aim for a 1000-calorie deficit, to ensure you’re able to lose weight at a good rate. On the bright side, that adaptation gets cut in half once you’ve stabilized for a few weeks at your new weight, and it’s effectively back to zero a year later.

To further maintain my muscle following weight loss, I added a weighted vest to my after-lunch walks occasionally (examples: Rogue, 5.11, TRX). I started doing this once a week, and I aim to get to 3x+/week. I use a 40 lb weighted vest to counterbalance the 40+ lb of weight that I’ve lost. When I walk with the vest, I’m careful to maintain the same pace as without the vest, which increases the intensity and my heart rate. This pushes a normal moderate-intensity walk into the low end of high intensity (approaching 80% of my max heart rate). I also anticipate incorporating this weighted vest into my strength training later, once my own body weight is insufficient for continued progression.

Considering a minimalist approach, however, I think you could do just fine without a weighted vest. There are other ways to increase intensity, such as speed or inclines, and the combination of a high-protein diet, HIIT, and strength training provides similar benefits.

HIIT — High-Intensity Interval Training

Why do HIIT? Regularly getting your heart rate close to its maximum is good for your cardiovascular health, and you can’t do it with LISS, which by definition is low intensity. Another option besides HIIT is much longer moderate-intensity continuous training (your classic aerobic workout), but HIIT can fit the same benefits or more into a fraction of the time.

Research is very supportive of HIIT compared to longer aerobic workouts, which enables time compression of the total workout length from the classic 60 minutes down to 30 minutes or less.

However, 30 minutes still isn’t the least you can do and still get most of the benefits. The minimum required HIIT remains unclear — in overall length, weekly frequency, as well as patterns of high-intensity and rest / low-intensity. Here are some examples of research that test the limits of minimalist HIIT and find that it still works well:

1x 4 min, 3x/wk: review
5x 1 min, 2x/wk: study, study, study
4x 1 min, 3x/wk: study
8x 20 sec, 4x/wk (i.e. the Tabata protocol): study

Yes, you read that right — the last study used 20-second intervals. They were only separated by 10 seconds of rest, so the primary exercise period was just 4 minutes, excluding warm-up. Furthermore, this meta-analysis suggests that HIIT benefits more from increasing the intensity of the high-intensity intervals, rather than increasing the volume of repetitions.

After my investigation, it was clear that “low-volume” or “extremely low volume” HIIT could work well, so there was no need to do the full 30-minute HIIT workouts that are popular with many gym chains.

I settled on 3 minutes of HIIT, 2x/week: 3 repetitions of 30 seconds hard / 30 seconds light, plus a 1-minute warm-up. This overlaps with the HIIT intervals, breaks, and repetitions from the research I’ve dug into, and it also has the convenient benefit of not quite making me sweat during the workout, so I don’t need to change clothes.

I’m seeing the benefits of this already, which I’ll discuss in the Summary.

Strength Training

I also wanted to incorporate strength training for many reasons. In the short term, it was to minimize muscle loss as I lost weight (addressed in my prior post). In the medium and long term, I want to build muscle now so that I can live a healthier life once I’m older and also feel better about myself today.

What I’ve found is that aiming for the range of 10%–15% body fat is ideal for men who want to be very fit. This range makes it easy to tell visually when you’re at the top or bottom of the range, based on the appearance of a well-defined six-pack or its fading away to barely visible. It gets harder to tell where you are visually from 15% upwards, while anything below 10% has some health risks and starts to look pretty unusual too.

Within that 10%–15% range, I’m planning to do occasional short-term “lean bulks” / “clean bulks” and “cuts.” That’s the typical approach to building muscle — you eat a slight excess of calories while ensuring plenty of protein, aiming to gain about 2–4 lbs/month for someone my size. After a cycle of doing this, you then “cut” by dieting to lose the excess fat you’ve gained, because it’s impossible to only gain muscle. My personal preference is to make this cycle more agile with shorter iteration cycles, compared to some of the examples I’ve seen. I’m thinking about a 3:1 bulk:cut split over 4 months that results in a total gain/loss of ~10 lbs.

Calisthenics (bodyweight exercises): the minimalist’s approach

My goal of staying minimal pushed me toward calisthenics (bodyweight exercises), rather than needing to work out at a gym or buy free weights. This means the only required equipment is a doorway pull-up bar ($25), while everything else can be done with a wall, table or chair/bench. Although I may not build enormous muscles, it’s possible to get to the point of lifting your entire body weight with a single arm, which is more than good enough for me. That’s effectively lifting 2x your body weight, since you’re lifting 1x with just one arm.

My routine is inspired by Reddit’s r/bodyweightfitness (including the Recommended Routine and the Minimalist Routine) and this blog post by Steven Low, author of the book “Overcoming Gravity.” I’ve also incorporated scientific research wherever possible to guide repetitions and frequency. Overall, the goal is to get both horizontal and vertical pushing and pulling exercises for the arms/shoulders due to their larger range of motion, while getting push and pull for legs, and good core exercises that cover both the upper and lower back as well.

I’ve chosen compound exercises that work many muscles simultaneously — for practicality (more applicable to real-world motions), length of workout, and minimal equipment needs. If you’re working isolated muscles, you generally need lots of specialized machines at a gym. Isometrics (exercises where you don’t move, like a wall-sit) are also less applicable to real use cases as you age, such as the strength and agility to catch yourself from a fall. For that reason, I prefer compound exercises with some rapid, explosive movements that help to build both strength and agility.

My initial routine

Here’s my current schedule (3 sets of repetitions for each movement, with a 3-minute break between sets):

Monday: arm push — push-ups (as HIIT) and tricep dips. “As HIIT” means that I’ll do as many push-ups as I can fit within my HIIT pattern, then flip to my active work (e.g. jumping jacks or burpees).
Tuesday: arm pull — pull-ups (with L-sit, as below) and inverted rows (“Australian pull-ups”)
Wednesday: core — L-sits, planks (3x — 10 sec on each of front, right, left)
Thursday: handstands — working toward handstand push-ups as the “vertical push”
Friday: legs — squats (as HIIT), and Nordic curls (hamstrings & lower back)
Saturday/Sunday: rest — just walking. Ideally hitting 10k steps/day but no pressure to do so, if I’m starting to feel sore.

For ones that I couldn’t do initially (e.g. pull-ups, handstands, L-sits, Nordic curls), I used progressions to work my way there step by step. For pull-ups, that meant doing negatives / eccentrics by jumping up and slowly lowering myself down over multiple seconds, then repeating. For handstands, I face the wall to encourage better posture, so it’s been about longer holds and figuring out how to bail out so I can more confidently get vertical. For L-sits, I follow this progression. For Nordic curls, I’m doing slow negatives as far down as I can make it, then dropping the rest of the way onto my hands and pushing back up.

On days with multiple exercises for the same muscles, I’ll typically try to split them up so they fit more easily into a workday. For example, I’ll find 10 minutes mid-morning between meetings/calls to do one movement and 10 minutes mid-afternoon for the other. This is the same time I might’ve spent making a coffee, before I started focusing on fitness.

Combined with the walks, this plan gets me moving 4 times a day — two 20-minute walks and two 10-minute workouts, for a total of 1 hour each day. The great thing about this approach is that I never feel like I need to dedicate a ton of time to exercise, because it fits naturally into the structure of my day. I’ve also got an additional 40–60 minutes of slow walking while at my desk, which again fits easily into my day.

What I’ve learned along the way

As you can see, I’m currently at 1x/wk for non-core exercises, which is a “traditional split.” That means I’m splitting up exercises, focusing on just one set of muscles each day. The problem is that the frequency of training for each muscle group is low, which I’d like to change so that I can build strength more quickly.

I’m switching to “paired sets” (aka “alternating sets”) that alternate among different muscle groups, so I can fit more into the same amount of time. Here’s how that works: if you were taking a 3-minute rest between sets, that gives you time to fit in an unrelated set of muscles that you weren’t using in the first exercise (e.g. biceps & triceps, quads & hamstrings, chest & back). I do this as an alternating tri-set (arm pull, arm push, legs) with a 30–45 second rest between each muscle group, and a 1.5–2 minute break between each full tri-set. You might also see “supersets,” which is a similar concept but with no breaks within the tri-set. I’ve found that I tend to get too tired and sloppy if I try a superset, so I do alternating sets instead.

In addition, I’ve done a lot more research on strength training after getting started. For LISS and HIIT, I had a strongly research-driven approach before beginning. For strength training, I went with some more direct recommendations and only did additional academic research later. Here’s what I’ve learned since then:

Higher-load (80%+), multi-set workouts 2x/week are optimal for maximizing both strength and hypertrophy, according to a 2023 meta-analysis.
One ideal size of a set to maximize benefits seems to be 6-8 repetitions, with a 3-minute break between sets to maximize energy restoration. 6-8 reps seems like a sweet spot between strength and hypertrophy (muscle size). For endurance, 15+ repetitions should be the goal. If you want to build all of those characteristics, you should probably alternate rep counts with different loads.
Time efficient workout design: Use compound exercises and include both concentric & eccentric movements. Perform a minimum of one leg-pressing exercise (e.g. squats), one upper-body pulling exercise (e.g. pull-up) and one upper-body pushing exercise (e.g. push-up). Perform a minimum of 4 weekly sets per muscle group using a 6–15 rep max loading range.
Eccentric / negatives are superior to concentric. Don’t neglect or rush through the negatives / eccentrics. That’s the part of an exercise you ignore by default — letting your weight come down during a squat, pull-up, or push-up rather than when you’re pushing/pulling it back up. Take your time on that part, because it’s actually more important.
Doing something as quick as 3-second negatives, 4x/wk, will improve strength.

Overall, that suggests a workout design that looks like this (2 days a week):

2+ sets of each: Compound exercises for arm push, arm pull, leg press
Aim for whatever difficulty is required to max out at 6–8 repetitions for strength & hypertrophy (muscle size), or up to 15 if you’re focusing on endurance
Do slow eccentrics / negatives on every exercise

The new routine

To incorporate this research into a redesigned routine that also includes HIIT and core work, here’s what I’ve recently changed to (most links go to “progressions” that will help you get started):

Monday: Strength: push-ups, pull-ups, squats as alternating set
Tuesday: HIIT (burpees, mountain climbers, star jumps, etc)
Wednesday: Core & Flexibility: L-sits, planks, Nordic curls, stretches
Thursday: HIIT (similar routine)
Friday: Strength: handstand push-ups, inverted rows, squats as alternating set
Saturday/Sunday: Rest days

Also, 4+ days a week, I do a quick set of a 5-second negative for each type of compound exercise (arm push, arm pull, leg press). That’s just 2 days in addition to my strength days, so I usually fit it into HIIT warm-up or cool-down.

On each day, my overall expected time commitment will be about 10 minutes. For strength training, all the alternating sets will overlap with each other. Even with a 3-min break between each set for the same muscle group, that should run quite efficiently for 2–3 sets. For HIIT, it’s already a highly compressed routine that takes ~5 minutes including warm-up and cool-down, but I need another 5 minutes afterwards to decompress after exercise that intense. You may notice that I only have one dedicated day to work my core (Wednesday), but I’m also getting core exercise during push-ups (as I plank), L-sit pull-ups, and handstands (as I balance).

The research recommendation to increase load to 80% of your max can seem more challenging with calisthenics, since it’s just about bodyweight. However, it’s always possible by decreasing your leverage, using one limb instead of two, or increasing the proportion of your weight that’s applied by changing your body angles. For example, you can do push-ups at a downwards incline with your feet on a bench/chair. You can also do more advanced types of squats like Bulgarian split squats, shrimp squats, or pistol squats.

Summary

My cardiorespiratory fitness, as measured by VO2 Max (maximal oxygen consumption) on my Apple Watch, has increased from 32 (the lowest end of “below average,” for my age & gender) to 40.1 (above average). It continues to improve on a nearly daily basis. That’s largely happened within just a couple of months, since I started walking every day and doing HIIT.

My blood pressure (one of my initial concerns) has dropped out of pre-hypertension into the healthy range. My resting heart rate has also decreased from 63 to 56 bpm, which was a long slow process that’s occurred over the entire course of my weight loss.

On the strength side, I wasn’t expecting any gains because I’m in a caloric deficit. My main goal was to avoid losing muscle while losing weight. I’ve now been strength training for 2.5 months, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the “newbie gains” (which people often see in their first year or two of strength training).

For example, I couldn’t do any pull-ups when I started. I could barely do a couple of negatives, by jumping up and letting myself down slowly. Now I can do 4 pull-ups (neutral grip). Also, I can now hold a wall handstand for 30–45 seconds and do 6–8 very small push-ups, while I could barely get into that position at all when I started.

Overall, clear results emerged almost instantly for cardiorespiratory fitness, and as soon as 6 weeks after beginning a regular strength-training routine. If you try it out, let me know how it works for you!

The lazy technologist’s guide to weight loss

[Last update: 2024-02-16]

In the past 8 months, I’ve lost 60 pounds and went from completely sedentary to becoming much more fit, while putting in a minimum of effort. I have no desire to be a bodybuilder, but I want to be in great shape now and be as healthy and mobile as possible well into my old age. A year ago, my blood pressure was already at pre-hypertension levels, despite being at a relatively young age.

I wasn’t willing to let this last any longer, and I wasn’t willing to accept that future.

Research shows that 5 factors are key to a long life — correlated with extending your life by 12–14 years:

Never smoking
BMI (body mass index) of 18.5–24.9
30+ min a day of moderate/vigorous exercise
Moderate alcohol intake (vs none, occasional, or heavy)
Diet quality in the upper 40% (Alternate Healthy Eating Index)

Although I’m not a smoker, I was missing three of the other factors. My weight was massively unhealthy, I didn’t exercise at all and spent most of my day in front of a desk, and my diet was awful. On the bright side for these purposes, I drink moderately (almost entirely beer).

In this post, I’ll walk through my own experience going from obese to a healthy weight, with plenty of research-driven references and data along the way.

Why is this the lazy technologist’s guide, though? I wanted to lose weight in the “laziest” way possible — in the same sense that lazy programmers find the most efficient solutions to problems, according to an apocryphal quote by Bill Gates and a real one by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Gates supposedly said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Wall wrote in Programming Perl, “Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.”

What’s the lowest-effort, most research-driven way to lose weight as quickly as possible without losing health? Discovering and executing upon that was my journey. Read on if you’re considering taking a similar path.

My weight-loss journey begins

My initial goal was to get down from 240 pounds (obese, BMI of 31.7) into the healthy range, reaching 185 pounds (BMI of 24.4).

My aim was to lose at the high end of a healthy rate, 2 pounds per week. Credible sources like the Mayo Clinic and the CDC suggested aiming for 1–2 pounds a week, because anything beyond that can cause issues with muscle loss as well as malnutrition.

But how could I accomplish that?

One weird trick — Eat less

I’ve lost weight once previously (about 15 years ago), although it was a smaller amount. Back then, I learned that there’s no silver bullet — the trick is to create a calorie deficit, so that your body consumes more energy than the calories in what you eat.

Every pound is about 3500 calories, which helps to set a weekly and daily goal for your calorie deficit. For me to lose 2 pounds a week, that’s 2*3500 = 7000 calories/week, or 1000 calories/day of deficit (eating that much less than my body uses).

Exercise barely makes a dent

It’s far more effective and efficient to create this deficit primarily through eating less rather than expecting exercise to make a huge difference. If you were previously gaining weight, you might’ve been eating 3000 calories/day or more! You can easily reduce what you eat by 1500 calories/day from that starting point, but it’s almost impossible to exercise enough to burn that many calories. An hour of intense exercise might burn 500 calories, and it’s very hard to keep up that level of effort for even one full hour — especially if you’ve been sitting in a chair all day for years on end.

Not to mention, that much exercise would defeat the whole idea of this being the lazy person’s way of making progress.

So how exactly can you reduce calories? You’ve got a lot of options, but they basically boil down to two things — eat less (portion control), and eat better (food choice).

The plan

At this point, I knew I needed to eat 1000 calories/day less than I burned. I used this calculator to identify that, as a sedentary person, I burned about 2450 calories/day. So to create that deficit, I needed to eat about 1450 calories/day. At that point, I was probably eating 2800–3000 calories/day, so that would require massive changes in my diet.

I don’t like the idea of fad diets that completely remove one or many types of foods entirely (Atkins, keto, paleo, etc), although they can work for other people. One of those big lessons about dieting is that as long as you’re removing something from what you eat, you’ll probably lose weight.

I decided to make two big changes: how often I ate healthy vs unhealthy food, and when I ate over the course of the day. At the time, I was eating a huge amount of high-fat, high-sugar, and low-health foods like burgers and fries multiple times per week, fried food, lots of chips/crisps, white bread (very high sugar in the US) & white rice, cheese, chocolate and candy.

I decided to shift that toward white meat (chicken/pork/turkey), seafood, salads & veggies, and whole grains (whole-wheat bread, brown rice, quinoa, etc). One pro-tip: American salad dressings are super unhealthy, often even the “vinaigrettes” that sound better. Do like Italians do, and dress salads yourself with olive oil, salt, and vinegar. However, I didn’t want to remove my favorite foods entirely, because that would destroy my long-term motivation and enjoyment of my progress. For example, once a week, I still allow myself to get a cheeseburger. But I’ll typically get a single patty, no mayo/cheese/ketchup, and with a side like salad (w/ healthy dressing) or cole slaw. I’ll also ensure my other meal of the day is very light. Many days, I’ll enjoy a small treat like 1–2 chocolates, as well (50–100 calories).

What if you like beer?

I wanted to reach my calorie target without eliminating beer, so I could both preserve my quality of life and also maintain the moderate drinking that research shows is correlated with increased lifespan.

I was also drinking very high-calorie beer (like double IPAs and bourbon-barrel–aged imperial stouts). I shifted that toward low-alcohol, low-calorie beer (alcohol levels and calories are correlated). Bell’s Light-Hearted IPA and Lagunitas DayTime IPA are two pretty good ones in my area. Of the non-alcoholic (NA) beers, Athletic Free Wave Hazy IPA is the best I’ve found in my area, but Untappd has reasonably good ratings for Sam Adams Just the Haze and Sierra Nevada Trail Pass IPA, which should be broadly available. As a rough estimate on calories in beer, you can use this formula:

Beer calories = ABV (alcohol percentage) * 2.5 * fluid ounces

As an exception, many Belgian beers are quite “efficient” to drink, in that roughly 75% of the calories are alcohol rather than other carbs that just add calories. As a result, they violate the above formula and tend to be lower-calorie than you’d expect. This could be the result of carefully crafted recipes that consume most of the carbs, and fermentation that uses up all of the sugar.

Here’s a more specific formula that you can use, if you’re curious about how “efficient” a given beer is, and you know how many total calories it has (find this online):

Beer calories from ethanol = (ABV * 0.8 / 100) * (29.6 * fluid ounces) * 7

(Simplified form): Beer calories from ethanol = ABV * 1.7 * fluid ounces

This uses the density and calories of ethanol (0.8 g/ml and 7 cal/g, respectively) and converts from milliliters to ounces (29.6 ml/oz). If you then calculate that number as a fraction of the total calories in a beer, you can find its “efficiency.” For example, a 12-ounce bottle of 8.5% beer might have 198 calories total. Using the equation, we can calculate that it’s got 169 calories from ethanol, so 169/198 = 85% “efficient.”

If you’re really trying to optimize for this, however, beer is the wrong drink. Have a low-calorie mixed drink instead, like a vodka soda, ranch water, or rum and Diet Coke.

The plan (part 2)

Therefore, instead of giving up beer entirely, I decided to skip breakfast. I’d eaten light breakfasts for years (a small bowl of cereal, or a banana and a granola bar), so this wasn’t a big deal to me.

Later, I discovered this qualified my diet as time-restricted intermittent fasting as well, since I was only eating/drinking between ~12pm–6pm. This approach of 18 hours off / 6 hours on (18:6 fasting) may have aided in my weight loss, but studies are mixed with some suggesting no effect.

Here’s what a day might look like on 1450 calories:

Lunch (400 calories). A tuna-salad sandwich (made with Greek yogurt instead of mayo) on whole-wheat bread, and a side salad with olive oil & vinegar.
Afternoon snack (150 calories). Sliced bell peppers, no dip, and a small bowl of cottage cheese.
A treat (50–100 calories). A truffle or a couple of small chocolates as an afternoon treat.
Dinner (650 calories). Fried chicken/fish sandwich (or kids-size burger) and a small order of fries, from a fast-casual restaurant.
One or two low-alcohol, light, or NA beers (150–200 calories).

When I get hungry, I often drink some water instead, because my body’s easily confused about hunger vs thirst. It’s a mental game too — I remind myself that hunger means my body is burning fat, and that’s a good thing.

For a long time, I kept track of my estimated calorie consumption mentally. More recently, I decided to make my life a little easier by switching to an app. I chose MyFitnessPal because it’s got a big database including almost everything I eat.

On this plan, I had a great deal of success in losing my first 40 pounds, getting down from 240 to 200. However, it started to feel like a bit of a struggle to maintain my weight loss as I reached 200 pounds and wanted to continue losing at the same rate of 2 pounds/week.

Adaptation, plateaus and persistence

I fell behind by about two weeks on my weight-loss goal, which was massively frustrating because I’d done so well all along. I convinced myself to keep persisting because it had worked all along for months, and this was a temporary setback.

Finally I re-used the same weight-loss calculator and realized what seemed obvious in hindsight: Since I now weighed less, I also burned fewer calories per day! Those 40 pounds that were now gone didn’t use any energy anymore, but I was still eating as if I had them. I needed to change something to restore the 1000-calorie daily deficit.

At this point, I aimed to decrease my intake to about 1200 calories per day. This quickly became frustrating because it started to affect my quality of life by forcing choices I didn’t want to make, such as choosing between a decent dinner or a beer, or forcing me to eat a salad with no protein for dinner if I had a little bit bigger lunch.

That low calorie limit also carried the risk of causing metabolic adaptation — meaning my body could burn hundreds fewer calories per day as a result of being in a “starvation mode” of sorts. That ends up being a vicious cycle that continually forces you to eat less, and it makes weight loss even more challenging.

Consequently, I began to introduce moderate exercise (walking), so I could bring my intake back up to 1400 calories on days when I burned 200 extra calories. I’ve discussed the details in a follow-up guide for fitness.

Over the course of my learning, I discovered that it’s ideal (according to actuarial tables) to sit in the middle of the healthy range rather than be at the top of it. I maintained my initial weight-loss goal to keep myself motivated on progress, but set a second goal of reaching 165 pounds — or whatever weight it takes to get a six-pack (~10% body fat).

Eat lots of protein

I also discovered that high-protein diets are better at preserving muscle, so more of the weight loss is fat. This is especially true when coupled with resistance or strength training, which also sends your body a signal that it needs to keep its muscle instead of losing it. The minimum recommended daily allowance (RDA) of protein (0.36 grams per pound of body weight, or 67 g/day for me) could be your absolute lower limit, while as much as 0.6 g/lb (111 g/day for me) could help in improving your muscle mass.

Another study suggested multiplying the RDA by 1.25–1.5 (or more if you exercise) to maintain muscle during weight loss, which would put my recommended protein at 84–100 grams per day. The same study also said exercise helps to maintain muscle during weight loss, so it could be an either/or situation rather than needing both. Additionally, high-protein diets can help with hunger and weight loss, in part because they keep you fuller for longer. Getting 25%–30% of daily calories from protein will get you to this level, which is a whole lot of protein. Starting from your overall daily calories, you can apply this percentage and then divide your desired protein calories by 4 to get the number of grams per day:

Protein grams per day = Total daily calories * {25%, 30%} / 4

For my calorie limit, that’s about 88–105 grams per day.

I’ve found that eating near the absolute minimum recommended protein level (67 grams per day, for my weight) tends to happen fairly naturally with my originally planned diet, while getting much higher protein takes real effort. I needed to identify low-calorie, high-protein foods and incorporate them more intentionally into meals, so that I can get enough protein without compromising my daily calorie limit.

Here’s a good list of low-calorie, high-protein foods that are pretty affordable:

Breakfast/Lunch: eggs or low-fat/nonfat Greek yogurt (with honey/berries),
Entree: grilled/roasted chicken (or pork/turkey) or seafood (especially shrimp, canned salmon, canned tuna), and
Sides: cottage cheese or lentils/beans (including soups, to make it an entree).

If you’re vegetarian, you’d want to go heavier on lentils and beans, and add plenty of nuts, including hummus and peanut butter. You probably also want to bring in tempeh, and you likely already eat tofu.

I’d never tried canned salmon before, and I was impressed with how easily I could make it into a salad or an open-faced sandwich (like Danish smørrebrød). The salmon came in large pieces and retained the original texture, as you’d want. Canned tuna has been more variable in terms of texture — I’ve had some great-looking albacore from Genova and some great-tasting (but not initially good-looking) skipjack from Wild Planet.

Avoid the most common brands of canned fish though, like Chicken of the Sea, StarKist, or Bumble Bee. They are often farmed or net-caught instead of pole/line-caught, and they may be higher in parasites (for farmed fish like salmon). I also aim to buy lower-mercury types of salmon and tuna — this means I can eat each kind of fish as often as I want, instead of once a week. I buy canned Wild Planet skipjack tuna (not albacore, but yellowfin is pretty good too) and canned Deming’s sockeye salmon (not pink salmon) at my local grocery store, and I pick up large trays of refrigerated cocktail shrimp at Costco. The Genova brand also garners good reviews for canned fish and may be easier to find. All of those are pre-cooked and ready to eat, so they’re easy to use for a quick lunch.

Go ahead and get fresh seafood if you want, but be aware that you’ll be going through a lot of it so it could get expensive. Fish only stays good for a couple of days unless frozen, so you’ll also be making a lot of trips to the store or regularly thawing/cooking frozen fish.

Summary

Over the past 8 months, I’ve managed to lose 60 pounds (and counting!) through a low-effort approach that has minimized the overall impact on my quality of life. I’ve continued to eat the foods I want — but less of them.

The biggest challenge has been persistence through the tough times. However, not cutting out any foods completely, but rather just decreasing the frequency of unhealthy foods in my life, has been a massive help with that. That meant I didn’t feel like I was breaking my whole diet whenever I had something I really wanted, as long as it fit within my calorie limit.

What’s next? A few months after beginning my weight loss, I also started working out to get into better shape, which was another one of those original 5 factors to a long life. Right now, I’m aiming to get down to about 10% body fat, which is likely to be around 165 pounds. Then I’ll flip my eating habits into muscle-building mode, which will require a slight caloric excess rather than a deficit.

Stay tuned to see what happens!

How to be a 10x engineer: Business value for technologists

pexels-photo-engineer

Since joining an enterprise (the world’s largest business-travel company) 6 months ago to drive their DevOps transformation, my ongoing mental evolution regarding the value of technology has gone through an almost religious rebirth. I now think in a completely different way than I did 10 years ago about what technology is important and when you need it. If you want to become a 10x engineer, you need a different perspective than just working on things because they seem cool. It’s about working toward the right outcomes, whereas most of us focus on the inputs (what tech you use, how many hours you work).

It all comes down to business value. You need to contribute to one of the core factors of business value, or however incredible the technology is, it just doesn’t make a difference. If you don’t know what that really means, you’re not alone — most of the technologists I know have trouble articulating the business model of their employers.

I think about it as 4 primary factors:

Money. This comes in two flavors. First, you’re creating new efficiency, which increases the profit margin. This could either be through lowering the underlying fixed costs of running the business, or decreasing the cost of goods/services sold by saving a little money on every one. Second, you’re increasing sales, which grows overall revenue. In a cost center within a larger enterprise, or in saturated markets, the former is the most common mode of operation because it’s hard to capture new opportunities. In the latter, it’s about growth mode – investing to capture new value, and often assuming you can make it profitable later. This could be framed as “land and expand” or with the assumption that your company will increase the price and margin once it’s gained a sufficient market share to do so with lower risk. Do you understand your company’s business model? Where does the money come from, who are the customers, what are their needs, what is the sales process and cycle, and what are they buying?
Speed. Again, there’s a couple of versions of this that overlap. The overall goals are either initial time to market or speed of iteration. Time to market can come at the expense of significant technical debt, while long-term accelerated iteration cycles are about product-market fit. If you know of the Lean Startup approach promoted by Eric Ries, this should sound familiar. From a long-term perspective, iteration cycles require a balanced approach of customer perspective and technical debt. Otherwise, your company can’t deliver value to customers quickly due to accruing interest on its tech debt. In practice, this can drive an approach that involves gradual refactors with the assumption that long-term rewrites (or e.g. strangler pattern) will be required. It’s the classic “design for 10x but rewrite before 100x,” to paraphrase Google’s Jeff Dean.
Risk. As before, this essentially boils down to executing on new opportunity or loss to existing opportunity. Dan McKinley has a fantastic post on why you should choose boring technology, because the important risks are in the business model vs the tech. You should only make a small number of bets on new technology when it will really make a difference in your ability to deliver on business value. For existing opportunity, it’s more about risk avoidance. Typical approaches tend to end up in some mainframe application that one nearly retirement-age developer knows but is afraid to touch. However, a more sustainable model is to implement heavy automation if it truly is a business-critical application that justifies the investment. Relatedly, risk avoidance is where security shines. One of my favorite perspectives is Google’s BeyondCorp model, which assumes your perimeter is compromised and acts accordingly.
Strategy. Often not immediately visible in the above approaches, investing in strategic growth opportunities is consistently a great path to success in your business. Do you know your company’s strategy? They probably have posters up and meetings about it all the time. Could you say it out loud? Do you know how it maps to concrete actions? Although any individual opportunity may fail, your contribution to executing on the technology behind that opportunity will not go unnoticed. Similarly, if you’re involved in divesting from areas your employer wants to leave as part of its strategy, you have a real but often smaller opportunity to leave your mark upon the work.

Although many other factors have an impact upon business value, those are 4 of the most important ones that can make you consistently successful as a technologist. The key is to understand which ones play into your work, so you can act accordingly in your day-to-day efforts and as part of your career strategy. Are you building software for a cost center, a growth incubator, a risk center, or at a company that cares to invest in speed? Taking full advantage of this approach could make you the 10x engineer you’ve always wanted to be. Best of luck in your journey, and may you spend time where it matters!

How to give a great talk, the lazy way

Got a talk coming up? Want it to go well? Here’s some starting points.

I give a lot of talks. Often I’m paid to give them, and I regularly get very high ratings or even awards. But every time I listen to people speaking in public for the first time, or maybe the first few times, I think of some very easy ways for them to vastly improve their talks.

Here, I wanted to share my top tips to make your life (and, selfishly, my life watching your talks) much better:

Presenter mode is the greatest invention ever. Use it. If you ignore or forget everything else in this post, remember the rainbows and unicorns of presenter mode. This magical invention keeps the current slide showing on the projector while your laptop shows something different — the current slide, a small image of the next slide, and your slide notes. The last bit is the key. What I put on my notes is the main points of the current slide, followed by my transition to the next slide. Presentations look a lot more natural when you say the transition before you move to the next slide rather than after. More than anything else, presenter mode dramatically cut down on my prep time, because suddenly I no longer had to rehearse. I had seamless, invisible crib notes while I was up on stage.
Plan your intro. Starting strong goes a long way, as it turns out that making a good first impression actually matters. It’s time very well spent to literally script your first few sentences. It helps you get the flow going and get comfortable, so you can really focus on what you’re saying instead of how nervous you are. Avoid jokes unless most of your friends think you’re funny almost all the time. (Hint: they don’t, and you aren’t.)
No bullet points. Ever. (Unless you’re an expert, and you probably aren’t.) We’ve been trained by too many years of boring, sleep-inducing PowerPoint presentations that bullet points equal naptime. Remember presenter mode? Put the bullet points in the slide notes that only you see. If for some reason you think you’re the sole exception to this, at a minimum use visual advances/transitions. (And the only good transition is an instant appear. None of that fading crap.) That makes each point appear on-demand rather than all of them showing up at once.
Avoid text-filled slides. When you put a bunch of text in slides, people inevitably read it. And they read it at a different pace than you’re reading it. Because you probably are reading it, which is incredibly boring to listen to. The two different paces mean they can’t really focus on either the words on the slide or the words coming out of your mouth, and your attendees consequently leave having learned less than either of those options alone would’ve left them with.
Use lots of really large images. Each slide should be a single concept with very little text, and images are a good way to force yourself to do so. Unless there’s a very good reason, your images should be full-bleed. That means they go past the edges of the slide on all sides. My favorite place to find images is a Flickr advanced search for Creative Commons licenses. Google also has this capability within Search Tools. Sometimes images are code samples, and that’s fine as long as you remember to illustrate only one concept — highlight the important part.
Look natural. Get out from behind the podium, so you don’t look like a statue or give the classic podium death-grip (one hand on each side). You’ll want to pick up a wireless slide advancer and make sure you have a wireless lavalier mic, so you can wander around the stage. Remember to work your way back regularly to check on your slide notes, unless you’re fortunate enough to have them on extra monitors around the stage. Talk to a few people in the audience beforehand, if possible, to get yourself comfortable and get a few anecdotes of why people are there and what their background is.
Don’t go over time. You can go under, even a lot under, and that’s OK. One of the best talks I ever gave took 22 minutes of a 45-minute slot, and the rest filled up with Q&A. Nobody’s going to mind at all if you use up 30 minutes of that slot, but cutting into their bathroom or coffee break, on the other hand, is incredibly disrespectful to every attendee. This is what watches, and the timer in presenter mode, and clocks, are for. If you don’t have any of those, ask a friend or make a new friend in the front row.
You’re the centerpiece. The slides are a prop. If people are always looking at the slides rather than you, chances are you’ve made a mistake. Remember, the focus should be on you, the speaker. If they’re only watching the slides, why didn’t you just post a link to Slideshare or Speakerdeck and call it a day?

I’ve given enough talks that I have a good feel on how long my slides will take, and I’m able to adjust on the fly. But if you aren’t sure of that, it might make sense to rehearse. I generally don’t rehearse, because after all, this is the lazy way.

If you can manage to do those 8 things, you’ve already come a long way. Good luck!

Gentoo needs focus to stay relevant

After nearly 12 years working on Gentoo and hearing blathering about how “Gentoo is about choice” and “Gentoo is a metadistribution,” I’ve come to a conclusion to where we need to go if we want to remain viable as a Linux distribution.

If we want to have any relevance, we need to have focus. Everything for everybody is a guarantee that you’ll be nothing for nobody. So I’ve come up with three specific use cases for Gentoo that I’d like to see us focus on:

People developing software

As Gentoo comes, by default, with a guaranteed-working toolchain, it’s a natural fit for software developers. A few years back, I tried to set up a development environment on Ubuntu. It was unbelievable painful. More recently, I attempted the same on a Mac. Same result — a total nightmare if you aren’t building for Mac or iOS.

Gentoo, on the other hand, provides a proven-working development environment because you build everything from scratch as you install the OS. If you need headers or some library, it’s already there. No problem. Whereas I’ve attempted to get all of the barebones dev packages installed on many other systems and it’s been hugely painful.

Frankly, I’ve never come across as easy of a dev environment as Gentoo, if you’ve managed to set it up as a user in the first place. And that’s the real problem.

People who need extreme flexibility (embedded, etc.)

Nearly 10 years ago, I founded the high-performance clustering project in Gentoo, because it was a fantastic fit for my needs as an end user in a higher-ed setting. As it turns out, it was also a good fit for a number of other folks, primarily in academia but also including the Adelie Linux team.

What we found was that you could get an extra 5% or so of performance out of building everything from scratch. At small scale that sounds absurd, but when that translates into 5-6 digits or more of infrastructure purchases, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

In related environments, I worked on porting v5 of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) to Gentoo. This was the first version that was distro-native vs pretending to be a custom distro in its own right, and the lightweight footprint of a diskless terminal was a perfect fit for Gentoo.

In fact, around the same time I fit Gentoo onto a 1.8MB floppy-disk image, including either the dropbear SSH client or the kdrive X server for a graphical environment. This was only possible through the magic of the ROOT and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT variables, which you couldn’t find in any other distro.

Other distros such as ChromeOS and CoreOS have taken similar advantage of Gentoo’s metadistribution nature to build heavily customized Linux distros.

People who want to learn how Linux works

Finally, another key use case for Gentoo is for people who really want to understand how Linux works. Because the installation handbook actually works you through the entire process of installing a Linux distro by hand, you acquire a unique viewpoint and skillset regarding what it takes to run Linux, well beyond what other distros require. In fact I’d argue that it’s a uniquely portable and low-level skillset that you can apply much more broadly than those you could acquire elsewhere.

In conclusion

I’ve suggested three core use cases that I think Gentoo should focus on. If it doesn’t fit those use cases, I would suggest that we allow but not specifically dedicate effort to enabling those particulars.

We’ve gotten overly deadened to how people want to use Linux, and this is my proposal as to how we could regain it.

3 days left to apply for the Google Summer of Code

Students, this Friday at 1900 UTC is the deadline to apply for this year’s GSoC. It’s an awesome program that pays you to work on open-source projects for a summer (where you == a university/college student).

It’s by no means too late, but start your application today. You can find more information on Gentoo’s projects here (click on the Ideas page to get started; also see our application guidelines) and on the broader GSoC program here.

Good luck!

OSCON meetups: FLOSS lunch, RedMonk beer

It’s been a few years, but I used to have an OSCON tradition of getting a bunch of interesting people together for lunch, from a variety of free-software and open-source communities.

This year I’m suggesting we do the same, on Wednesday of OSCON week. Let me know in the comments or via email if you’re interested.

I’ll also be hosting a RedMonk beering, beginning Wednesday night around 9:30–10pm. Location TBD, watch the Twitters.

Update (2013/07/19): Beers will begin around 9:30pm Wednesday at Bailey’s Taproom (213 SW Broadway, which is downtown). The place is open till midnight and we’ll likely be there till then.

Get paid to write open-source software this summer

If you’re a university student, time is running out! You could get paid to hack on Gentoo or other open-source software this summer, but you’ve gotta act now. The deadline to apply for the Google Summer of Code is this Friday.

If this sounds like your dream come true, you can find some Gentoo project ideas here and Gentoo’s GSoC homepage here. For non-Gentoo projects, you can scan through the GSoC website to find the details.

Opportunities for Gentoo

When I’ve wanted to play in some new areas lately, it’s been a real frustration because Gentoo hasn’t had a complete set of packages ready in any of them. I feel like these are some opportunities for Gentoo to be awesome and gain access to new sets of users (or at least avoid chasing away existing users who want better tools):

Data science. Package Hadoop. Package streaming options like Storm. How about related tools like Flume? RabbitMQ is in Gentoo, though. I’ve heard anecdotally that a well-optimized Hadoop-on-Gentoo installation showed double-digit performance increases over the usual Hadoop distributions (i.e., not Linux distributions, but companies specializing in providing Hadoop solutions). Just heard from Tim Harder (radhermit) than he’s got some packages in progress for a lot of this, which is great news.
DevOps. This is an area where Gentoo historically did pretty well, in part because our own infrastructure team and the group at the Open Source Lab have run tools like CFEngine and Puppet. But we’re lagging behind the times. We don’t have Jenkins or Travis. Seriously? Although we’ve got Vagrant packaged, for example, we don’t have Veewee. We could be integrating the creation of Vagrant boxes into our release-engineering process.
Relatedly: Monitoring. Look for some of the increasingly popular open-source tools today, things like Graphite, StatsD, Logstash, Lumberjack, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Sensu, Tasseo, Descartes, Riemann. None of those are there.
Cloud. Public cloud and on-premise IaaS/PaaS. How about IaaS: OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, or OpenNebula? Not there, although some work is happening for OpenStack according to Matthew Thode (prometheanfire). How about a PaaS like Cloud Foundry or OpenShift? Nope. None of the Netflix open-source tools are there. On the public side, things are a bit better — we’ve got lots of AWS tools packaged, even stretching to things like Boto. We could be integrating the creation of AWS images into our release engineering to ensure AWS users always have a recent, official Gentoo image.
NoSQL. We’ve got a pretty decent set here with some holes. We’ve got Redis, Mongo, and CouchDB not to mention Memcached, but how about graph databases like Neo4j, or other key-value stores like Riak, Cassandra, or Voldemort?
Android development. Gentoo is perfect as a development environment. We should be pushing it hard for mobile development, especially Android given its Linux base. There’s a couple of halfhearted wiki pages but that does not an effort make. If the SDKs and related packages are there, the docs need to be there too.

Where does Gentoo shine? As a platform for developers, as a platform for flexibility, as a platform to eke every last drop of performance out of a system. All of the above use cases are relevant to at least one of those areas.

I’m writing this post because I would love it if anyone else who wants to help Gentoo be more awesome would chip in with packaging in these specific areas. Let me know!

Update: Michael Stahnke suggested I point to some resources on Gentoo packaging, for anyone interested, so take a look at the Gentoo Development Guide. The Developer Handbook contains some further details on policy as well as info on how to get commit access by becoming a Gentoo developer.

Video: Package management and creation in Gentoo Linux

As one of my four talks at FOSDEM, I gave one on Gentoo titled “Package management and creation in Gentoo Linux.” The basic idea was, what could packagers and developers of other, non-Gentoo distros learn from Gentoo’s packaging format and how it’s iterated on that format multiple times over the years. It’s got some slides but the interesting part is where we run through actual ebuilds to see how they’ve changed as we’ve advanced through EAPIs (Ebuild APIs), starting at 16:39.

If you click through to YouTube, the larger (but not fullscreen) version seems to be the easiest to read.

It was scaled from 720×576 to a 480p video, so if you find it too hard to read the code, you can view the original WebM here.