Inconceivable!

Ex Diaeta

2005-09-25T10:51:00.000-04:00

Since it's the end of my usual 5-month Blog hibernation cycle, I seem to be having the urge to write again.

A lot has happened between the "IDD" post and the Sheehan post. One of the most significant (by no means the most significant, but that's another story) has been my effort to get a weak, flabby, hypertensive, anxious body into reasonable shape. I don't say "back" into reasonable shape because I've really never been there. Except for a brief (meaning one semester) period of improved fitness required by a PE class in college, and a two-year period in Cameroon where Barb and I both alternated between being fit enough to function and being too sick to function, my body's been obstinate. Somehow I was never able to convince it to get itself in shape. I offered it everything - cookies, ice cream, cake, chips, popcorn - to try to get it to see my point, but it refused.

It took a combination of steadily rising blood pressure and mounting levels of anxiety to convince me to take control. Like many Americans, I have over the last several years had torrid affairs with flashy diets that have breezed through the media, luring us with promises of quick success. Sugar Busters, Atkins, The Zone, The South Beach Diet, The Abs Diet - they all gave results, with varying degrees of success, but every single time I reached that level of success, some holiday would roll around and I'd end up feeling like I had to be rolled around. Over the course of just a few days, my weight would shoot up five or six pounds. my energy level would plummet, and I'd find myself back on the sofa eating a whole bag of Doritos or two or three bowls of ice cream.

Finally, I started to notice something. All these diets relied on just one or two threads of science, then built the rest of the diet around them. Sugar Busters told me to eschew processed sugar and focus on foods with a low glycemic index. Atkins told me that carbs should be limited and introduced me to ketosis. The Zone said that I should keep my diet within a narrow window of macronutrient percentages. South Beach was sort of a rationalization of all three of the others. The Abs Diet introduced the concept of raising metabolism through aerobics and strength training, combining exercise with portion control. It seemed as though everyone was focusing on a specific piece of a bigger picture. Why?

Here's today's lesson, folks. It's as clear a picture as I've ever seen of the damaging role marketing can play in our society. Marketing has nothing to do with objectivity. Marketing experts and many entrepreneurs analyze culture, seeking to exploit weaknesses as opportunities to profit. The profitability formula for a diet exploits three primary cultural weaknesses: (1) We like to indulge ourselves with little concern about the cost; (2) We are obsessed with how we look; (3) We have short attention spans and very little self-discipline.

Applying this formula to diet results in a plan with these three corresponding characteristics: (1) Limit specific foods or food types, but keep the plan simple and offer acceptable (and expensive) alternatives that you have branded as "approved"; (2) Promise (and bombard the consumer with pictures of) dramatic results; (3) promise those results in three months or less. (In fairness, most of the diets I tried or looked at discussed long-term maintenance, but usually only as an appendix or a short section at the end of the book.)

So now, armed with that understanding, I could see why our society's obsession with diets has landed us here in 2005 with the highest percentages of overweight and obese children and adults in history. We look at diets the same way we look at auto tune-ups and repairs: not as fundamental paradigm shifts but as maintenance events. The problem is that our culture does not support good health (the existence of certain entities who have the gall to refer to themselves as "Health Maintenance Organizations" notwithstanding). Moving from passivity to self-discipline is the primary requirement, and, as is the case with so many things in modern American society, as long as we depend on external entities (HMO's, doctors, diet hawkers, employers) to lead us by the hand, we'll always end up at their destination, not ours. Good health is a long-term commitment, not a periodic repair job.

After nosing around on the web for a while, I did find a plan that has been almost universally praised by the few unbiased sources I was able to locate. Lest you begin to think I'm going to point you to some altruistic non-profit or government sponsored agency, let me be clear. This plan is being marketed as well, but by its author, who has self-published. He is accepting your money for an e-book just as Dr. Atkins accepted your money for all his books. The difference is that, once you download the book, you'll find no additional marketing gimmicks: no supplements, no magazine subscriptions, no online weight loss software. Just several hundred pages of really good information that presents diet and nutrition holistically. You get the whole story, not just bits and pieces.

This has gotten too long already, but I'll give you a link in a minute and say more in later posts. Let me close with my before and after stats. They say all that needs to be said, except that this really has been a lifestyle change for me that I know I can maintain, not just a diet pit-stop along a road that is slowly spiraling downward.

	Start	End of 12th Week
Weight:	201	185.4
Resting Heart Rate:	78	56
Blood Pressure:	145/92	132/80
Percent Body Fat:	22.2	9.5
Lean Body Mass:	156.4	169.5
Basal Metabolic Rate:	1905	1995

In other words, I lost a net of 15.6 pounds, but actual fat lost was 26.2 pounds, because I gained 13 pounds of muscle at the same time. Best of all, I know how to adjust my diet to a maintenance mode when I reach the results I want.

The catch? It's not easy. It's hard. It takes a lot of work and determination, and the results are gradual (one to two pounds per week - sometimes less). I guarantee you'll never see a flashy ad program that says "Lose as much as TWO POUNDS in TWO WEEKS!" or "Exercise only ONE HOUR SIX DAYS A WEEK and see GRADUAL RESULTS!!" Like most things that are worth paying attention to, you have to make an effort, therefore it is marketing anathema.

Here's the site.

But "Sheehan" isn't French...

2005-09-21T14:20:00.000-04:00

I find the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon very interesting. Troubling, too.

Of course, as a parent, I understand her pain. I try to imagine what losing a child would be like and I quickly withdraw from even the notion of it. But I find her response to the pain -- and the response of media and other groups to that response -- to be a very telling snapshot of the state of our culture.

Strangely, Ms. Sheehan seems more upset by the world with which she has been confronted than by the fact that she is now without her son. His death in Iraq suddenly forced her to actually confront the difficult issues of pain and evil in a complex world, and she has summarily rejected it in favor of an existence in which her son, exalted to some sort of Sheehanic sainthood and surrounded by tens of thousands of militant angels, points an accusing finger toward those who have made difficult decisions and urges his Beloved Mother to set them straight. Apparently, this can be accomplished by giving her a few minutes of time for a "meeting." One imagines from all reports that this meeting might be characterized as "a sound thrashing" -- Martyr-elect Cindy presents the harsh reality of the world, and those so reprimanded walk away shaking their heads to clear the fog, thanking her for helping them to see the light.

To Ms. Sheehan, the world is thus a caricature; a morality play in one act. Those who claim to be good are in reality evil because their decisions cause people to die, and those we are told are evil are really just misunderstood and demonized heroes. The moral of the story is that we could live in peace and prosperity if we would just learn to be kind and mind our own business. People are basically good and will do the right thing if given the opportunity, and we will have a happy ending if we all just decide to live in harmony.

I wish that could be true. But if history tells us much of anything, it's that, regardless of how we interpret or revise humanity's past, we see an imprint on the world of a creature that is anything but "basically good". Ms. Sheehan has set up President Bush and a myriad of government entities as straw men for a humanity she cannot accept.

But she can take comfort in history as well. It shows us that she is in abundant, if not good, company. France comes to mind. The French have made commiseration a way of life, and I believe that perhaps "We mind our own business, and mind it well" is the French National Motto. Ms. Sheehan need only look back a few years to the German occupation of France to achieve a level of mental and emotional clarity around what happens to nations who believe that the lion will lie down with the lamb just because the lamb sits quiet and aloof, sending an occasional smile or wink of the eye its way as an invitation. The nature of the lion has to be changed, or the lamb will realize too late that it isn't having a picnic - it is the picnic.

What I find most interesting, though, is how easily some Americans find it to despise the environment that provides them with the very freedom that enables men and women like Ms. Sheehan's son to volunteer to defend it. At best, this is disingenuous, at worst, hypocritical and destructive. It seems to me, actually, that Ms. Sheehan and her worship by various interests is the cultural equivalent of an autoimmune disorder. Society begins to eat away at itself, suddenly seeing as dangerous what it used to correctly recognize as healthy. To Ms. Sheehan and her tagalongs, the taste is very sweet, and no one can make them understand the bitterness and tragedy that will follow.

Diagnosis: IDD

2005-03-31T21:20:00.000-05:00

No, it's not a real term. I made it up. It stands for Information Desensitizing Disorder, and I think nearly every American has it.

A comment I made on Guiroo's blog in response to his entry about the commercialization of Easter brought it to mind. This entry is a slightly expanded version of my comments there.

I don't think we even realize the extent to which commercialization is taken in our culture. We certainly aren't aware of its impact. Even Christian radio stations that claim to be "listener supported" (i.e., no advertising) advertise simply by virtue of the fact that they tell all their listeners who their "underwriters" are. Wouldn't it be nice if there were no expectations of an on-air acknowledgement on the part of the giver, and no sense of obligation to do so on the part of the station?

Our culture's middle name is "Cheap". We cheapen everything, and we have a powerful motivation for doing so. The process of cheapening insulates us from the sharp edges of reality and responsibility. I do it all the time, without even so much as a second thought. We have a deep-seated fear of anything significant. Nothing is private, nothing is off-limits. There is no intimacy nor is there profundity. Everything, be it trivial or life-changing, becomes information to be consumed, from Terri Shiavo's last days through every excruciating detail of Michael Jackson's aberrant behavior to how many people died in Iraq yesterday. To put everything on a level field like this is a reductionism that serves to very effectively decouple the information from any personal responsibility to act on it. The outcome is physical, spiritual, and emotional numbness.

It's a hefty price to pay, but hey, since we're numb it won't bother us, so it's all OK.

Remembering and Wondering

2005-03-25T07:16:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been scouring the Internet for CDs of Christian music from the 70's. At first I attributed this urge to revisit that music as simple nostalgia. Now I'm coming to realize that my spirit is trying to make connections and bring them to the surface. It's the beginning of an excursion into why things are different now. Is it that I'm different? That the world is different?

As we were going to sleep last night I was talking to my wife Barb about a set of videos I ordered during one of these online searches. It's a two-volume set called First Love. Several sites offer it, but it was produced by Steve Grieson's company and can be bought from them here. It came in the mail yesterday and once I put volume one in the player, I couldn't stop watching it. It's a curious mix of documentary, interview, and music. Grieson assembled a group of artists who are associated with the Jesus Movement of the sixties and seventies: Chuck Girard, Barry McGuire, Annie Herring, Randy Matthews, Honeytree, Melody Green -- names everyone who came to know the Lord during those decades would recognize -- and has them just talk and sing.

The impact of the content blew me away as I watched people like Terry Clark and Annie Herring talk not just about their music but how they got to their music. I'm still reeling from the emotions that bombarded me. Things are so different now. Chuck Girard commented that people come up to him these days and ask him to listen to their demos or to give them advice on how to break into Christian music. He commented at one point that he is reasonably sure that Keith Green couldn't even be signed to a label today -- he would be considered too confrontational.

Several things struck me as I watched, and I'm still sorting through them, but here are a couple of observations.

First, what is now an industry began as a simple response -- an externalized expression of what had happened internally in these peoples' lives. None of them had "Christian recording artist" as their goal. Their music was the sonic rippling from the Holy Spirit's disruption of the status quo. God was moving and their music poured out -- like a firehose -- from deep inside their spirits as lives were changed.

Second, these were broken people. At one point Annie Herring remarks that everything that could be taken from her had been taken and that she was totally empty. In what is probably the most poignant point in the video, Terry Clark tells a sobering story of how his experiences in the military brought him to the point where he decided he no longer wanted to be identified with humanity. He became, for all intents and purposes, an animal because of the horrors he had seen and experienced. At his lowest point, when he had been committed to an institution and diagnosed as being beyond hope of recovery, God said to him "I know what you've been through -- I know how horrifying humanity can be. The difference between us is that, while you decided you no longer wanted to be a human being, I decided to become one." Out of this kind of brokenness God birthed something new -- not just in individual hearts but for a whole generation.

So why are things different now? Barb and I talked for a while into the night about it, and I realized that, even if I haven't sorted it all out in my mind yet, I do know that one thing hasn't changed. The Church has moved on and what was once alive and fresh seems now to have become institutionalized. We are stale and have wrapped ourselves in a subcultural cocoon to shield ourselves from a world we consider a threat. But the Holy Spirit who moved hearts then has certainly not changed. God is the constant across all the variability. In the late sixties, he chose to begin a work using a generation whose culture had rejected it -- "filthy hippies" with drug addictions and criminal records who had lived on the streets and were deemed worthless by both the Church and society.

We'd do well to take a long hard look at that.

[To Be Designed] is Up

2005-03-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

Finally got my "other" blog set up over the weekend. Should be fun to see if anybody actually reads it: [To Be Designed].

Blink

2005-03-19T09:41:00.000-05:00

I just started a new book (I must be crazy -- I have a backlog of at least a dozen books that I've started over the last six months) called Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's the guy who popularized the concept of "tipping points".

Blink is a fascinating book. In it, Gladwell investigates Western culture's tendency to trust careful, objective, and methodical investigation over more subjective flashes of intuition. It immediately grabbed my attention because I often have trouble verbalizing conclusions I draw. I've always been able to communicate better in writing than verbally, so that's part of it. But a significant part of it is simply that I don't know. Even at work, where my primary responsibility is to design software solutions, I can't always explain why I settle on a particular design. Sure I can talk about quality attributes and best practices, and how the selected design meets their criteria, but the real answer is almost always that it just feels right. That is rarely an acceptable answer to those who feel a need for evidence, and, honestly, it dissatisfies me as well.

Gladwell begins the book by telling the story of a Greek kouros statue that was being evaluated for purchase by the Getty museum back in 1983. Prominent scientists performed a thorough examination of the statue (one even publishing his process and results in a scientific journal) and promounced it authentic. There was one catch. Every art historian who saw it felt it didn't "look right." For reasons they found difficult to articulate, the statue troubled them. This worried the Getty curator, as the museum had already bought the statue based on the results of the scientific examination and a routine check of the statue's documentation. Their lawyers then dug more deeply into that documentation, and discovered discrepancies that eventually led them to objective proof that it was an Italian forgery. The art historians had been right, and the careful, scientific study had missed the aggregate "soft" evidence that the art experts had intuited but not been able to fully articulate. One had said the the statue "felt fresh." Another had complained that its fingernails were "wrong." Still another had remarked that its feet "looked modern."

We have been taught to distrust such insights, and I'm looking forward to what promises to be a very interesting treatise on learning how to change that.

Well...

2005-03-19T09:28:00.000-05:00

Since it's been nearly FIVE months since I've posted, and I get gigged on a regular basis for it, it's high time I posted again. Since it's an easy out, I'll blame the software development project I've been working on over that period of time. Our QA group qualified the release yesterday, so for the first time in a LONG time I actually have a Saturday morning when I'm not working.

I'm planning to start a professional blog soon so that I can rant about that sort of thing -- I put in four months' worth of work over the last two months and it doesn't have to be that way. More on that when I get it set up. For now, I'll just say I'm glad to be back in the land of the living.

Who's Driving?

2004-10-28T18:06:00.000-04:00

In the world of software development, it's de rigeur to talk about what you're driven by. Back in the 80's, after I realized that, generally speaking, software should not just mutate like an irradiated fruit fly, I became database-driven then requirements-driven. In the early 90's, I lost myself and went through several stages of rebellion during which I was process-driven, goal-driven, architecture-driven, and finally feature-driven. Around the start of the millenium, people started telling me I should be domain-driven, test-driven, and model-driven.

An identity crisis is looming here. I'm not sure how I can be driven by all these things without coming down with some kind of software engineering schizophrenia. Who's driving this thing?

Seriously, it's clearer to me now than ever just how immature the software development field still is. I can't wait for the next new book that will proclaim to all the world that everything about software development should be [whatever]-driven. No other field takes such a simplistic view of itself. The truth of the matter is that none of these would-be umbrellas can alone drive software development. The agile development people may not always have cornered the market on best practices -- in some ways they, too, try to make software development too simple and linear -- but at least their approach is truly rational. Call it common-sense-driven if you feel you have to have a driver.

I wonder if in my lifetime I'll see the day when this field as a whole embraces the truth that software development is best modeled as a matrix of drivers that must be viewed and managed multidimensionally. And manipulated wisely. A thing does not have to be linear to be simple, and sophistication does not imply complexity.

The Thin Line

2004-10-23T11:47:00.000-04:00

Beau, our Springer Spaniel, woke me up early this morning (why can't I ever seem to be able to sleep in on Saturdays?) demanding breakfast. Beau doesn't understand weekends. I guess every day is Saturday to a dog, so I won't hold it against him.

Once I'm out of bed it's hard for me to get back to sleep, so I made some coffee and walked out to get the paper. On the front page was a bizarre story. It seems a woman who lives here in one of Atlanta's suburbs came home from a vacation in Greece to find her lights on and a strange car parked in her garage. You can read the full story here, so I won't go into details, but it seems that, while this poor woman was on vacation, a woman broke into the house and moved in. I mean moved in. She put in a new washer and dryer, repainted, pulled up carpet and replaced it with tile, and put in new light fixtures.

In reading through the details, I couldn't help noticing that this squatter seemed to alternate between periods when she knew she was a thief and burglar ($23,000 worth of the owner's jewelry was found in the squatter's car), and believing that she actually owned the house. In her mind a switch was flipping, like a light bulb filament beginning to burn out.

How fine that line is between reality and a realm of blissful self-deception. This woman seems to have been crossing and recrossing the line uncontrollably, but how many times every day, and in how many small ways, do we choose to close our eyes to reality and create our own surreal internal constructs that enable us to cope with the demands life brings to our doorstep?

I think I do that more frequently than I might want to admit to myself. One of the primary themes of the New Testament is the idea of beng transformed toward Christlikeness. The apostle Paul referred to this as being conformed to the image of Christ. I'm beginning to realize, far later in my life than I would have preferred, that part of that process is the process of bringing the life of the mind and the external life into consistency with each other. All those little internal rationalizations, those little insanities that I've constructed through the years as self-justifications and coping mechanisms, are not consistent even with my external life, much less with a life that is Christ-like. Brian Doerksen wrote a song not long ago called "Change Me on the Inside" that expresses this well:

I long for freedom to live in the truth
I want to be more like You
But every time I try to bring about change
I only touch the visible me
There’s only one way I’m really gonna change

Change me on the inside...

This seems simple and easy to dismiss with a "well, of course." But it means yielding to Christ in the deepest internal places -- it means giving Him control of the switch that we flip to turn off the sense of reality that the Spirit uses to lead us to respond to the world with compassion and to turn on nicer realities that enable us to focus on self instead. It's humbling to realize at 45 that the appearance of some increasing level of Christlike behavior is nothing even remotely close to what Christ really longs to see in me.

Become a Gambler Who Never Loses!

2004-10-04T21:37:00.000-04:00

Just get into the auto insurance business. Today we received a notice from our car insurance company (who shall remain nameless but who is associated with a small green lizard -- which seems very fitting now that I think about it) that our insurance will be canceled unless we remove our daughter from our policy.

Now our daughter is 20 years old, a college student with a high GPA, and happens to have had the misfortune to have had two minor accidents over the past two years. Otherwise our driving records are clean. The Lizard says that "after careful consideration" (which -- believe me because I am a software architect -- means that some type of data mining software flagged our account and generated a form letter signed by an "underwriter"), it was determined that we did not meet its stringent requirements.

In other words and in more direct terminology, "You can pay us usurious rates as long as there is no indication that it will ever cost us anything, but if there exists any evidence that we might ever be required to actually stand behind the policy for which you are paying, well, then you represent a poor risk."

A quick phone call with a perfectly friendly, cordial, sympathetic, but worthless customer service representative provided me with addtional detail. The Lizard would be happy to offer my wife and I as well as my daughter coverage if I remove our daughter from our policy. Then my wife and I would receive a "preferred" rate, and my daughter would be able to independently purchase coverage at the amazing low rate of just $1600 every six months.

Of course, I'll now start shopping for other coverage, but it's difficult to feel so trapped by a situation in which the government requires coverage, but does nothing to regulate the behavior of an industry whose powerful lobby demands that it never be held accountable for such unethical behavior. Like a whining, spoiled child, it insists on gambling with no risk of losing. And its parents always give it what it wants.

Wouldn't it be great if we, like today's insurance corporations, could walk into a casino, place bets using other people's money, then walk away with that money whether we win or lose? It staggers the mind.