J . M A I L

Tom Bihn Aeronaut Review +

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:25:00 -0400

I thought it was time to post a review of a recent purchase, the Tom Bihn Aeronaut Bag, finally I think I have enough experience to post something of use, here goes…

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Description:

The Aeronaut is hard to categorize: Is it soft luggage? A duffel bag? Or a backpack?

The Aeronaut is all of the above. It takes the best of all of those bags and combines them into what may be the most versatile travel bag yet. A maximum carry-on size bag, the Aeronaut converts to be carried as a backpack with zip-away backpack straps

Exterior made of U.S. 1050 denier Ballistic nylon: twice the abrasion resistance of 1680 denier fabric
Lined with Ultra-lightweight yet tough Dyneema/nylon ripstop fabric, made for us in Japan.
Meets most non-commuter domestic airlines’ carry-on size standards as well as many international carry-on standards, including Heathrow
Overall dimensions: 22” x 14” x 9” / 555 x 355 x 230mm
Volume: 45 liters (2700 cu. in.)
Weight: 2.71 lbs / 1230 grams

http://www.tombihn.com/page/001/PROD/500/TB0906

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Let me start off with the obvious, this bag is not cheap. At $240 dollars without the shoulder strap and $30 dollars shipping this is not a cheap piece of luggage.

- not me (but posted for visual size comparison)

What you are getting for this price is what I believe is one of the best carry on bags available today. I have so far taken this bag to Vancouver, Scotland, Italy, and the Netherlands (all carry on) using Air Canada, BMI, Ryan Air, and Easy Jet airlines with no problem and testing each airlines baggage restrictions racks at the airport with this bag.

This bag fits pretty much every airlines carry on limit on the planet due to the fact of its particular size and the fact that it is not a rigid bag. However, I did see one airline in Rome with a weight limit of 7 kg which I had never heard of before and I really doubt this bag would fit within their baggage limit, that said I doubt I will ever fly with this no name airline.

I started looking for a new piece of luggage while thinking about switching my traveling style to carry on baggage only. It is just so much simpler to fly with carry on bags only, in so many ways that I don’t have to explain.

After searching the web and talking to a few people I realized one bag/no wheels luggage was the way to go. A bit of google searching and I found this bag based on a number of glowing reviews. I now have to agree with all the praise this bag gets. It is pretty much perfect.

To begin with… the size is perfect, as big as possible but not so big that you can’t carry on airlines like Ryan Air or EasyJet (the cheap euro airlines).

The convertible hideaway backpack is awesome. No, it is not the best backpack in the world but it is fine for a day walking around the streets of Rome with a full weeks of clothing in it without too much discomfort.

The $30 dollar addon shoulder strap is probably the best strap I have ever used and likely the best anywhere due to the stretchy soft material used that you kinda have to try to understand what I mean.

The material of the bag is top notch, basically bomb proof. It seems more durable than my Chrome Messenger bag as comparison.

Handles on the bag are where you need them when you need them and the bag is pretty good looking to boot.

I probably won’t go for anything smaller than this bag though as I found I wanted as much space as possible to make week long trips possible, which is very possible with this bag.

The duffle bag design is great. One big main pocket and the two side pockets divide everything logically and well. Making this even better are the optional packing cubes Tom Bihn sells to match the bag.

I decided to go for the two end cubes and one large cube and two small for the main compartment and am very very pleased with them. They make packing and unpacking amazingly easy… its actually pretty unbelievable to how awesome they are as the are so simple in concept but that concept works and works well.

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So I have described the basic parts of this bag but really the take away point is that this is probably the best carry on bag on the planet for trips up to a week long. One bag / no wheel travel is the way to go and there is a lot more information about this on the web one can easily find using google.

This kind of luxury does not come cheap at over $300 US fully loaded but I expect this bag to outlast me and I really like to support hand made locally (Seattle) craftman type products made by people who really care about what they do. The attention to detail and thought put into this bag really shine through.

To go along with bag I also purchased the Arc Teryx Cierzo 25.

At $80 dollars it is probably not worth the cost but at 415 g it is super super light and folds down to almost nothing (made of 100-denier nylon) making it an ideal companion to the aeronaut.

I use it as my day trip bag that so that I can leave the Tom Bihn where I am staying when I travel. This bag is a bit overkill for the purposes of a day bag but it performs well and is fairly comfortable.

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Overall scores according to me:

Tom Bihn Aeronaut : 5 / 5

Arc’teryx Cierzo 25: 4 / 5

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Let me know if you have any questions about either bag and I will do my best to answer them.

The era of watches: time is ticking down

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 03:59:08 -0500

Just had a thought… is the era of watches slowly coming to end? Now obviously clocks are not going anywhere, they are great on the walls of the gym, the walls of classroom, the train station, the airport, while scuba diving, ect … But personal time pieces worn on the wrist seem to be less and less noticeable on people in their 20’s.

Growing up I was really into watches. It seemed like something everyone wore. Watches seemed like they were maybe the only truly accepted piece of male jewelry. However, the rise of cellphones has basically brought this to a halt.

Cellphones have seemly made wrist watches redundant. What I am thinking is that as all these 20’s enter into their 30s they still won’t be wearing watches except on formal occasions. I don’t see the younger generations really getting into watches except for maybe those cool japanese wrist watches, yet even those seem less popular then they once were.

In 20 years time will no one be wearing watches??? What do you think?

WebLog Reboot

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:17:00 -0400

I did some house keeping on my blog recently, getting rid of a lot of the older posts and trying to leave just the ones that were heavily accessed via google searches and those which have some useful computerish/jonish information in them.

I decided to clean up and “professionalize” the content of my website a bit so that I could link it to my lab’s website : http://innovis.cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Soon I will have an expanded research section of this website detailing what I have worked on, what I am working on, and what I see myself working on in the future.

I know a lot of the content I have written in the past has perhaps been too personal to share as openly as I do so going forward I will try to focus my writing to things I wouldn’t mind anyone in the world reading. Maybe I should have done this long ago but at least I am doing it now.

In Jon related news, my apartment is now furnished with only a few more things to be built. I have a guestroom so please come and visit me and you will have an awesome and private place to stay.

I leave for Salt Lake in two weeks and still have a lot of work to do on my poster but as the time gets nearer I get more and more excited to get away and soak up my first real conference.

Also this week I am going to a surfnet workshop two day event held at the University of Calgary. I am trying out a new presentation style in which I will deliver a 60 second slide show containing 60 slides (1 slide / second). I am hoping it will be funny and interesting. Fingers crossed. There is an award being given out for best minute long presentation that I hope I will be in the running for.

So that’s what is new. I am super busy with school these days. Work is piling up and yet I am still trying to have fun when I can. I will try to update this blog more and will really especially try to update during VisWeek in Salt Lake.

Till then…

Art Interactivity

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:24:36 -0400

I have been thinking about an exhibit lately focusing on touch interactivity, audio prompts, and visual reveals.

The idea is pretty simple, a show case of different interaction metaphors which each reveal a visual piece of art or info-graphic. Leveraging iPads as the interaction canvases different interaction methods would reveal related work.

For example…

A pair of headphones is attached to one of the screen mounted on the gallery wall. When a person places the head phones on they hear the beating of a human heart. At first all that would be seen on the display would be the icon of a heart and a red circle. When a person taps inside the circle in time to the heard beat on the audio track the circle would slowly turn green indicating progress of the interaction (red - green traffic light progression). After a set number of correct taps in the right rhythm an info-graphic would be revealed above the interaction space of the canvas.

This sort of piece would invite the audience to play with the piece, discover the interaction naturally through visual feed back and transition an audio cue, to a touch interaction, and ultimately to visual reveal/reward. Such a piece would also invite other on lookers to observe the participant using the piece and study the interaction required to “unlock” the work.

Other such interactions could include having one hand of the participant move one touch point up and down and one touch point left to right using the other hand of the participant to reveal the work.

E.G.

I envision maybe 5 - 6 different interaction metaphors making up the exhibit, each interaction inviting trial and error, playfulness, observation, and discovery.

Let me know what you guys/girls think of this and if you might like to be involved. If you think this is just crazy let me know that to. :)

Acer 1830T First Benchmarks

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:48:00 -0400

Battery life via windows (everything at default)…

Internals of the 1830t.

My old computer benches at (Core2 Solo U35000 @ 1.40 ghz / 3 gigs of ram / mobile intel 4 series express):

But check out the 1830t:

Check out how the ssd in the old computer crushes the new one.

The cpu score with the i3 is over double that of an su3500.

Faster memory. Better graphics. Am I sold? I don’t know yet.

SSD for Me

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:37:00 -0400

Yesterday I bit the bullet and went out and got myself an Intel SSD hard drive. I was able to get an 80 gig drive for around $20 under cost and even still it wasn’t cheap, costing almost half the price of my current laptop (Gateway EC1803h).

I posted my windows experience index above and as you can see the score for the hard disk is incredibly high. As for real work noticeable differences, faster boot times, slightly faster hibernate times, faster app loading (eg. word loads almost instantly). However, after I get Word, Firefox, Tweetdeck, and Digsby loaded up the laptop runs about the same as it would with a regular hard drive.

The SD drive itself was noticeably lighter than the old hard drive it was replacing. My current laptop is a bit over 3 pounds so at this weight every gram counts.

I hope to get marginal improvements in battery life as well.

I bought the drive because I figured if I do get a new system in the near future I can just move the HD over and if I don’t get a new system at least my current setup will be a bit faster and hopefully more usable due to the speed increase.

So far I can’t say if the SSD was worth the price. The reviews of SSD drives on the web are crazy positive but I am gonna hold off on deciding how worthwhile they are a bit longer. So far so good though…

Tablets, Netbooks, Nooks, Galore

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:06:42 -0400

I am trying to decide if I should pick up a new laptop or tablet. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Here is some internal dialogue:

1. Do I need a new tablet, netbook, or ereader

Answer: No.

2. Should I get an ereader for reading papers?

Answer: No, I can’t annotate them with any kind of stylus. I also like physical paper and books.

3: Should I get a tablet?

Answer: For what I do, word, firefox, and digsby ~ maybe.

4. Should I get an iPad?

Answer: Not when things like this are coming out.

5. What about a laptop?

I am thinking about this one:

Thin, light (3 pounds), 8 + hours of battery, i3 culv processor and then I would add an 80 gig intel ssd hd (specs/link)

Price would come out to about $850 cad

…

To be honest I shouldn’t really buy any of these but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about all the new toys out there. My current laptop is fine cpu wise, the only thing that might be nice is better battery and an ssd drive.

I could buy an ssd drive and add it to the current laptop to see how I like it.

Another thought I have had is that if I am gonna upgrade then maybe I should get a 13” model but feel that 11.6” might be the perfect size.

Now the things about the toys is that none of them would break the bank. If I didn’t already have an 11.6” laptop I would get either a table or new laptop for sure. The question is whether to upgrade to a whole new machine when I don’t really need to, wait and then upgrade, get a new ssd drive and stick with the current machine, or buy nothing and save the cash.

What do you think blog-o-sphere?

Calibri

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:32:00 -0500

Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface family under the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection.

In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and replaced Arial as the default in PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook.

Calibri was designed by Lucas de Groot for Microsoft to take advantage of Microsoft’s ClearType rendering technology.

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FROM WIKI : Calibri

Availability

The typeface is distributed with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2007, and Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.

This typeface, along with Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel, is also distributed with the free Powerpoint 2007 Viewer^[2] and the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

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If you don’t have any of these products then have fun will arial or helvetica on this blog. Everyone else enjoy the clear type font :)

Temperature Affects on the Transmission of the Common Cold Virus

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:09:58 -0500

Hearing someone say they don’t want to catch cold as they bundle up to go outdoors bothers me all the time. It’s like saying, “Hey I am going outside, better wear a hat to avoid illiteracy.” It makes no sense!

Molecular surface of one variant of human rhinovirus.

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From the FBHC

“Does cold weather cause a cold?

Although many people are convinced that a cold results from exposure to cold weather, or from getting chilled or overheated, NIAID grantees have found that these conditions have little or no effect on the development or severity of a cold. Nor is susceptibility apparently related to factors such as exercise, diet, or enlarged tonsils or adenoids. On the other hand, research suggests that psychological stress, allergic disorders affecting the nasal passages or pharynx (throat), and menstrual cycles may have an impact on a person’s susceptibility to colds.”

END FREAKOUT

How to Eat A Chicken Wing

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:43:39 -0500

How to Eat A Chicken Wing

Rethinking My Desktop and Syncing My Online Persona

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:57:18 -0500

I am playing around with my desktop to make it more sleek, less cluttered, and more usable.

The first thing I did was install fences to group my desktop icons together. I placed the four most important things together at the bottom of my desktop and everything else will be dumped into the thin column on the left hand side of my desktop. Fences is nice in that when I mouse over to the think column a scroll bar appears and lets me see more icons in the list.

I also have object dock set to only display item that are actually indicators rather than simply short cuts. In case you are wondering the recycling bin lets me know if I have stuff in the trash or not by changing its appearance.

Next I removed all the program launching short cuts from my taskbar. I left Word as windows 7 has the nice feature of right clicking on pinned items and bringing up a list of the most recently used. I didn’t want to loose this feature at the cost of uniformity. Also, since the time I took the picture of my desktop I have also added the firefox shortcut back to my taskbar just because I use it so often (one click is easier then a few keyboard strokes sometimes). All the icons on the right side of taskbar are indicators aswell.

Basically what I am thinking is that, everything on the desktop should be an indicator & button rather than simply just a button.

I am using launchy to launch everything almost all of my applications now. No more icons and clicking around to launch programs for me. I will updated later on if this is actually a smart move but it seemed like an interesting experiment to try.

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Finally, I have started moving over to the email jonhaber @ instead of jon.haber @. The period was never really needed and I realized it can be an issue for mobile devices. I now have “jonathanhaber” @ gmail, @ twitter @ facebook as well as my standard jonhaber @ gmail. I think going forward this will streamline things. It also makes me wonder if I should get the jonathanhaber domain as well. What do you guys and girls think?

I want it! Wi-Fi Scale

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:35:14 -0500

This looks so cool. It would make tracking weight so easy. I think I would use it all the time if I had it.

Video of the Web Interface:

Video of the free Iphone App

and last but not least …

…. it posts to twitter.

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Price is $160. Thoughts?

New bottom bar on TwitCritics

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:53:22 -0500

From the TwitCritics Blog:

Slight tweak to our bottom bar. We are in the process of working on a lot of exciting big things but we are still paying attention to the little details that make your experiences on twitcritics as easy and understandable as possible.

Our careful and considered solution to the bottom bar design was to group items according to who we think will be using them.

General Users:

Home, About, Press, Contact

Developers / Power-users:

Blog, Widget

Business (is self explanatory)

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Here at TwitCritics we believe, “Little things can make a big difference”.

What's in a name? The usability of web names

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:41:00 -0500

I learned today that on the web a name is not just a name.

Example 1: http://pixelposition.com/hyphens-underscores/

On twitcritics we were using underscores on our links to movies ie: http://twitcritics.com/movies/men_who_stare_at_goats

This is not the best practice. FTA:

Concensus of “repeat opinion” is that hyphens have an SEO value. Why? We know hyphens are seen as word separators. We don’t know, for sure, how Google, Yahoo! and Live Search interpret underscores.

Google’s does give their recommendation for URL structure in their Help pages.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

Vanessa Fox wrote about best practices for image filenames on Jane and Robot. She discusses the issue in the following paragraph:

Make image filenames descriptive

If your filename includes multiple words, use hyphens to separate them (search engines tend to see a hyphen as a separator and an underscore as a joiner (so lavendar_plant would be seen as one word and lavender-plant would be seen as two).

The following is from April 2006 from Matt Cutts’ blog, Google’s chief engineer:

And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores…

I made a mistake when thinking about the design of our web links on twitcritics. I will learn from it and hopefully you can learn from my mistake before you do it too.

Example 2: Picking a twitter name

Users on twitter with number or underscores just get less followers. Don’t use them.

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Do:

try to make your name as short as possible, when people want to retweet your posts every character will count and 140 characters go quickly (why waste them with your user name?)
use your real name in your twitter user name, people are already hard enough to find online

Don’t:

use gimmicky names on twitter
use numbers or underscores

Objectified

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:44:00 -0500

I just watched the documentary “Objectified”. My brain is buzzing with hundreds of thoughts and comments. I want to get them all out but first I am going to re-watch this movie and write down my thoughts as I go. Expect to read a number of blog posts in the near future centered around design and interaction design. I highly recommend you watch (*download) this film. (btw the above video is just a short clip from the movie, the first guy who speaks is Dieter Rams, and you can see in just a few pictures how he influenced apple by following this link)

SimplyNoise.com - The best free white noise generator on the Internet.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:08:00 -0400

SimplyNoise.com - The best free white noise generator on the Internet.:

Pretty cool application.

First Impressions Review: Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:58:00 -0400

Picked up the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000 today. I was trying to decide between a bunch of different mouses. Most were too expensive. I was also looking at the VX nano logitech, the v550 logitech, and the microsoft arc mouse.

The arc didn’t have one of the new nice super small usb connectors that can be left in all the time. This mouse features something microsoft calls Bluetrack, which the arc also didn’t have, which is supposed to allow this mouse to track on any surface. I will mostly using this new mouse on my couchs arm rest with the new laptop so that is perfect for me. The logitech offers were all more expensive and I thought this new ms tech, supposedly the next step up from laser mouses, sounded smart.

The mouse feels good in my hand. I havn’t been able to make it looks tracking on any surface yet. The holder in the mouse for the usb adapter is really nice but I doubt I will be using it. Luckily this mouse has an on off button so I don’t have to put the adapter in the mouse to turn it off. No clue on battery life yet but microsoft says 10 + months.

The bad is the extra front left side button is too far forward which is a bit annoying as I have to readjust my hand on the mouse to use it. I don’t find the same problem with the extra front right button.

The size of the mouse fills good in my hand, the build quality seems top notch, and the finish and style of the mouse perfectly match my computer which is a big plus for me.

This mouse ended up being cheaper than any of the other mouses I was looking at after I price matched it at Future Shop with NCIX for $50.

For the features this mouse offers and that I was looking for (small usb adapter, good any surface tracking, and price) I think I found a winner.

First Impression Score: 8 / 10

First Impressions Review: Gateway EC Series ULV 11.6" Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:44:00 -0400

I bought a new laptop! This is the first new one since the 7” eeepc, which was a waste of money, and the computer I first got when I came to Guelph for undergrad in 2001.

It’s a Gateway EC Series ULV 11.6” Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 (currently only selling at future shop, not yet for sale in the states, it actually only came out friday at my local future shop, which I happened to visit randomly with a friend last friday). Usually when I think gateway I think ewwww but this machine caught my attention. The high rez LED backlite 11.6” (1366x768) screen present a real usual resolution. The older 10.1 ” and smaller netbook don’t have a workable resolution in my opinion.

It’s based off the new low voltage intel chipset with a core solo processor. Almost every other 11.6” CULV computer coming out comes with an atom processor. I think the single core 2 solo offered here is a better choice as I am using this maching as a desktop replacement / all round machine. With 3 gigs of ram and a 250 gig hd I have enough of ram and hd space standard.

One nice feature of this 11.6” plateform is the full sized keyboard if offers. However, the biggest issue so far for me when it comes to this computer is the keyboard. Although it is apparently stiffer then the competing 11.6” model from Acer (acer owns both acer and gateway) the english/french keyboard means the enter key is taller and skinnier and the left shift and right : and right \ are positioned in a funny way. I expect in time I will get used to it.

Battery life with the 6 cell battery is about 5 + hours. The new culv system and the led backlite screen makes this model great for battery life.

The touch pad is ok thus far but I dont know if I will use the gesture feature.

The left click button is a bit annoying. You can’t really click the far left of the key to depress the button because of how the button mechanism works. You have to press more towards the middle of the left click button to make it work. Same with the right click but the right side of it is hard to click in it’s case. I think I will get used to this as well.

As for video performance.

The good: 720p works and plays back smoothly. HD flash youtube works smoothly.

The bad: 1080 p does not play back smoothly. (I don’t download 1080p content so I can live with this)

The black casing on this machine is a finger print magnet but looks very nice. I like that the gateway logo on the lid is small. I am considering covering it on the underside of the monitor.

BTW I am running this machine with Windows 7 RC. I have no idea about running it with xp, vista (which is ships with), or linux.

Price: $560 (taxes in)

First Impression Score: 9 / 10

UPDATE:

I just wanted to update to say the scroll pad click buttons problems I was finding are really a non-issue.

I also discovered with the right video player I am able to play 1080 p content smoothly.

I got used to the keyboard in a week and now the enter key and left shift key are no longer an issue for me.

I often find the speakers in this laptop to quiet even when the system volume is a max.

I am still find this computer quick even when working with photoshop, dream weaver, firefox, and office at the same time. Still really happy with the purchase.

from flickr had a crappy day. could complain about it but...

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 02:30:00 -0400

from flickr

had a crappy day. could complain about it but instead here is something useful

Anatomy of a Cutting Diet

Mon, 25 May 2009 14:50:00 -0400

Today I begin my third cutting diet. I am currently 170 pounds. Soon I will be 155 pounds.

Let me start from the beginning. I could say that today I start my diet but that wouldn’t be specific enough. Really, we are all on diets all the time. We tend to associate the word diet with an effort to lose weight but a diet can be program to gain weight or simply a word to describe what we tend to eat. Diet need not be a four letter word. It is a descriptive word and an indication that we are giving conscious thought to what we are putting into our bodies.

Many people have tried changing their diet to lose weight. Almost everyone who is reading this will have tried at one point or another to diet in order to drops some pounds. It seems odd to me that something that is attempted by so many people is so poorly understood by almost as many people. I would like to describe to you what I feel a cutting diet should be like, the basic principles behind an effective diet from my own experiences, and correct some misunderstandings that lead to people beginning a diet and ultimately failing to lose weight.

Let’s start all the way back at the beginning. Without a foundation in the basics a diet is much less likely to work. The human body is an amazing thing but luckily it tends to operate in three simple states. The body is either growing, shrinking, or staying the same size. It is very important to understand that these states do not normally occur at the same time. This is important because it means it is foolish to attempt to gain muscle while losing body fat or vice versa. It just doesn’t work. When we decide to diet to lose weight we have to accept that we will lose some muscle. Do not believe any trainer that tells you that they can help you put on muscle while at the same time losing fat. This is why bodybuilders have two typical states of training: one called bulking where they gain fat and muscle and one called cutting where they lose fat and muscle. Their ultimate goal is to gain as much muscle and the least fat as possible while bulking and lose as much fat and the least amount of muscle when cutting. We should all be looking to do the same while cutting whether we be men or women.

The second basic misconception I hear a lot is that fat turns into muscle or vice versa. This is entirely impossible. The human body does not work this way. Fat cells cannot change into muscle and muscle cannot change into fat. A fat cell either fills or is emptied of its fatty contents. It will not change into a different type of cell through exercise. What this means though is that once we have this fat cell it is easier to fill then to produce a new cell and fill. What this boils down to is that once we get fat and diet down it will be easier for us to get fat again later on as compared to someone who never had as many fat cells in the first place.

It is also important to use the right language to help us on our cutting diet. The terms we will use will be anabolic, meaning to grow, or catabolic, meaning to shrink. We will approach our diet with a systematic approach. We do this by realizing what a diet really is.

A cutting diet is forcing the body into caloric negative state or a catabolic state. That is the be all and end all of what it means to be on a diet in order to lose weight. Anything other than being in a caloric negative state will not result in weight lose.

This is the most important thing to know for a cutting diet. Eating the same foods as always and adding exercise may not work. If you already eating too many calories and are in a caloric surplus state then exercising won’t do anything to help you shed the pounds.

We will get to a caloric negative state by first understanding our caloric maintenance requirements. That is, we will find out how that range of caloric intake where we will neither be gaining weight (growing) or losing weight (shriking). This may be a small range or a large range depending on your body and your metabolism. We figure out this caloric amount through trial and error, guessing, and estimation. For me I know that if I eat around 2200 calories I will lose a bit of weight. Above 2200 calories my bodies just stays the same. Therefore when I am trying to lose weight I want to eat 2000-2200 calories a day and here is why…

To be dieting to lose weight I want to be in a catabolic state, a state in which I am losing weight. However, I don’t want to lose a lot of muscle while I am loosing body fat. I don’t think anyone, men or women, really ever need to lose muscle. In order to lose body fat while limiting how much muscle I lose I want to be in a catabolic state BUT JUST BAIRLY.

Like I said before the body is pretty amazing and if we force our body into a deep catabolic state, i.e. a very low caloric intake that becomes a large caloric negative state, our body will respond by slowing our metabolism and go into what is normally called “starvation mode”. If this happens our weight lose will happen just very very slowly. What we really want to do is to “trick” our body into losing weight. By consuming a diet with a slightly deficient number of calories while allowing our metabolism to stay elevated. We will be in a caloric deficiency but our body will not respond as if we were starving. Our high metabolism will cause the weight lose and not our exercise and we never want to negatively affect our metabolism by eating too little!

There are tools we can use to help us attain this state. This is where exercise comes into play and also the timing of how we eat our food.

When it comes to dieting to lose weight EXCERSICE IS SECONDARY TO EATING CORRECTLY. Exercise will be a tool we use to keep our metabolic rate, or our metabolism, elevated. That is all it will be used for. I actually recommend you totally forget about the number of calories you burn during exercise. It is almost meaningless for most people. Exercise burns so few calories it is not worth worrying about until we are at an advanced level of dieting and have practiced with dieting. Why exercise does work to help us burn calories is because it gets our metabolic rate to become elevated and this metabolic rate stays elevated even after the exercise is over. Most of the calories burned from exercise happen after we have stopped the exercise! We continue to burn calories for hours after we stop exercising.

What I personally recommend is weight lifting instead of cardio if one wants to lose weight and only has a short bit of time in the gym. Weight lifting will raise your metabolic rate more than cardio will and has the benefit of helping you maintain muscle mass while your body loses muscle and body fat during the cutting diet. If cardio is fun for you then short (15-30 minutes) of low intensity cardio should be enough (120 heart beats a minute) to get your metabolic rate up. Again, don’t worry about the calories burned during exercise.

Other important things to know… two things that burn A LOT of calories… having muscle mass and EATING. Someone with more muscle will burn more calories just sitting on their butt then someone will less muscle sitting on their butt. Having muscle increases your metabolic rate and it is important to know that muscle has a higher caloric requirement then body fat in a resting phase (the phase we are in most of the time). As important to know is that eating burns a lot of calories. Eating is a great way to lose weight!!!

Repeating again… eating is a great way to lose weight. Eating burns calories and increases our metabolic rate!! Hooray! This means we should be eating all the time right? Correct!

If we are eating all the time it should be easy for use to avoid going too low into caloric deficiency and therefore into starvation mode. How do we eat all the time but stay out of our caloric maintenance phase and in our caloric deficient phase??? We eat a lot of small meals throughout the entire day :)

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Here is an example of what I mean:

Based on a 2100 calorie cutting diet for my body:

Meal one: 400 calories (A big breakfast is really important, it gets your metabolism going after sleeping. During sleep your metabolic rate slows and this is not what we want when dieting to lose weight. This should be the biggest meal of the day!)

Meal two: snack 200 calories

Meal three: 300 calories (lunch)

Meal four: pre gym meal 300 calories

Meal five: post gym meal 300 calories

Meal six: an hour after the gym lets eat again – 300 calories

Meal seven: right before bed to keep our metabolism going before sleep let’s eat 300 calories

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This diet outlines how we can get the calorie count we want and spread it out throughout the day. 200-300 calories isn’t a lot but if you eat often enough you should never be that hungry. (keep in mind you caloric requirement to cut weight will not be the same as mine). If you do get hungry try downing an entire glass of water in one go and then wait 10 minutes. In our North American society we often mistake thirst as hunger, how crazy is that!

What do we eat for those calories throughout the day? Healthy food. You already know what they are. Vegetables and fruit. Good slow absorbing carbs like oatmeal or non-white pastas. Brown rice. Lean sources of protein, chicken, steak, turkey, pork, ect … good fats from things like almonds and other nuts along with fish, drink lots of water, whey powder if you want before and right after the gym. We don’t have to be too strict here we just have to know we are inside our caloric window. This typically means that eating out at restaurants is hard though because we can’t be sure what we are getting. Cooking at home isn’t really a big deal though and it allows us to know exactly what we are eating.

The best part, take one day off your diet one day a week and eat whatever you want! This is called a “cheat” day or if you prefer a “cheat meal” (this is one cheat meal instead of an entire cheat day). It gives us a rest from our diet. It makes you pumped to get back on your diet the next day after you cheat and it gives your brain a rest from dieting. It also gives your metabolic rate a kick in the junk and helps insure we don’t fall into the dreaded starvation mode.

So now you know what I think about dieting. Forget eating a cupcake and running on a treadmill to burn off the exact number of calories, it just doesn’t work as a long term solution. What does work is cutting the way I have outlined above until we arrive at our desired body weight and then switching back to caloric maintenance amount. Using the approach above you can expect to lose 0.5-2 pounds a week. Ideally we don’t want to lose much more than 1 pound a week. Crash diets don’t work in the long term. If you find that you are not losing any weight then reduce you daily calorie intake by 200 calories, reduce each meal throughout the day appropriately. Repeat this 200 calorie drop until you are at about a 1 pound loss a week and then maintain that level of calories for the day.

(just a note: if you finding drops the calories isn’t working try eating more! I have made this mistake before. I was eating 1800 calories a day, my diet started to stall out, and nothing was happening. I upped my calorie intake to 2200 and the weight started to come off once again)

I hope this was all helpful. If you have any questions just ask. Happy dieting :)