This year has been an up an down year...

If up means weight, then mainly up. It seems that while I’m traveling, I’ve managed to gain weight. I’m not as into regular exercising as I was last year and I am probably eating too much at the breakfast buffets at the hotel. I’m haven’t quite figured out the correlation between eating too much at the breakfast buffets and gaining weight, but I’ll probably figure it out.

At any rate, based on the previous post that sitting is probably one of the worst things you can do all day from a health perspective, I have been using the counter as my new home office desk so that I stand while working. And it is a lot of work!

Unfortunately I haven’t had any time to exercise ever since coming back from my previous business trip, and I don’t know if it is just my body trying to get back to its earlier weight, but so far, I’m getting much closer to weight I was earlier this year.

I have a new admiration for people who have to be on their feet for their jobs.

Also, I have an additional strategy for losing weight. It is to chew my food 30 times before swallowing. I tried looking up some info about this, but most of the pages which refer to chewing well in relation to weight loss mention the fact that it takes time for the brain to register you are full. However, there was some show where someone lost weight simply by chewing his food 30 times (not more, not less). Of course, it has to do with the fact that by chewing thoroughly, it will take longer so your brain has a chance to register you are full, but this show also indicated that the act of chewing helped signal to your brain that it is getting satisfied from a hunger point of view. Therefore, in theory, this means chewing well in itself also allows your brain to feel it is full. And finally, this person chewed his food exactly 30 times, not more. My theory with that is if it takes you more than 30 chews to swallow, you’ve probably taken more than you need in one mouthful. By learning how to chew exactly 30 times, you learn the right proportion for each mouthful making it, which per above, helps prevent overeating.

Of course, counting 30 times is quite monotonous, but I break it into 3×10 segments… That is, whenever I remember to count at all.

See more progress on: get in shape