The Cheap Man's Weight Loss Plan

I ended up selling the PowerWatch on Ebay. It was a nice experiment, but ultimately, there's enough of a margin of error built into calorie counting that having a wildly inaccurate step count just wasn't going to cut it. Fitbit has a really slick, comprehensive system, and if I'm going to abandon it for anything, it'd better be good. If you're going to use anything other than your phone as a step-tracker, it's hard to go wrong with a Fitbit. There's something to be said about having a simple dashboard of all your body's input/output environmentals without having to sync between different fitness and nutrition apps. I really love my Fitbit One since I wear it on my hip, it lasts the better part of a week and it leaves my watch wrist free to experiment with different watches and watch styles without screwing up my fitness tracking system. Now that the weather is just back to just regular cold instead of bitter Arctic cold, I'm back on my bike commu...

Cutting my own hair is one of the things I've always wanted to do but never could work up the nerve to actually try until recently. I know many bald guys have been doing it for a while - one of the few perks of losing your hair, I'd imagine. Just buzz what's left as tight as you want, and you're done. But, for those of us who've managed to hold onto our hair on top of our head a little longer, cutting your hair seems like a very risky proposition. I work an office job, so keeping a low profile for a week or two after royally screwing up isn't really an option. This made the economics of trying it more trouble than it was worth, or so I thought. After all, if it was so easy, why do no one other than bald guys cut their own hair? I didn't know of any. $20 after tip every couple of months seemed like a pretty pointless amount of money to worry about, even for a cheapo. Part of the problem, however, was that I'd either have to hurry over after work ...

For the first time, I've hit consecutive weeks where my weight hasn't budged, hovering around 158. This isn't a bad thing as I don't have that much extra body fat left to lose. It's been a brutally cold winter, so I haven't been able to ride my bike into work as much or walk my dogs as long. So, my natural weight is probably a couple of pounds less than what it is now on a 2000 calorie a day budget. I also had a gut buster of a guys weekend the weekend before last , so that skewed my numbers a little. But, it's clear that my weight loss is slowing down. The reduced activity has me constantly bumping up against my calorie consumption rate throughout the day in my Fitbit dashboard and makes me jealous of those who live in warmer climates. I'd imagine they'd probably tell me to try going for a walk in July when it's 90 degrees at night. Speaking of the Fitbit, my new human powered, thermoelectric replacement - the Matrix Powerwatch, has str...

I started working on the pantry and freezer at our vacation home. Because we're not out here all the time, we lose a lot of food to spoilage. It's also tough to keep track of which essentials we have and what we're missing. I'm debating over whether I should try to keep an inventory list, but it might be kind of tough. We entertain a lot, so we get a lot of unusual leftovers. So, maybe I'll just stick to inventorying condiments and freezer items. When you shop in bulk, it's easy to overbuy condiments which have a relatively limited shelf life, and freezer items occupy premium space. Somehow after organizing the freezer, I ended up with less space than when I started even though I threw out a handful of freezer burned items. I guess I shouldn't be surprised though as we had it packed to the gills in a disorganized mess. Fish on the same shelf as fries, fruit and cheese - what? Putting away stuff in our freezer was like a Tetris game - whatever way ...

...or random sundry items left by the last Airbnb guests. Sometimes money just falls into the cheap man's hands. While none of this is particularly healthy or filling, there are enough calories here to sustain a human being for perhaps another week or more. As we've discussed, breaded, deep fried gristle can be healthy if served in the right quantities, so it's always good to have some of these things on hand if you live with or ever happen to entertain those not on the cheapo plan. The money you spend on those things still come out of the same pocket as your power foods, so you might as well keep some stocked. Besides, if North Korea launches or there's a meteor strike or something, it's all calories on deck anyway, so it's always good to hoard up.

You know how I've been saying that your activity tracker should become a permanent extension of your body? Well, this one truly is. I have no idea how this thing is going to work out, but out of the box it has one big advantage over my Fitbit: it charges off my body heat. That's right, it'll run until I'm dead and then another several years after I'm in the box. It basically takes the differences between your skin temperature and ambient temperature to generate power. That means if I go out for a walk in the freezing January temperatures, it should charge super fast - inside, less so. It's also waterproof to 50m, so I'll never need to take it off. First impressions: out of the box, the app menu is simple enough to operate. I had it up and syncing with my phone in no time: It comes in a few different trims - a silver, an all black and then a "Black Ops" one that I think kind of looks like a Casio G-Shock. The silver bezel was the cheap...

The Perfect Storm: Wings, Beer, Ribs, Bacon, Baked Beans, Donuts, Chips, Dips. If there was a more efficient way to consume that many calories in one weekend, I don't know what it'd be. If I ate any vegetables all weekend, they could have fit on a tea saucer. I barely cracked 10,000 steps the first day, 8,000 the next. Fortunately, these weekends are extremely rare, or I'd probably weigh 400 pounds. Of course, I'm just estimating on the calorie count. It could be a little more or less, but it would have been about impossible to calculate. Some of the guys were joking about how it's like taking the max stroke penalty on a hole in golf. "Let's just be gentlemen and assign you a somewhat respectable approximation of how much you stuffed your face and move onto the next hole." The Cheapo Rules require that I step on the scale every morning, and so step on the scale I did. I had crept up a little heading into the weekend, almost as if my body was pr...