So, how did I reach a result of 3250 calories? That number is based on my BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) multiplied by an activity factor. To work out my BMR I used the Harris-Benedict formula:

• Men: h = 66.4730 + (13.7516 x w) + (5.0033 x s) – (6.7550 x a)
• Women: h = 655.0955 + (9.5634 x w) + (1.8496 x s) – (4.6756 x a)

where h = total heat production per 24 hours at complete rest in kcals, w = weight in kilograms, s = stature (height) in centimeters, and a = age in years.

Obviously noone is totally at rest for 24 hours a day (except maybe a coma patient) so the resultant number then has to be multiplied by an activity factor.

• If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
• If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
• If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
• If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
• If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9

Okay, so now for a bit of maths, I used the following stats to calulate: weight: 76kg, height: 190cm, age: 23. Plugging these numbers into the formula above results in the following; h = 66 + (13.75 x 76) + (5 x 190) – (6.75 x 23); this gives me a result of 1906. Now for my activity factor, I picked 1.7 as I lift hard 4 days a week (Tue – Fri) and then I also cycle hard on the weekend. I lowered the number slightly because I only do exercise 6 days a week and I sometimes go pretty easy on my cycling. So, 1906 x 1.7 = 3240, and like I’ve already been doing throughout I round it off, thus I get 3250 rounded to the nearest 50.

For those wondering, yes I am still pretty thin even with all of the training and eating I do, 76kg at 190cm (6′3″) puts me in a healthy weight range, but it also means I have hardly any muscle bulk. For those interested I peaked at around 86kg a few months ago. I’m still in the process of determining how my body reacts to what I give it, so yes, I am purposefully losing weight right now. I did originally screw up for the first year or so as I didn’t quite educate myself properly, I’ve slowly rectified that in the last few months and changed my diet entirely.

Getting fit, looking good, having strength, etc. is basically about 90% nutrition and 10% training. Genetics also play a huge role and can make things a lot easier or difficult depending on your heritage. I unfortunately inherited the “more difficult” genetics.

That’s the quantity of calories I should be eating in order to maintain the current body structure I have — if I were an average that is.

diet
–noun
1. food and drink considered in terms of its qualities, composition, and its effects on health: Milk is a wholesome article of diet.
2. a particular selection of food, esp. as designed or prescribed to improve a person’s physical condition or to prevent or treat a disease: a diet low in sugar.
3. such a selection or a limitation on the amount a person eats for reducing weight: No pie for me, I’m on a diet.
4. the foods eaten, as by a particular person or group: The native diet consists of fish and fruit.
5. food or feed habitually eaten or provided: The rabbits were fed a diet of carrots and lettuce.
6. anything that is habitually provided or partaken of: Television has given us a steady diet of game shows and soap operas.
–verb (used with object)
7. to regulate the food of, esp. in order to improve the physical condition.
8. to feed.
–verb (used without object)
9. to select or limit the food one eats to improve one’s physical condition or to lose weight: I’ve dieted all month and lost only one pound.
10. to eat or feed according to the requirements of a diet.
–adjective
11. suitable for consumption with a weight-reduction diet; dietetic: diet soft drinks.

Telling people you’re on a diet to maintain your current weight, or even gain weight, generally gets you a few rather odd looks and many rather curious (snide? dubious? derisive?) comments. It’s quite hard to understand really. Many people seem to believe that the only time you “diet” is when you’re trying to lose weight, it’s these same people that end up using crap and unhealthy diets like the Atkins (sorry Dr Atkins you’ve been deluding house wives for almost 40 years now; many of your principles are valid, however your implementation is not) diet for fast results and end up yoyoing up and down on these things.

Losing weight is easy, losing fat is not. There is no quick solution so I don’t know how people get it into their heads that they’re able to lose in excess of 5kg / week or something equally ridiculous. The only people who can even approach numbers like that are the morbidly obese. Marketing is a wonderful thing… those people you always see in TV ads, many of them start out ripped and then gain a bunch of fat for the before and after pics.

Just as an aside, a can of coke contains roughly 140 calories of carbs. In this form it’s basically pure simple sugar, so it gets metabolised very quickly and isn’t really used for much. Also something to note is that the average person who doesn’t do any physical activities probably doesn’t even hit 2000 calories a day for maintenance requirements. Anyone doing the maths yet? Here’s some more numbers, there are roughly 4 calories in a gram of carbohydrate, 4 calories in a gram of protein, 9 calories in a gram of fat, and for all you drinkers out there 9 calories in a gram of alcohol. The first 3 have nutritional value, alcohol however does not, hence the term “empty calorie” often gets bandied about. Empty calories tend to get converted straight into fat and are present in many popular “foods” — anything with sugar basically, as well as dense saturated fats. To lose weight, it’s quite simple, your body needs to burn more calories than it consumes.

Anyways, this post got sidetracked quite a bit so I’ll probably follow up with a proper one where I explain things a bit better. I’m sure many people aren’t even remotely interested, this is just something that has quite a life changing impact on me.

I’ve never been one to talk about movies. For the most part they bore me, not only that, but the story is generally so short-lived and atomic that they usually go nowhere and have build absolutely no connection. As a result I watch movies purely for entertainment value and never look for a deeper meaning — does anyone remember people having arguments over what was truly meant in the original Matrix movie? I just laughed at those people and carried on with my life.

Anyways I really enjoyed 300, more for its incredible use of CG enhancements and amazing auditory experience than actual story. Though I mostly enjoyed people getting slaughtered and maimed. Saying I only enjoy movies with extreme violence wouldn’t be far from the truth.

I know now, this is who I really am inside.

That’s how many weeks it took to get police clearence on my bike. Thus, the reason I haven’t blogged about my bike yet. It’s ready for collection though, just waiting for paperwork to be finalised. I like to be legal and all.

Otherwise I’m looking forward to getting back on now; there’s a long weekend next weekend so that should provide a few mornings for me to burn in the mountain passes. But, being Easter there’s probably going to an exhorbitant amount of traffic.

No, I’m actually not. But the banks like to believe I am, how else am I supposed to pay off all the loans they’ve been throwing at me?

So yesterday I receive another one of those typical “Your loan has been approved” letters in the post. With the amount of these I get from various institutions and whatnot, I could have bought a small house with the “instant cash” from all these loans.

I guess noone should be surprised to hear that the offer expires on 31 May. It’s just getting ridiculous now that there’s going to be a bunch of credit laws coming into effect. Since those laws were announced, the amount of loan offers I get have pretty much doubled and I doubt they’re going to ease off right up until the cutoff. The banks just love screwing the average consumer don’t they? They just have to lock people into those long term loans before they get bitchslapped by the government. The big four are definitely looking out for the welfare of this country…

Too bad that I didn’t accept a single one. I already have way too much debt thanks to the car, and also thanks to the people who can’t manage their debt, my repayments have gone up a fair bit.

Driving home from work yesterday I hear sirens. So I check my mirrors and there’s a police van coming up on my left with his right indicator flashing. I, being at the front of the queue about to turn right (there was a green turning arrow) decided to do what any decent person should do; it doesn’t exactly take a brain surgeon to figure out what the van wanted to do. I yielded, in doing so I held up the traffic behind me and promptly got hooted at… WHAT?

Which brings me to my point. What is wrong with people that they can’t be inconvenienced for 10 seconds? Many times I’ve seen people just sit there, completely oblivious to the ambulance or police behind them running full lights and sirens. Are you so important that you can’t give way? There might be someone bleeding to death in the back of that ambulance.

Also, countless times I’ve heard people argue that police abuse their sirens and lights just to skip through intersections and then promptly turn them off. Ever heard of running silent; so as not to alert criminals? Think about it for a second, would you rather surprise criminals and catch them in the act or give them plenty of warning to flee. Of course, this is the ever-present selfishness of our road users shining through time and time again. Of course no amount of preaching will ever cure such an entrenched attitude problem.

So I went to check out my new bike. For those who aren’t aware it’s a Honda VFR400 NC30; and now that I think about it I completely forgot to check what year it was. It doesn’t really matter though; I assume it’s a ‘95 or ‘96.

The pictures are a bit bad, but it was really hard to get any decent photos. Getting a decent angle would have been all but impossible, as should be obvious if you look at the amount of bikes in there. There were a good 20-or-so bikes in his tiny little back yard, he even had his own bikes inside his lounge.

The red is being redone up to look a lot brighter (like the red bike next to it), but the original tri-colours are remaining, so the blue and white will get redone as well. The pipe is going to get swapped as that one has a slight dent in it. If there are any steel brake lines, I’ll get those as well. All in all, once the bike has been fixed up and completely assembled it should look pretty good.

The tyres don’t have too much life left in them unfortunately, so that will probably set me back a good R1.5k after a couple months of riding. The red seat may also get swapped for a black one, I’m still undecided on that point. Otherwise the grips suck… oh well. There’s no barends, which isn’t such an issue since it’s easy enough to buy a set. The problem will be getting matching bolts. I may just leave them off, hopefully I won’t get numb hand syndrome, as the barends actually provide a damping effect. The chain and sprockets may also need to be changed at some point. I’ll probably also get the wheels striped, red or white — anything to increase the value of the bike for when I sell it.

Monotony. That word pretty much sums up what I’m feeling, thinking and experiencing in my daily life. What was once a boon in where I could lackadaisically go about my day-to-day business without much care has become a double-edged sword which has cut quite deep.

Okay, methaphors aside, I’m pretty much bored. This isn’t new, as there’s not much that can hold my attention and interest for longer than a few minutes (adult ADHD?). However it has reached a crux where I’m starting to act and do things about it, it’s all very tentative at the moment so I’ll clarify everything in a future post (some already know what I’m referring to).

I really enjoy gym. I also really enjoy cycling. But above all I enjoy riding. This has of course been denied to me for the last 19 months or so as a result of my accident. After having a really bad experience in getting everything sorted out and losing a large chunk of money in the process I quite simply couldn’t afford to just get back on the horse so to speak. In the end I just cut my losses, discarded the whole issue and reinforced my cynic attitude. Absolutely.

The boredom mainly stems from my current line of employment. It takes up a large chunk of my time obviously. The problem is I don’t enjoy it a single bit, and the situation isn’t likely to improve. I originally wanted to specialise in Java development but that got thrown to the wayside in favour of C++; per my employers instructions of course. My “holding” contract expires at the end of April, so hopefully more things will change there.

I apologise to the poor souls who struggled to read through this rather vague, abbreviated and poorly structured entry — it really didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned.

At the beginning of January I ordered a game from England (Ninja Gaiden Black) and over six weeks later it still hasn’t arrived. I contacted the seller chatted with them, and it seems that my package has just dissapeared into the void known as the postal service; at least they’ve given me a full refund. But now I’m stuck with no game, and the money is in my Paypal account so it’s pretty much useless to me anyways. Great…

Last time I had lost a package it took 4 months to track down. It was stuck in some post depot, just not going anywhere because some retard put a sticker ON TOP OF THE DESTINATION ADDRESS. Yeah, that’s clever. The least they could have done was return to sender. But no, we had to pay to have the package returned and resent. This sort of thing annoys me, mainly because my mate that sent me the package ended up footing the bill to fix what is essentially a screw up on their part.

As to what’s happened to my latest parcel, who knows? Stolen… possibly. Stuck in a depot somewhere… probably. There’s no real good reason to steal my item, it was an old XBOX game that’s not really worth much. Maybe some post office worker really wanted it. Unfortunately this item did not get shipping with a tracking number (even though I paid £5 to ship a £10 item), so trying to find it will be an exercise in futility. I phoned customs yesterday and they flatly refused to help me without a tracking number. I don’t know when this policy changed because I’ve tracked down stuff without a tracking number before — my name has always been enough to find my parcels. They even told me they used to track parcels without a tracking number, but will no longer do it… thanks buddy, you’ve been a great help.

So in the end I’m just going to forget about the money I’ve lost and order another copy (I really want this game). Even ordering a second copy will work out cheaper than if I had tried to source it locally. Oh well, I guess you can’t win them all, I just hope whoever has my NGB is enjoying the damn thing.

• Assassin’s Creed
• Halo 3
• Blue Dragon
• Mass Effect
• Ghost Recond Advanced Warfighter 2
• Bioshock
• Alan Wake
• Stranglehold

2007 looks to be quite a nice year for XBOX 360 owners, so I definitely don’t regret spending an exhorbitant amount of money. That is my personal *ordered* list of anticipated titles for 2007; hopefully none of these will be pushed back into 2008 or get released all at the same time — otherwise I’m going to be a very poor sod.

Other notables include: Too Human, Kane & Lynch, Cry On, Lost Odyssey, Fable 2 and Turok. Though some of these are slated for 2007, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be released. The first 2 games are JRPG’s so it will probably be quite a while for them to translate and release them and Fable 2 is pretty much confirmed to be for 2008.

One thing I’m quite dissapointed about is that Blue Dragon only has a release date way off in November (EU release). This game was released in Japan in December, so that’s quite a long delay. Oh well…

Assassin’s Creed also got delayed to late 2007, so who knows. It’s made by the same people who made the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy so I’m expecting quite a lot from the game. Hopefully I won’t be dissapointed as the PoP games, though frustrating at times, were still some of my all-time favourites.

Another thing to note is that many of these games are now using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3.0. It’s a brilliant engine and I’m rather intrigued to see different types of games using it, such as the upcoming Mortal Kombat game. Just take a look at the list of current games using UE3, the most obvious use being Gears of War.