Fish Out of Order, Daily Edition

One of my more subtle ways in which I intend to beat the machine is by having regular tiny breaks from my sedentary 9-5 coding lifestyle.

I regularly sit in my chair continuously until lunch, often even through lunch. I’ve always known you should take breaks and have a stretch, but apparently not doing so is even worse than I thought.

Problem is, if I keep my eye on the clock and do a few stretches every thirty minutes, that great new habit is going to last, oh, all of thirty minutes. I can’t be thinking about that at the same time as focusing on work.

The other problem is that I might be at a loss as to what to do. “Okay, stretch. Take a break. Right. Should I do a lap around the office? Stretch my arms? Ummm…” Cue ten minutes passing. If I have to think about what I’m going to do, it’ll take me too much out of what I’m working on. I just don’t have the mental clarity for that kind of thing right now.

I looked through a bunch of pieces of freeware, shareware (and unsurprisingly, malware) proclaiming to remind you to stretch at set intervals, but none of them could convince me that they’d actually work.

I was about to call the whole thing off when finally I found something that didn’t suck, and that thing is called Big Stretch Reminder coded by a web developer by the name of Matt Lester. No spyware, and it’s free! Hooray for Matt! I will totally give you money once I’ve paid off my debt!

What makes BSR cool is that it avoids being bloatware (only 300kb, most of the other were 13mb or more) by being streamlined and straightforward. You can decide how often it bugs you (I’ve set it to thirty minutes) and you can get it to give you either a subtle reminder, or an in-your-face reminder that locks your computer down for the number of minutes you specify (I chose two minutes). You can skip a lockdown if it is inconvenient at that moment, but because it’s so much more difficult to ignore it’s been working much better for me.

The best bit is, you can get it to display a randomly-selected message from an XML file in the program’s installation folder every time it locks your computer. You can edit the XML file in something like Notepad for all kinds of goodness.

Matt populated the XML file largely with facts about RSI, but I have replaced all his facts with challenges for me to do within the two minute lockdown. I’ve written about 30 or so, and each have a different set of stretches, or 2-minute long activity for me to do to get my body moving.

And it’s awesome. I’ve been feeling more alert and focused. My muscles aren’t aching after spending 4+ hours without moving. And I don’t have to think, just do what the screen tells me to do. Woo! That’s my kind of mindless existence!

Hi, kids. Today we’re going to learn about how your body uses nutrients, how it affects sleep, and what I’m doing about it.

I’ve been working with a fitness/nutritionist expert once a month on improving my overall fitness level. He has a machine that examines how much fat, muscle, and water in your body there is, as well as doing monthly tests on my toxicity levels. The toxicity thing is just a quick measure to look at how inflamed muscle tissue is, it doesn’t test for specific substances in the body.

That said, they did do a specific mineral analysis on me two years ago and I had off-the-chart levels of copper in my body. High copper levels can come from a multitude of sources – my mum probably already had high copper while she was pregnant with me  – and drinking a lot of unfiltered water from older, rusting water pipes probably significantly increased my copper levels.

The reason why you don’t want high copper is because while in trace amounts it is desirable, in large amounts it will block your body’s ability to absorb other useful nutrients; zinc and magnesium particularly. It’s probably one of the factors behind why I have such frequent insomnia (magnesium plays a key role in allowing your body to relax and fall asleep, and zinc improves the quality of sleep). If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s a great local doctor by the name of Doctor Dingle who’s written about this at length in an accessible fashion in books. He also does seminars and the like.

I don't know what my copper levels are like right now, but they're probably improved on what they were two years ago. I'll get another test in a year or so when I feel I can spend the money on it.

Anyway, over the Christmas break I managed to gain half a kilo of fat and one kilo of water. The fat isn't a big shock, given the way I ate at various family gatherings, but the kilo of water? My body was holding on to the extra water because I'd dropped of my exercise over my three weeks off, and I spent a lot of time dehydrated, which makes the body attempt to become a camel. It's just a thing that bodies do. Explains why I was feeling so sluggish in my third week off.

Anyway. Now we come to my three goals for the year. One is to pass Level 4 of the Japanese Language proficiency test in December. The second is to put enough money aside to manage a 2-3 week trip to visit my friends in Japan in the second half of the year.

The third goal is to get my nutritionist's machine to guess my age correctly.

The machine gives you an 'age' rank based on physical fitness, and while I'm chronologically 26, my muscle/toxicity/fat is that of a 32 year old. Could be worse. Still, I'm determined to get it to 26. Why? Because even though I don't know where exactly my life is going, I'm enjoying it. And the only thing that could really get in the way right now is poor health. So I am determined to do everything I can to make sure I'm as robust and healthy as possible.

That will also involve several trips to a quality skin specialist (not MoleScan - every MoleScan staff member I've ever met seemed to hate both their job and the world in general) because the number one killer in my family is cancer.

I'm going to write about some of the things I'm doing to improve my health in the next entry.