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Sunday, May 22, 2011

About fitness and coding

First things first .. I was always a fat guy and people acknowledge that. But as a programmer (since 2002 :) ) I thought it was not relevant. I also thought programmers should drink tons of coffee and oceans of Coca-Cola.
After reaching a disastrous .. mortal obesity area at around 140 kg(roughly 312 pounds) due to the sedentary life style and being chronically tired I started to change my lifestyle and lost some pounds .. at a more normal 120kg.
In January 2010 I had 95.5 kg .. an almost normal not overweight condition. Still the hardest thing for me to give up was Coca-Cola and coffee . Whenever I was tired I would add more coca Cola and more coffee.

Meanwhile I had started a desperate cross-traininig running 1km (with this bodyweight what can you expect ... ) and biking 15 km. I could not see any relevant drops from the 121-122 mark ..
And then Thursday (May 19) I dropped completely Coca-cola and coffee. Yes I was sleepy for a while .. but look at the chart below





Also I am now able to take slow lunches and really chew the food .. something I was not doing before.
And that's not all. My appetite is now normal .. I do not feel the need to eat a lot. And at the last weighting today I had reached 118.5 kg (which I had not reached since January).
My completely distorted image of programmers eating tons of pizza's and drinking lots of Coke's is definitely history. I have met several good programmers that are vegetarians , only drink tea and have a normal attitude towards food.

With the risk of making a full of myself I am writing here my objectives :
June 1st : 115-118 kg
July 1st : 105-110 kg
August 1st 95-100 kg
September 1st 85-90kg
I realize this is pretty ambitious but as a software engineer I need to optimize my body weight first .. before optimizing anything else :).
Why is this related to coding ? Due to sleep apnea you get to actually be tired and fall asleep on the keyboard/laptop.
Sleep apnea is basically a condition that does not allow you to rest at night .. and makes you tired all day long. Your effectiveness during daytime is half lost even as you add more and more coffee .. the problem does not go away. Soon you loose your ability to focus .. you are grumpy and burned out.
Granted I lost a day (which I almost recovered today) programming but it was not a problem as the
benefits outrank the costs. Yes some people do not have that day but I think it would be a good investment to make if you had it.
These last 3 days made me believe that eating healthy food and programming are not excluding each other .. hope I can prove it by completely changing my diet.