Bad Body Math

Bad Body Math - The Why and the How of a Food Journal
by Jason Jaksetic

What goes up comes down for the most part - but what goes on doesn't necessarily come off.

The purpose of this blog is to show that poor calculation, or rather, the absence of calculation, is at the root of excessive body fat.

Being thin is a matter of addition and subtraction.  It's not rocket science - yes, there are immeasurable variables all over the place in your life - it's what makes you unique and dynamic and so interestingly you - but all things considered, if you balance what goes in your body, with what what your body emits out, you derive a perfect figure.

Not rocket science, just thermodynamics.

Think of your body as a furnace.  Or better yet, a star.  Your body is a radiant point where matter ignites into energy.

(The whole Einstein-ian equation thing, remember?)

We can build bombs because we can unleash energy from matter.

Your body unleashes energy from food in the same way.  The calorie is a unit of heat measurement.

You get fat because you are piling up fuel, but not burning it.

In fact, maybe you are so fueled up, you can't even get a spark going.

Herein, lies the problem.  Here it my be beneficial to think about the First Law of Thermodynamics here.  Matter is not created or destroyed.  It just changes form.

Herein, lies the solution.  You can transform the body fat into energy.  You need to carry all the excess  numbers on one side of equation to another.  Actually, light them on fire!


If you want your body to drop energy bombs all over your surrounding landscape you might want to consider a food journal as part of the equation to balance your weight.

If you burn more calories than you consume your body will burn the fat weighing you down.  Your body has to burn the fat - it won't let you die.  Though you feel like your starving, your not.  Your body is snacking away on the lard your carrying around 24/7 when you are not resupplying via your stomach.

Exercise accelerates this process by pumping up the burn, but you will probably notice that just observing what you eat will put the weight loss odds in your favor.

A food diary let's you see one side of body's equations.  (We'll worry about the other side - the burn - in another article.)


The Food Journal - 3 tips to consider on getting it done right


- it's about awareness...

The first thing I find people notice when they even attempt to write down what they eat is that they are blown away with how they've never examined such the mundane, yet brilliantly enjoyable and complex  behavior of eating..  Humans are so busy these days it seems eating as become an autonomous motion to accompany our other activities.


 - don't stress...
You are doing your food journal wrong if it's a burden.  Don't stress about descriptions and nutritional information of what you are eating.  (Look at that later.)  Just take quick notes throughout your day on a pad you keep handy or on a notepad app on your smartphone.  Oh, there are 10,000 apps, too, but don't use these if the technology will stress you out.  Just grab a napkin at breakfast and jot down what you eat, every time you eat.



- try it for a week...
You can learn a boatload of information with just one week of data.  It usually is enough to make your bad habits obvious.  Knowledge is the power to that allows you to shift the momentum of your habitual behaviors.

Make Your Tax Deductible Cancer Fighting Donations Here

I coach people for a living pretty much - as a writer anyway, breaking down the ins and outs of nutrition, fitness, and putting the two together for some successful weekend racing, whether that be triathlon, obstacle racing, or train running.

I write tips and programs all over the internet, and tens of thousands of readers swing by and read them. But I never really get to connect with them often, and that is kinda a bummer.

This charity page is where I reach out to my readers to give back, if, in some crazy karmic occurrence, my writings about my experiences have fostered any positive changes in your life, and make a tax deductible donation to help cure cancer. This is a damn reputable charity, and I'm proud to work with them.  

$5? Perfect! If you've read my stuff over coffee, consider donating the amount of a fancy ass coffee to help cure cancer.

$250? Perfect! That will be a sweet hunk of change you can keep from the IRS - and use it to fight cancer. Oh, and you'll get a free year or workout, nutrition, and racing advise.

Click here and make a quick donation now....will end SOON!

Facebook White Noise

Lately I've been struggling with Facebook. I log on and scan it feeling alienated and confused. It's led to a lack of enthusiasm for the whole affair, that I wish to examine now.

At a certain point all the voices turn to static, a hum of a machine engineered to lull one into the illusion that things are actually being said. Never before have the data streams of mankind been so densely saturated, and never before have they been so vacuous. The cacophonous static of pixels is just colorful enough, familiar enough, that it is not rendered by the brain as static, but as a narrative – a veil of illusion that leaves us feeling as if we belong to a community of sorts, and are thus equipped to properly respond to the stimulating static – usually, through digitized banking systems, by buying something with just a few clicks.

For me, Facebook as become a community of static - not of individual voices of friends. And I can’t understand what is going on anymore.

As we paw at our smart-phones, we are only the ghosts in the machine – our true selves lost somewhere behind the chattering output that is fed to others, and then back towards us. Our own lives are a whisper in the babel.

Commercial algorithms, the DNA of social networks, govern our senses – a noisy dream of familiar faces spouting corporate agendas served with innocent naivety  – the specter of free will infecting our judgments and the meanings we assign to the characters strung together (with the help of guiding proprietary tools of 'sharibility') by our friends. As nodes in a web we forget that all we say, and all we can say, is conditioned by that web, and serve only to promote the survival, the nourishment, and ultimately the thriving of that web.

Wiggling our thumbs upon glass screens the actual physical world falls away to a visceral infection of emotional prodding – feelings of acceptance, unity, shared beliefs, and the affirmations of a meaningfulness born of an experience misperceived as being a faithful rendering of reality. Our inboxes are too full to read, so we must be fed a feed. Bobby is at Gold’s Gym. Sally is Jamba Juice. These are the lines for the appetites that are forged for us, whet with the misguided belief that we are smelling what’s really cooking outside the realm of marketing dollars that lubricate the entire chewing and swallowing process. These people were thrust before us, not out of the merit of being our friends, but out of the merit of being our friends with something commercially viable for us to consume. We have too many friends to talk to - so we've been spared having to, the machine will do it for everyone. We can just listen. Listen to what the algorithms spit out this month.

At a certain point everything is so hyper personal, so perfectly crafted for our consumption based upon our 10,000 previous choices, that we forget we are eating it all up, all the time, every time we tune in, thus consequently tuning out all else that might actually be before us.

And suddenly, when one can hear the static, one is no longer hypnotized by the 10,000 story lines – and one can easily change the channel.

Ultimately, from CNN to your Facebook feed, there is one imperative - click here. Thus you're measured and weighed, your impulse tabulated and stored, so your next one can best be fabricated for you in the soundscape of a numbing, commercial static. 

I'm not trying to hate. I'm trying to rationalize a sudden lack of enthusiasm that has left me feeling blessedly lonely online, that more often than not, leads me to venture out into the real world, to strike up a conversation or two. 

Pissed Racers

I love racing because it is one of the few humanly practices still available for our species to engage in that still produces within the human organism true fear – instinctual fight or flight, gut wrenching, bowel adjusting fear.  And therein lies the justification for the experience the racing experience.

Before a triathlon everyone is pissing themselves.  (Everyone's standing in, or floating in the water, mind you, or dashing off into the woods, but, yes, sometimes on the bike, too...anyway).  It’s one of the most liberating moments in a triathlete’s life I think – the moment you just let it ride because you feel, you understand on a bodily level, that it will only weigh you down - your body is engaging with full flight mode and there are much more serious effin' issues at hand.  THAT is fear.  You’ve peed 12 times that morning already!  But, 30 seconds before the gun goes off, you’ve got to go again.  The liberation felt here is not from breaking any social taboo, but the understanding of an animalistic reality, that, because of circumstances being nonconventional, can be experienced by your everyday 9 to 5er in a socially acceptable manner.

THAT is animal fear.  And that is why I love racing.

0006 - On Philosophy

When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire.
- The Stars, Your Ex Lover is Dead [1]

Philosophy is an act, a behavioral tendency of a self to interpret the reality he/she/it finds itself in.  Philosophy has a history but it is not a history lesson.  

Or shouldn't be, anyway.  Books on philosophy are like books on yoga—helpful, but yoga is something other than any one author's rendering at a particular time in a particular way.  Philosophers jack 'philosophy', just like yogis jack 'yoga'.  

I'll name drop philosophers, but only as a courtesy, and will try to keep historical attribution and further analysis of ideas regarding specific thinkers to endnotes.[2]

Philosophy is open sourced code that, in some circles, might be considered a virus.  Especially if you don't like to have your current world view spun out of control, like internet browser tabs endlessly opening because you clicked the wrong link.   

As always, beware of self replicating questions (programs) that deviate and distract from the current programs that you want, or were told, to have rendering your reality.  Just like Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Chrome present you different versions of 'the internet', your worldview, your philosophy creates different versions of reality.

A philosophical incite, the work of philosophy, is a spark of ignition that is first fueled with doubt, and then nourished with ideas brought about by assuming the new perceptions brought on by the incite, and then, consequently rendered into paradigms shifts regarding of how the universe is fundamentally ordered.

Geometry worked fine with Euclid's 5 axioms for geometry.  It worked better when Reimann told us we only needed 4.[3] 


When inferior interpretations of reality are rendered through logical analysis available of sense data, your best move, particularly in a darwinian sense, is to adapt.  In other words, if you are standing in front of an oncoming train, step out of the way.

You step have to step into the water yourself, and there, you can't even step into the same river twice.  You have to be in a river in order to begin the analysis or a river.  You must, first step into the stream of data, so to speak, in order to render your understanding of data, and then realize that the notion of a 'data' as something permanent, not ever changing.  That you are, in fact, not in a 'river' but having an experience of a piece of something you are calling a river. 

Your world is a stream where the only unchanging thing is that it is always changing.  This was told to us clearly by the who I affectionately refer to the Buddha who Never Heard Of Buddha.****

David Hume argued that if Adam (of the biblical account) was born with perfectly rational faculties could not discern from any empirical observations that he would drown if he put his face underwater, until he put his face under water.[5]

I think this culminates in the work of Bertrand Russell who allows us to imagine a universe that is 8 seconds old.  For, all we can know about the universe is our current, uninterrupted conception of it.  Given that psychologists argue that our undivided attention span are about 8 seconds, Russell, argued rightfully that, epistemologically speaking - meaning as to how we understand knowledge - that there can be a whole new universe might have just happened, with all it's physics and stories, and all it's billions of books and super computers - just happened 8 seconds ago, and will only be there as is, during this unified thought.  Everything might be different the second you break your attention and wake up in a 'new' unified moment with it's own physics and stories and libraries.

If you had a book with a Theory of Everything...best to try and make it boil down to a Tweet...[6]

My advice on how to use this worldview of infinite universes of possibilities every 8 seconds as an article of faith?  

I say embrace it.

Maybe you want to call it forgiveness, or rebirth, or awakening, or idea enema, or a next breath free of any expectation.   Call it philosophy.

You can name it because it is yours and no one else's and can never be.  It will be with you at that undetermined moment where you step out of this universe.

The power to create your universe is in how you render the reality you find the next time you open your eyes.

The Stoics mastered this.  (Name drop warning).  When one reads the two most prominent authors of this school one finds as authors an Emperor of the Known World and a slave of that world.  They both strove with all their philosophical might, and, interestingly came the same understandings of the reality around them, generally speaking.  

It's hard to play the victim when you know you are the creator.

Instead of fighting the world as you know it, breath in, look at the world before you (not the one in your head) and interpret as best you can so you are ready for the next 8 seconds that are about to smack you in the face.

If that is not practical I don't know what is.

When racing, when in the depths agonizing fatigue, I breath deep and just say, hold on, just hold on 8 more seconds.

When running it's 'that next telephone pole'.  You don't know what you'll find there.  Maybe it's an incite that will get you to the next 10,000 telephone poles while running; maybe it's just another chance to put your head down and charge.

You are at once the emperor and slave; you are not the victim.  You are the artist of you own reality when one paints with the proper brush.

So what next.  Where's my paint brush?  Close your eyes, forget everything (and most important forget can't), breath, stay with the breath, and then begin again.  Everything starts there.

Or maybe with 'yes'.

It's the responsible thing to do.  Not bow down but to look at the stars if they've got something to say to you.


[1]  The quote is spoken by an unknown speaker, could be a sample.
[2]  Wittgenstein nailed this with his introduction to the Tractatus:

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another 


I hope that all name drops are checked and rechecked by each reader to benefit their reading of this blog as needed.  I welcome any interpretations of my use of assigning a particular idea to a particular author.  We are all, indeed, as much thieves as blues musicians.

[3]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemannian_geometry

[4] Heraclitus - 'You can't step into the same river twice', and, 'Change alone is unchanging' seems to suit this theme well in his work.

[5]  David Hume, from http://www.uwplatt.edu/~drefcins/humeencyclopediaentry.html

[6]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

0005 - The Yoga Bus

The Yoga Bus left Pittsfield at 8.37 AM, facing south on rt-100, engine revved for a rapid ascent of Killington's foothills on the way to Pico and Mendon Pass.  The vehicle, a black Jeep Wrangler, took the s-turns with a seasoned maximal velocity - the pilot a local for 7 years now – that never could have occurred if some transient Saab or BMW from Massachusetts created for the driver and sole passenger a one-lane no-passing-zone hell.  

Today the Yoga Bus is a black Jeep Wrangler with a cracked LCD stereo that makes sense immediately upon glancing backwards and taking in the child seats.  The driver is an unshaven, man in his thirties wearing a 'Sub - Pop' t-shirt and slim designer jeans - a 6 foot 4 inch yogi, with too much centeredness to be deemed lanky, while possibly having lanky arms and legs.  Sometimes the Yoga Bus is a black Saturn piloted by me, a shaven headed, square faced fellow in MMA shorts and a three quarter sleeved workout apparel top made by Reebok from the mid 90’s – almost all the logo washed off at this point.

Hitting Killington, and other traffic (and, thankfully, a passing lane) at the Route 4 junction, the Yoga Bus faced westward, and barreled up over Mendon Pass before careening straight down into the plains of southwestern Vermont. 

The moment one passes McGraw's Tavern at The Inn at Long Trail, the highest road around, you know it's all down hill from here.  Your stomach drops as if your car where on roller coaster tracks, pulling you down faster than your body wants to fall.  It is at this point that you know you are leaving the valley.  Here one is outside the caress of the Green Mountains - one is descending into a new climate.  Mendon sits poised as the first town before 'town' - 'town' meaning Rutland.

The entire ride to Mendon, off to one's right, one can peer into the Green Mountain National Forest, a blanket of wildlife that is supposedly forever set aside by Congress.  This swath of trees covers multiple peaks.  One of the smaller of them with an undistiguishing and uncleared summit at 2600', lies before Lower Michigan road, immediately before rt-100 swings east with the White River into Stockbridge, and is called Hedgehog Knoll - the mountain I mean when I say 'my mountain', as in, the mountain I live upon.  

Everyone is welcome to board the bus provided that there is room.  Or room will be made.  We are those kind of folks here in Pittsfield.

Danny got on the Yoga Bus the other day, when it was a Black Saturn.  It would have been a good day for the Jeep, but never underestimate a Saturn, it bore Danny's 400+ lbs bulk easily.  Well, easily enough for me - he did look rather cramped, his sumo-esque frame filling my entire passenger window view, but he didn't complain.  For a man who spends all of his time eating only raw foods and training, he complains rather little, in my opinion.  Sometimes I'll go find him on a 10 mile loop, as he trudges slowly for hours carrying a sandbag.  

He only looks good, he's smiling.  95% of the elite athletes I know won't put out the power he'll emit today in energy expenditure.  

I can't count how many people are too self conscious to go to a Bikram Yoga class because of their weight, fearing to show a little skin and get sweaty with a room full of people.  They must be too fat, in their minds.

Danny didn't have that hang-up, and that lead him to having an amazing class, doing every posture in the sauna like environment.  Danny did what so many can't - let themselves do what they want to do.

The Yoga Bus don't care about your yogi status.  It cares about as much as yoga cares about your yogi status.  Yoga is an activity, not a thing - and all participants are equally engaged, that is, when they are fully engaged.

There is no position outside yourself by which you can judge 'your yoga' versus 'yoga'.  In fact, there is no 'yoga' outside of you.

Yoga is wave, not particle.  We can ride it like S turns, in the Yoga Bus.

0004 - Finishing at the Start

Roadside - training break to contemplate clouds. 

Gratitude and Thanks 

All the training ends that moment you're treading water with 3000 other athletes, trying to keep you heart rate down, waiting for the canon to fire, sending smoke over the morning mist, that will be sending off a fury of thrashing arms and feat towards one finish line.

That's wear the fun starts for me.  Right now, the real race is on.

At last check-in I've raised $2306 of $4000 for the MMRF - what I feels is a premier cancer research charity, that deserves all the help I can lend them.  

This outpouring of support and love from you all has created such a positive energy in my heart, and I thank each of you for your gifts, deeply - sincerely, thank you.  Nahmaste.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to finish the Ironman on Sunday.  Honestly, that tangible quantity doesn't matter.  The only particular number on my mind is $4000.  Once I get there, I can just enjoy the sun (or rain), free food, and safe and marshalled roads (and a lake) during a swimming, biking, and running workout.

All the work is done, I think, once I've made the difference that will carry on and outlive my own personal sphere.

9:59:00 or 16:59:00 - Doesn't really matter so much, as making sure I've got the next $1694 - at last check in- accomplished.

If you are able to help, the next day is crucial in my effort to raise $4000 for cancer research through the MMRF - any contribution is greatly appreciated.  Click here.