I Has Foodz Issues: Part II

I've been on this diet for 2 weeks now. So far I've lost 8 lbs and the cravings have gone away for the moment; but I've been irritable and cranky. Then I happened to be reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting and it mentioned irritability as a symptom of dieting.

So today I just feel like doing nothing, and just vegging out in my bed, watching movies. Blah. I have articles to write, and a batch of other projects I'd love to get going on, but every time I start to do them, I just feel repelled.

It seems pretty clear it's the diet. But I doubt it has anything to do with any particular vitamin deficiency. I'm getting all the nutrition I need, and then some; but my caloric intake has really gone down. So wherever this bad mood is coming from, I'm guessing it's related to calories alone.

On the other hand, I'm also pretty sure the bad mood will clear up in time. It's probably the result of the sudden change, not to mention all the withdrawal I must be experiencing, from grease, salt, and sugar. I'd be amazed if I did this sudden dietary change, and just felt great right away. I have to pay my dues.

This reminds me of when I gave up caffeine recently. I felt awful for quite awhile, but then I was free. This has to be the same exact thing. It's amazing how nonfunctional I feel. As I write, the words seem very poorly thought out.

So yeah, this is clearly one of the early tests, where my strength of resolve has to be equal to the challenge of losing the ability to reason. And through it all, I have to remember the massive temptation that lies probably months in the future, and not get lost in any sort of "hey, I'm losing so much weight" euphoria.

Still though - blah.

I Has Foodz Issues

I've changed my diet. In fact, I've really only decided to eat healthy foods, i.e. mainly vegetables, but also some fish. The idea of a 'diet' as a special new understanding of what's healthy seems like the result of so many fad diets being on the market, like the one saying you should eat mainly meat and fat. Ugh.

Science pretty well knows what a good diet is. We may not have a perfect picture of the nutrients required for optimal health, but the picture is still pretty clear by now, and we know which foods will give us those nutrients, and which foods will include too much of various things like salt and sugar.

The problem isn't identifying the good stuff to eat anymore. The problem is that people have all kind of crazy ideas about the ways we need to eat; and people have all kinds of crazy issues like cravings and an inability to control hunger.

The cornerstone of my new diet is essentially the idea that if I can't find anything to eat that fits my diet, I'm going to go without. That doesn't sound very radical to me; it just means that I'll wait until I find healthy food somewhere, rather than just eat the unhealthy food that's put in front of me.

This has provoked universal consternation from everyone I talk to. Immediately they're conjuring images of a hunger strike. Zack has gone insane! He's not eating! Is this a syndrome? How could this happen???

All I'm saying is, if a big plate of pasta and mashed potatoes comes my way, I'm not going to eat it, but instead wait until I can find some nice vegetables.

It seems perfectly sensible to me, but it really has produced a huge uproar whenever I tell someone new about my dietary changes.

Another thing that seems almost universal is this idea that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." When I tell people that I don't eat breakfast, they completely wig out. But not one of them can actually justify this idea. The argument in favor of breakfast basically is, it jumpstarts your metabolism.

Why would I want my metabolism jumpstarted? Well, they answer, it will cause you to burn calories.

But does my metabolism really burn so many calories that the whole breakfast I've just eaten will be burned off before lunch?

No one really has an answer to this. I think it's because people mainly just accept that theory without question because they then have an excuse to eat a big breakfast. They don't want to lose the whole "most important meal" theory, because they wouldn't be able to have their flap jacks and bacon.

As far as I can see, the difference in the number of calories my metabolism burns just on its own, versus the number of calories I burn on an empty stomach in the morning, can't be such a large number. Maybe in the double digits? A breakfast with a double digit number of calories might be a container of yogurt or a glass of orange juice. That's the kind of breakfast that must be advocated if someone insists on the whole "most important meal" concept. But that's not the breakfast I hear people advocating.

Getting back to my specific approach though; I'm attempting to deal with the cravings and other eating urges that have been overwhelming me. If I'll just eat whatever's in front of me, I'll never be eating healthy. I'm surrounded almost all day by very unhealthy choices. And my job serves free, very tasty, yet also largely unhealthy, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. If I try to make a small change, as I've tried in the past, it might proceed for awhile, but eventually I just drift right back to eating too much of the wrong stuff again.

Another problem is, if I go a little further, and make a larger change, like cutting out the bad foods, and trying to set up some kind of regimen where I always eat well, then I start getting cravings. Hoo boy will I start getting cravings. After a few weeks, it can become intolerable. And then, if anything happens to disrupt my carefully planned regimen, I can become completely overwhelmed and just pig out, and fall totally off the wagon.

Hence my current diet plan, which I chose specifically to deal with those hard cases. It does me no good to set up a very fragile, brittle approach to eating, if that approach is just going to break at the first shock. What I need is an approach that can withstand the exceptional circumstances as well as my daily life.

So, by design, my intention to "do without" if I can't get what I want, is an attempt to address cravings, and situations where my routine has been disrupted. My focus is on those inevitable events, because those are the events that always beat me. My plan has to address the real problem.

So, some people have said I should carry healthy snacks around with me, so I never run into a situation where I have to "do without".

Bad idea. First of all, I'd eat all the snacks right away, and then what? I'm stuck with no snacks again, facing cravings and temptation.

But the main thing is, if I try to rely on keeping snacks with me, and creating an environment where I never experience being deprived of food, then I'll be all the more likely to fail when I am one day confronted with that situation. I wouldn't be solving anything, just making myself weaker and more vulnerable.

So, my experience with my current new diet so far has been very difficult. I'm eating well. I have a large, vegetable-heavy salad for lunch every day, which gives me a lot of everything except a few vitamins that I can pick up elsewhere. For dinner I have a larger meal, typically with fish, or at least a larger quantity of stuff than what I had for lunch. And I'm losing weight at a healthy and not too aggressive rate. I'm not starving myself, I'm doing OK.

BUT.

The cravings are so powerful, it's a nightmare. Each time I try to control my eating, the cravings and temptations get worse. If I'm with someone who's eating something, I crave whatever they're eating.

The cool thing is, because of my simple protocol of "doing without", I don't feel any actual compulsion to act on these cravings. I experience them merely as a symptom, something that triggers my "do without" protocol.

Still though, it's extremely distracting. I really hope that the cravings start to subside in the next couple months.

Also, if the diet follows the same path as quitting smoking (which it really does seem to), the cravings will subside, and then will come back somewhere down the road in a sudden massive attack that will be extremely difficult to resist.

So that's my plan. Weather the current cravings, keep my guard up even as those cravings subside, and be prepared to resist the larger wave of cravings that will hit me once I do finally start to relax my guard.

I'm kind of hoping it's like cigarettes. I quit those, and got a lot of practice trying and failing, before I managed it. Now I have a lot of practice trying and failing to get my eating under control. If the addiction is similar, I may be able to use my cigarette experience to advantage here.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Crumble Rules

I've been playing crumble for a couple of years now, and the rules are no longer changing. I think the game is done. Every once in awhile I consider ditching one or more rules that seem difficult to explain to new players; but I always decide that those rules make the game much better than it would otherwise be.

Take joins. They typically never happen in the early part of the game, and you can definitely get some good play without resorting to them. But having the option to do a join is a very powerful weapon that forces the opponent to take your pieces seriously, even your pieces are smaller than theirs. Without the threat of a join, a player could simply ignore the smaller pieces on the board, until the entire position became completely immobile.

Even relatively obscure elements of joins, such as the ability to join many pieces into one, seem essential. Not only do they allow sudden interaction with much larger pieces, but they also make it possible to create regions of the board that are completely distinct from other regions, like a world within a world.

Long splits are another feature that sometimes gets criticism, though it's used much more frequently than joins. But long splits are one of the major ways that multiple simultaneous attacks can be launched. This is something that is so difficult to set up in a game like chess. In crumble, multiple attacks are much more common, and they add an element of force to games of even relative beginners, that you'd almost never see in chess.

It's the same right down the line. People criticize captures on the same grounds - takes up time to explain how it works. But capturing is important because it forces players to maintain cohesion between their pieces. In general, the entire game position is always very significant in crumble. Without captures, you'd end up with little pockets of pieces everywhere, not really doing anything, but just hanging out, waiting. With the possibility of captures, most of the pieces on the board have to remain focused on protecting one another.

Other rules come under criticism for more legitimate reasons. Why is it necessary to be able to divide the pieces down into other, arbitrarily smaller pieces? Why not have a reasonable limit?

That's something I have to answer on more abstract terms. For one thing, imposing a limit would mean that at a certain level of recursion, the very strategy and nature of the game would completely change, in order to accommodate that limit. For another thing, that limit would put an inherent limit on the ultimate complexity of the game. And one of my goals when I first started thinking about designing a game, was to create something that didn't suffer from having a finite game tree. I wanted something whose complexity would grow to match the needs of its players. The game of checkers has already been solved, and chess is not far behind. Unless an entirely new approach to game analysis is discovered, that fate will never befall crumble.

It can be frustrating to introduce someone new to crumble, and see them shake their head sadly at the 'obvious' mistakes I've made in its design. But without exception, those people are looking at the game in terms of irrelevancies. They have no clue of the justifications behind each rule of crumble, they only think in terms of how well it could be packaged or marketed.

My idea is, first you get the good idea, then you get other good ideas that solve the packaging and marketing problems that may stand in its way. But you don't cripple your good idea just because it would be easier to fit it in a box.

For example, I've had consistent problems writing down the rules. I've written them down a number of different times in a number of different ways, but each attempt has been unsatisfactory. The problem is that the rules do require a lot of explanation. But another problem is that the more explanation I give, the more likely it is that a newcomer will miss something I've clearly explained.

So, this is an example of needing to have more good ideas in order to solve the problems surrounding the good ideas I've already had. There has to be a way to express these rules clearly and concisely, so that people find it easy to get started.

One reason I know there has to be a way is because once a player learns the rules and gets comfortable with them, oftentimes they'll remark that the rules are actually extremely simple, once you know them. In other words, they're clear, intuitive, and result in easy-to-follow moves by both players. I just need to find a way to express them, so that all the details are just obvious. Maybe there's a natural analogy somewhere, or a set of natural analogies, that would make a lot of the nuance of the rules seem obvious to all concerned.

That's what I'm thinking about lately. I'm trying to write the rules down again, in yet another way that will hopefully be easy to read. So far, though, the new text is still relatively long. I have to keep working on it.