This page will discuss losing weight and maintaining oral health.

Loosing weight

So, if you lose weight your supposed to go out and tell everyone your secret, what to buy, etc.

A few years ago, I was over 260 lbs and sometimes closer to 270 lbs. I tried losing weight but nothing seemed to work. One excellent piece of advice that I was given by Jamie Teather (I hope he's okay) was that you have to change your lifestyle.

So, in Spring 2018, I started walking to work. I was thinking of starting on an auspicious day to make it memorable, but then decided to forget that idiocy, and so I just started walking one day. I didn't have any goals, so I couldn't miss any goals and thus fall into a depression and disappointment. Instead, I just walked every day to work. It was a 10 km round trip. After a month, I started jogging home. At first, I didn't even have jogging clothes, I just started to trot. After another two months, I finally started jogging to work. This is where I discovered the wonderful bureaucracy of the Physical Activities Centre. There are dozens of showers on campus, but if you just want to jog to work and take a shower, you are not allowed to do so without paying a large term fee. Thus, I just found showers in other buildings; specifically E3.

Thus, I started jogging to and from work from then on. I started to bring a small back pack to bring my clothes. I got a larger and heavier back pack, and then I continued to jog into the fall. As it cooled, I was very lucky: in the Canadian Armed Forces, I participated in winter warfare exercises where the temperature plummeted to below minus thirty. What this taught me was that with sufficient layers, you could stay comfortable, even in a five kilometer run. So I ran the entire winter, and the next year, and finally cancelled my parking pass.

Now, how did I change my diet? Not much. I didn't pick out a special X, Y or Z diet. The average diet gets you all the nutrients you need anyway, and there are calories in everything you eat. Yes, oils are more calorie dense than sugars, which are more calorie dense than dietary fiber, but they're all in the same ballpark.

Later, I started to run in the evenings as well. Consequently, and very slowly, over the period of over a year, my weight went down from over 260 lbs down to 190 lbs. With my father getting worse health-wise, I spent more time not running and doing other things, but I'm still only up about 15 lbs, so I hope to start losing that come September 2021.

Advice? Yes, change your life style, don't set goals, or at the least, don't set unachievable short-term goals, and remember that there are no miracle diets; although there are miracle fees charged by some diet companies. It's just a matter of calories-in and calories-out. If the first exceeds the second, the body stores the difference as fat. If the second exceeds the first, the body starts to use up that stored fat.

As for other habits, while I was in the Canadian Armed Forces, every so often, I would ask for a cigarette from someone else. They were occasionally a distraction, and a useful one at that, especially when the weather was wet, cold and more-or-less miserable. When I joined Waterloo Maple, during the code-complete run-ups, we were often working 16 hours or more a day, occasionally sleeping in our chairs or on the couch. During this time, it was all too common for some of the developers to go to the smoke hole and we'd join them for a break, and occasionally a smoke. I found, however, after one code complete that I started showing distinct signs of nicotine addiction. It was quite horrible, and I've got my father, the cheap guy he was, to thank. I wasn't going to buy a pack of smokes, so for the next three weeks I grinned and bore the shakes. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who is addicted and wants to stop. Later, when I got my DNA sequenced by 23-and-me, I found out that I was also more likely to get addicted to smoking if I ever started... I guess I dodged a bullet there.

Maintaining oral health

Okay, I did something smart in 2022: I finally went to the dentist after five years. I was told that there were likely to be many cavities, but there were none. The gums of my teeth were almost universally healthier than they were five years ago. Finally, the cleaning was expected to take two sessions, but turned out to be only one short session, despite the time interval since the most recent cleaning. Thus, what did I do?

Keep my heart healthy (see above): a healthy heart supplies blood to the gums and allows them to remain healthy.
Next, I use a Waterpik. It's called a water flosser, but it more closely parallels a tooth pick: it allows you pick out any bits of food that remain between your teeth. I purchased mine used on Kijiji, but you really don't need a high-end one. The lower-end ones are more than sufficient. Point the tip of the pik at the hole between the teeth, and you should feel the water pass through and hit your tongue. Don't spit the water out, just swallow it: you probably need to drink more water, anyways.
Next, I use the Listerine pump to use only a small quantity of mouthwash, little more than enough to get the tooth brush wet. At the same time, I put toothpaste on my Oral B electric tooth brush and start to brush my teeth with the mouthwash.
After the requisite brushing time as determined by the brush, I spit out the combination of toothpaste and mouthwash, but I do not rinse my mouth. Apparently this allows the fluoride in the tooth paste to continue penetrating your teeth even after brushing your teeth. I originally did this because of something Sgt Todd Scotney once said (paraphrased, of course): "Nothing makes a ruck-march easier to bear than to have that taste of toothpaste in your mouth and sucking on your teeth while you're marching along." That was very true.
Finally, I floss using one-and-a-half feet of floss circled into a loop. See my video on flossing. However, it is important to buff and polish each tooth separately: you get the floss between the teeth, and then like you would buff shoes, go back and forth and up and down towards the front of your mouth, and then again but towards the back of your mouth. Buff and polish both above and below the gum lines. If you haven't flossed in a while, your gums will bleed. Sorry.

Are these the best possible instructions? I don't know, but they worked for me, and apparently quite well.