Weight loss update 7

So, this is just a minor update because my rate of weight loss is now slowing noticably. Over the last four weeks or so, I've been maintaining an average 1.5kg/week loss, while on a day-to-day basis, fluctuating madly. The overall trajectory is still in the right direction though.

And this morning, for the first time in many years, I tipped the scales at less than 100kg (just under: 99.8kg!) Although it's just a few hundred grammes down from the start of the week, seeing a whole digit disappear from my weight makes me feel pretty happy this morning!

The biggest recent change in my routine has been to switch to bicycle as my mode of commuting to and from work. I'll write more on that subject later, but from a weight-loss perspective, the ride two ways adds an extra energy burn to my day that's about the same as my daily gym routine!

I've also made a slight change to that routine. I used to do a brisk walk (6.5km/h) for 20 minutes on a treadmill, followed by 20 minutes of maintaining 60RPM on an elliptical machine. Now, I'm running (slowly, 8km/h) for 40 minutes instead. This has increased my overall calorie burn slightly, while hopefully also building my endurance for events like my weekly ParkRun and other fun runs that I plan to participate in.

My initial weight-loss goal, that I set in January, is now less than 10kg away, and these new boosts to my activity will hopefully see me there in around a month, I hope :) 

Places I'd like to visit in the United States

During 2015, I've taken on the challenge of reshaping my body. But there's other work I want to do on my personal development too, and one of these items involves confronting a very specific anxiety I have around authority figures, including cops and all kinds of security goons.

One of the consequences of this anxiety is that I don't fly. When I tell people that I don't fly, they usually assume it to be a fear of flight; and then those who know me and my fascination with aviation find it incongruous. In fact, I have no fear of flight, and would quite happily go up in all kinds of flying machines that probably nobody in their right mind should. It's getting through the security checkpoints and customs at airports that freaks me out (and which becomes, as you can imagine, a vicious circle). So there's a lot of the world I would like to see but haven't.

I don't yet have any plan for doing anything about this. But maybe dreaming, and engaging with my motivations is a start (as it was for the body transformation).

A couple of family members are planning a trip to the United States next year. I have no intention of joining them for that. But their plans did get me thinking about what would I like to see in the United States if I were ever to go there? I tried to make a list of 10 things, but it ended up being 17. I also couldn't rank them: the top couple are easy, but after that, ranking became difficult but also pretty irrelevant.

So here are 17 places I'd like to visit in the USA, presented in order of increasing longitude.

Photo by Fawcett5 via Wikipedia
Released into the public domain

Museum of Flight
Seattle, Washington
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

The Museum of Flight is one of the largest privately-operated aerospace museums in the world, with around 150 aircraft and spacecraft in its collection. The museum has strong ties to Boeing, and preserves the "Red Barn", a two-storey wooden building that was Boeing's original manufacturing facility. These ties also manifest in the museum's collection, which contains examples of most significant Boeing aircraft, including the 737 and 747 prototypes and reproductions of Boeing's earliest designs. The museum is even home to the mockup of the Boeing 2707, the manufacturer's abortive supersonic airliner of the 1970s (albeit currently in their off-site storage facility). This is a must-see for its collection of commercial transport aircraft.

USAF photo
In the public domain

Air Force Flight Test Museum
Edwards Air Force Base, California
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

What this museum lacks in size, it more than makes up for in "exotic". It's located on Edwards Air Force Base itself, where the United States has tested advances in aeronautical technology for 70 years. The highlights of the collection are the experimental aircraft (including many "X-planes") or their replicas preserved here, together with the prototypes of other aircraft that later made it into mass production. By their nature, most of the aircraft at this museum are one-of-a-kind and historic, and include such delightful oddities as the X-36 and X-48.

Photo by Dustin May
CC-BY-SA

Planes of Fame
Chino, California
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

Planes of Fame houses a collection of rare and unusual aircraft. Many of them are military aircraft of the Axis powers of World War II, rescued from scrapping by the museum's founders after the US military had finished evaluating them. In fact, this private museum houses the finest collection of Japanese aircraft of the period anywhere in the world, including the only airworthy Mitsubishi Zero still with its original engine, plus exotic types like the only surviving Shusui rocket-powered fighter. Rare German exhibits include a Heinkel He 162 jet fighter (pictured) and a Horten H.IV flying wing.

Photo by Jeff Keyser
CC-BY

Titan Missile Museum
Green Valley, Arizona
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

This museum is a Titan II inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) preserved in its launch silo together with a replica of its nuclear warhead. The museum not only preserves and displays this weapon, but its support and launch facilities as well: eight levels underground. At its deepest point, visitors can stand under the Titan II's main engines. This is the only museum of its kind anywhere in the world!

Photo by Frank Kovalchek
CC-BY

Pima Air and Space Museum
Tucson, Arizona
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

Another one of the world's largest privately-run aerospace museums, Pima has a surprising number of giant aircraft in its collection, including bombers like the B-36 and B-52, tankers like the KC-97 and KC-135, and cargo planes like the C-124 and C-133. There's even a "Super Guppy", formerly used by NASA to airfreight rocket stages across the USA. Apart from these aerial behemoths, the museum also preserves examples of a large proportion of America's military aircraft types from the 1940s to the present day.

Photo by Aaron Anderer
CC-BY-ND

National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
Albuquerque, New Mexico
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

This museum preserves the history of America's nuclear research, with a particular emphasis on the development of atomic weapons during World War II and into the Cold War. Highlights of the collection include full-size replicas of the "Little Boy" atomic bomb used to destroy Hiroshima (pictured) and the "Fat Man" bomb used to destroy Nagasaki (yellow casing can be glimpsed at top right of picture). The casings of two of the atomic weapons lost in and recovered from the Mediterranean Sea in the Palomares accident are also on display.

Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda
CC-BY

White Sands Missile Range Museum
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

White Sands was the home to America's early rocketry experiments in the 1940s and 50s, and continues as a US Army missile test facility to this day. The museum preserves around 50 missiles ranging from captured German missiles from World War II up to modern systems like the Patriot. White Sands also hosted the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, the first artificial atomic explosion, and the museum preserves artefacts from that work as well. (The Trinity test site is nearby, but is accessible to the public on only one day per year. It would be cool to time a visit to coincide with that...)

Photo by Randy Read
CC-BY

Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center
Hutchinson, Kansas
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

The Cosmosphere houses a huge collection of American and Russian space hardware: the largest collection of the former outside Washington DC, and the largest collection of the latter outside Moscow. Particular highlights include a flight-ready backup for Sputnik 1, a Vostok capsule, Mercury capsule Liberty Bell 7, and Odyssey—Apollo 13's command module.

Aside: note the Titan II rocket at the left of the photo. Configured here to launch astronauts aboard a Gemini space capsule, this is the same vehicle described in an entry above, but configured there to launch a nuclear warhead—its original intended purpose. To be interested in the history of space exploration is inevitably to be interested in the history of weapons of mass destruction.

Photo by The Austinot
CC-BY-NC

Space Center Houston
Houston, Texas
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

The museum attached to NASA's Johnson Space Center exhibits artefacts related to America's human spaceflight programmes. Even the highlights are far too many to call out here, so I'll name just two: the Skylab training mockup, and the shuttlecraft Galileo prop from the original series of Star Trek. Both these items relate very strongly to my early interest in spaceflight: a childhood interest that has become a lifelong passion. Skylab was America's first space station, which made an uncontrolled re-entry in mid 1979. Growing up in Australia at the time, the news was full of Skylab, since Australia was right in the path of where it might come down. (In the end, most of it ended up in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. But I remember the Courier Mail front page with the headline "Mind Your Heads!" from Skylab's last days.)

Photo by Tim Wilson
CC-BY

Golden Wings Flying Museum
Blaine, Minnesota
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

This small museum is home to a collection of aircraft from America's "Golden Age" of flying: the 1920s and 30s. By then, the aeroplane had been matured over the battlefields of the First World War, and new frontiers of air travel were opening up. Daring aviators competed for records of speed and endurance, and transporting passengers and mail by air became a commercial reality. The collection at Golden Wings captures some of that romance, including six of the big, metal trimotors of the era, together with recreational biplanes. Look at the Ford Trimotor pictured (yes, that Ford; they used to build planes as well) and note that both Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart piloted this particular plane.

Photo by Bill Abbott
CC-BY

EAA AirVenture Museum
Oshkosh, Wisconsin
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

America maintains a very healthy culture of aeronautical experimentation, in which dedicated amateurs build their own aircraft, either from kits or plans of other people's designs, or of designs all their very own. The Experimental Aircraft Association supports and encourages these activities nation-wide, and this museum is a testament to some of the tremendous innovation of people building their own planes and rotorcraft. Once a year, it's also home to the world's biggest fly-in and airshow, EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. With other entries on this list emphasising the cutting edge of aerospace development, this collection is based around the simple and ingenious.

Photo by Greg Goebel
CC-BY-SA

National Naval Aviation Museum
Pensacola, Florida
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

I have a particular soft spot for naval aviation. I find flight amazing and exciting enough as it is, but this branch of aviation adds an extra layer of difficulty by doing it all from a moving ship at sea! The US Navy's aviation museum preserves that history, and includes examples of every major aircraft type operated from America's aircraft carriers, together with experimental and shore-based maritime aircraft.

Photo by Rian Castillo
CC-BY-NC-ND

US Space and Rocket Center
Huntsville, Alabama
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

Proposed by the father of American spaceflight, Wernher von Braun, and nestled in the swamps of Alabama, this is a treasure-trove of American spaceflight, emphasising human spaceflight missions. There's an interesting engineering focus to the collection too, with a large number of rocket engines on display. These include that of the V-2 missile (the first rocket into space), the F-1 engine that launched American astronauts to the moon, the re-usable Space Shuttle Main Engine, and a prototype of NERVA, America's nuclear rocket engine that was intended to power a mission to Mars in the 1970s.

Photo by Valder137 via Wikimedia Commons
CC-BY

National Museum of the United States Air Force
Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

As the name suggests, this is the definitive collection of American land-based warplanes, with examples of every type of these aircraft that the USAF and its predecessor forces have operated in any number. There are over 360 aircraft on display here, also making it one of the world's largest aerospace museums. In among the historically important types are a few of my favourite prototypes as well, ranging from the tiny and weird XF-85 Goblin "parasite fighter" to the XB-70 Valkyrie, which I hold to be one of the most beautiful machines ever to fly.

Photo by Lee Cannon
CC-BY-SA

Kennedy Space Center   
Merritt Island, Florida
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

One of the two most important space launch facilities on the planet, the Kennedy Space Center also hosts a large museum of American spaceflight artefacts. In particular, it is the only place that preserves examples of every type of spacecraft and launch vehicle that has carried American astronauts into space. Apart from this hardware, the visitor center also presents reproductions of launch control rooms. One of these is even animated to re-create a Saturn V moon rocket launch, that of Apollo 8.

Aside: that's a mission I have a particular fondness for, stemming from a record that I grew up with. Shipped with National Geographic, Apollo 8's commander, Frank Borman, presented Sounds of the Space Age. You can hear it online here. I think his charisma comes through loud and clear.

Photo by Jawed Karim
CC-BY-SA

Photo by Chris Devers
CC-BY-NC-ND

National Air and Space Museum
Washington, DC
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]
and its annex, the
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
Chantilly, Virginia
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

This is the jewel in the crown: if there were only one place on this list that I could visit, this would have to be it. Well, it's two places really, the museum itself and its vast storage annex. The top photo is the entrance hall of the museum in which you can see all in just this one shot: Spirit of St Louis (the plane flown by Charles Lindberg on the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic), Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis (the plane flown by Chuck Yeager as the first contolled flight through the sound barrier), the Apollo 11 command module (that carried the first crew of astronauts to the moon) and SpaceShipOne (the first human-carrying spacecraft developed and launched by a private company). The lower photo is of the storage annex, which includes, among many other highly significant machines, Space Shuttle Discovery, and Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped an atomic weapon on Hiroshima (the silver plane with the number "82" on the fuselage in the middle of the photo).

Photo by Phillip Capper
CC-BY

Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome  
Red Hook, New York
[location] [website] [Wikipedia]

Finally, an extraordinary collection of vintage aircraft, including the second-oldest (by only a few months!) airworthy aircraft in the world, a 1909 Blériot XI. The focus of the collection is aviation from the beginning of powered flight up to the "Golden Age" of the 1930s. Most of the collection is flyable, and much of it is made up of original aircraft, in addition to faithful modern reproductions. The museum also displays an extensive collection of vintage aircraft engines.

Weight loss update 6

So today, I passed my next weight loss milestone: I have lost 40kg since January 1 (40.9 to be exact). I now weigh 101.7kg. With a BMI of 30.0m/kg², it also means that I am no longer obese by definition. I have not weighed so little since a few weeks in 2008, then a few weeks in 2005.  Right now, I'm feeling pretty chuffed. I'm still hoping to hit my "get here and re-appraise" goal of losing 52kg by sometime in early July.

The service  that I used to do pretty graphs in previous posts (Highcharts) has changed its business model slightly, so I don't have these ready yet. I'll update when I do, but sorry for the wall of text in the meantime.

Maintenance-plan wise, I've discovered at least one form of physical recreation that I enjoy: Zumba! I attended a series of free classes run by the  Medibank Feel Good Program at Southbank in March–April, enjoyed them, and today attended one that was a Brisbane City Council Active Parks event. It's not something I would do for its own sake, but as part of a strategy to stay in shape, I find it agreeable enough to continue with.

I've also joined Parkrun and completed two 5-km runs on consecutive Saturdays. Again, this is not something I'd do for its own sake, but striving to beat a personal best time does appeal to me. And again, this is something I could imagine myself doing post-weight-loss.

Finally, I'm learning to ride a bike. The results so far suggest to me that riding to work, at least in the Winter months, is a realistic goal. Initially, I believed that balance would be the big obstacle, but this didn't turn out to be a big problem for me. After an hour, I could confidently balance on the bike and control it while it rolled down a grassy incline. After another hour-long session today, I can steer and pedal as well (all still on grass).

So, the maintenance plan for July and beyond now looks like this:

• After I hit my initial goal weight, I will continue aggressively losing weight on the current scheme for a while longer. I'm thinking the final target should be around the 82kg mark, a loss of 60kg, because:
• I know that the weights I measure at the moment are my body empty of food, and somewhat dehydrated. I know that normal amounts of food and fluid add something like 2kg–3kg to my weight on the scales.
• I want to create a 5kg buffer zone within which I will maintain my weight. 
• I will continue daily weighings. If my weight ever reaches 90kg, I will embark on the same aggressive weight loss programme that has been so successful for me this year until I drive my weight back down to 82kg.
• I will eat according to a 5:2 plan, which worked for me in late 2014 to arrest weight gain.
• I will discontinue daily gym visits, but I will: 
• continue with Parkrun
• look for a Zumba class to continue with
• buy a bicycle and use it for my daily commute to work, at least in Winter. 
• maintain my gym membership so that if I need it for a future rapid weight-loss program, it's there, in place and ready to go.
• continue exploring new forms of physical recreation in case I ever do find something I like enough to do for its own sake. 
• Continually revisit and adjust this plan as necessary

I will have no idea how well this will work until after I go ahead and do it.

But today, I am happy with how far I've come so far.

Weight loss update 5

This is old news now, delayed by very limited Internet access at the moment, but a week ago, I passed  another milestone: 30kg lost since January 1. 

I'll have graphs and data later, although at the speed at which a resolution is progressing, I'd hope to be close to the next milestone by then! 

Vale Leonard Nimoy

Part of growing older is watching your heroes and idols wink out of existence one after the other, and my day today began with the news that Leonard Nimoy is gone too. The character of Spock that he co-created has had an enormous impact on my life, and I am deeply saddened at the loss.

His passing brings forcefully to mind his fictional death as Spock at the finale of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan all those years ago. In today's information- and spoiler-rich world, it's hard to explain what a shock that was in 1982.

The first I even knew that there was a new Star Trek film coming was a couple of weeks from its Australian release, when the cinema pages of the Courier Mail suddenly started carrying advertisements with a daily countdown. The ads showed the film poster with a caption like "It is now 10 days till Stardate 8130.3"

When my Dad took me to see it at what was then the Valley Twin cinema, I had absolutely no idea what the movie was about or what was waiting for me at its end. (Later in the 80s, the Valley Twin was to become a porn cinema when that was still a thing. In the 90s or early 00s, it was a Cantonese cinema. Now it's The Globe).

This film told a very different Star Trek story! I was shocked at a Captain Kirk who had grown old and bitter (then reassured when a crisis brought him back to form). But that was nothing compared to the stunning realisation that there was no eleventh-hour reprieve for Spock putting himself in mortal danger to save the starship Enterprise. This was a moment for Blake's 7, not Star Trek! Right up to the funeral scene, I was still waiting for some quirk of Vulcan physiology or a miracle cure by Dr McCoy to reveal that Spock was all right after all. It didn't come. I remember my tears and my Dad's laconic reassurances that it's just a movie. He bought me the novelisation and the soundtrack cassette in the foyer and we went home.

Within a year or two, a schoolteacher would give my class an exercise to produce a short piece of reflective writing on the topic of "my friend" or perhaps "my best friend". In that rural hellhole, I didn't have anyone in my life I would have called a friend. So I wrote about Spock instead, how we had travelled together on the most incredible imaginary journeys and how his death had affected me. I was there! I was right there! I saw it happen right in front of my eyes! I was given a low grade with the comment that this should have been about a real friend. Even at that point in life, I had already learned it would have been futile to explain how I truly felt closer to an imaginary alien than to anyone in that room, so I didn't argue the point.


...an imaginary alien whom Mr Nimoy brought to unforgettable life, and gave a young nerd in a bad place—and many many others like him all over the world—someone to believe in and look up to.

So although I never met him, I am missing him tonight.

Weight loss update 4

I've reached a new milestone today. I have now lost over 25 kg since 1 January; 25.8 kg actually, which puts me about half-way towards my goal:

And, for the first time, I'm staring down my shame and publishing the actual values here. On 1 January, I weighed 142.6 kg. Today, I weigh 116.8 kg. My target is 90 kg, at which point I'll work out what I want to do next based on how I feel about my appearance.

Weight loss has settled down to an average of 2.1 kg per week, consistent over the last 2 weeks and over the last 4 weeks. This lines up well with my rough prediction of 2.5 kg per week based on my daily intake, daily activity and my last-measured resting metabolic rate. Some of my readers will understand how happy it makes me that the experimental data is matching the prediction from the model so well.

I'm still using races against historical data to keep me focused and motivated. Every day or two I lovingly examine the graphs, turning them over in my mind. Here's me beating my previous journey down to 120 kg:

And now here's me racing against two previous campaigns to reach 110 kg:

(The different shapes of the graphs reflect weekly weighings in the past versus the daily weighings I do now.)

The 2011 data I'm racing here was part of a longer campaign and so doesn't include the rapid drop that the start of a campaign always includes. The 2012 data includes such a drop though, and beating that will be difficult in the first week of March.  

If I can maintain my current rate of loss, I will reach my 90 kg target at the end of May. Therefore, in April, I will need to firm up plans for the weight-maintenance project that will follow this weight-loss project at its successful conclusion.

For now, I am starting to think about what form of sport or physical recreation might appeal to me more than 3AM gym visits. Ideas so far include dance and renaissance fencing. If dance, then Latin (there seems to be many options in Brisbane) or flamenco interest me. I've also returned to the notion of cycling to work as an option for the cooler 6 months of the year. All this is still months away, but I'm keen to hear people's experiences with (or interest in) any of the things I've named, or other ideas I might not have yet considered.

Charts again by the Highcharts Cloud tool, which I love.

Weight loss update 3

I've reached a new milestone today. I have now lost 20 kg since 1 January:

Divisions represent 5-kg intervals.

I'll admit that I've found the last few weeks a bit discouraging and frustrating. Of course, the rate of weight loss has tapered off a bit. Knowing from experience to expect this has certainly helped cushion the disappointment though.

To help keep me motivated, I'm also tracking my progress against a past weight-loss campaign from September 2010. I've transposed my data from then onto a 2015 calendar so I can compare my efforts:

Intervals here represent 2.5 kg. The different shapes of the curves come from weekly weighings in 2010 compared to daily weighings today. The 2010 curve includes the lowest point I reached on that particular campaign. But in 2015, I plan to go far, far beyond there. When I do, I'll create a new "race" using data from a different campaign (and then try to beat it, both in absolute terms and in rate-of-loss).

Staying ahead of my past self certainly helps stay on track :)

Charts again by the Highcharts Cloud tool, which I love.