# The past I suppose I am one of those people that have been struggling with their weight for their whole life. I never did any exhausting diets before, but I have lost weight in the past because I had a health issue. Eventually I recovered my health and gradually my weight and hit the peak of what I could consider acceptable during Covid when we had to stay indoors, but nobody told us that if you stop moving you also better stop eating as much. That is when for the first time in my life I considered investing some time in actually understanding how weight loss works. Initially I got a treadmill, because as we said during covid you could not do much, and I started training. Weight loss was not the only reason I started training, I also did it to warm up for my day. I live in Scotland, and it is pretty cold up here. I work as a software engineer, and during work I don’t move much. When the day is cold in the morning, I felt very cold, so starting my day with a run got the blood flowing and warmed me up nicely. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone, I would improve my health and also start my day warmed up. Well, I got one out of the 2 partially. Even though I did lose some weight, the process was slower than expected, and often I was quite exhausted. Obviously, I was doing something wrong. So I started reading up about how this should be done. # Stage 1, Recovery As a geek and a tech person, since I started educating myself about training, I could not miss the opportunity to dip my toe in the massive fitness tracking tech scene. I acquired several training watches and promptly got lost in a sea of metrics that I did not know how to interpret. The first and one of the most important metrics I utilised was recovery time. The device that first offered this metric was Polar M450 if I recall correctly, and usually Polar algorithms are solid. Recovery time is a complex metric. It takes into account the intensity of the training in combination with the heart rate to infer how much time your body needs to recover from the training. This allowed me to either decrease the intensity of my training when my body was over taxed, or just wait the appropriate time for my body to recover before training again and made my exhaustion go away. After this improvement I kept reading about various training models and eventually one day I happened to watch a video by Dr Iñigo San-Milan about Zone 2 training and that is when most pieces of the puzzle fell in place. Of course, heart rate zones are calculated automatically for us by our training watches, but it makes sense to document here how these can be calculated manually. # Stage 2, Zone training Zone training is based on dividing the heart rate range between resting and maximum to zones. * Zone 1 50%–60% of Max Heart Rate * Zone 2 60%–70% of Max Heart Rate * Zone 3 70%–80% of Max Heart Rate * Zone 4 80%–90% of Max Heart Rate * Zone 5 90%–100% of Max Heart Rate Max heart rate is calculated by the following formula: \\[HRmax=205.8 – (0.685*age)\\] If you are one of the lucky owner of an RPN calculator, you can use the following program. *** plus42 heart rate zones 00 { 59-Byte Prgm } 01▸LBL "HRZ" 03 60.09010 # I'm going from 60% to 90% in increments of 10% 04 STO 01 05 "Age?" 06 PRA # PRA: print the Alpha Stack 07 PROMPT 08 STO 03 09 205.8 10 0.68 11 RCL 03 12 * 13 - 14 STO 02 15 PRX # PRX: print the X stack 16▸LBL 01 17 CLA 18 RCL 01 19 IP 20 ARCL ST X 21 ├"%= " 22 RCL 02 23 RCL 01 24 % 25 ARCL ST X 26 AVIEW # when printer is on AVIEW prints to the print-out 27 PSE 28 ISG 01 29 GTO 01 24 .END. If you are not one of the lucky few, you can use the Free42 HP42s programmable calculator simulator which is free, or Plus42 which the enhanced paid version of Free42. ## Why is Zone training important? Heart rate zone training is important because depending on which heart rate zone we are using, it has different physiological effects on our bodies. As Dr Iñigo is explaining in his 3-hour presentation, Zones 2 and 3 are aerobic zones, when training falls into these zones, the energy source used by our bodies is primarily fat, with a small percentage of carbohydrates. When our training falls in zones 4-5, then these are the anaerobic zones and the energy source for these are primarily carbohydrates. Human bodies are designed to store their energy primarily as far, with some reserves held in carbohydrates form for quick and fast consumption during emergencies. Therefore, we have a lot more energy stored as fat compared to carbs. A human body is designed to do low intensity work for many hours, and it has the energy storage to support that, on the other hand if they need to move fast they can do that only in small bursts of activity. As a result, if people want to burn fat and lose weight, they need to keep their training within zones 2 and 3, and the sweet spot is at the top of zone 2 just before it becomes zone 3. Dr Iñigo goes further to explain additional benefits of zone 2 training even for elite athletes for 2 main reasons, first zones 2 and 3 increase the endurance of an athlete where zones 4 and 5 increase the peak performance. This means that even competitive athletes can benefit from zone 2 training in order to improve their endurance. In these cases a combination of zones 2-3 and 4-5 is advised, either as having different sessions within a week, or more commonly combining the two options within a session in the form of interval training. In the video linked above, Dr Iñigo goes into further details explaining how the mitochondria organelles within our cells respond to zone 2 training. It is really a fascinating discussion and I encourage anyone who has enough knowledge of biology to watch it. # Stage 3, Energy intake So far so good, we have explained the importance of recovery, we have explained the importance of heart rate zones and how we can use them to achieve the desired outcome, either increased performance or increased endurance. But if our goal is weight loss, we still have one more parameter to cover: our energy intake. It will not be possible to lose weight if our energy intake is higher than our energy consumption. Our fitness trackers are pretty good at estimating our energy consumption, they look at the intensity of our training and how our body responds to it. People who are fit can train harder without taxing their body too much, whereas non-fit people can become quite exhausted by mild exercise. As their fitness improve, they will find that they can increase the intensity of their training without feeling tired. I have tried various food logging services and I have always reverted to using the oldest one there is, MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal has integrations with the major fitness tracker providers where it can read from them the training history of the owner, and in exchange send them their energy intake. You can find all these integrations MyFitnessPal has here. I have used it with Garmin Connect for the past 431 days and I can say that I am overall satisfied with it. It has some weird behaviour depending on the setting, but after a while you learn to live with it. When it comes to Garmin + MyFitnessPal, Garmin will monitor your activity for the whole day and if you are not active enough, it penalises you by lowering the projected energy consumption MyFitnessPal calculates on its own. This is a mixed blessing, firstly, Garmin uses your heard rate data and your activity data to adjust in real time your energy consumption, this can be quite annoying because if you tell it you want to lose weight, you may find your daily goal unexpectedly reduced. In any case, eventually you learn to live with it and know what to expect. # Stage 4, Wrapping up If we combine all the above information, we can end up with a custom training plan that can be used for your desired goal. This information can not only be used to lose and maintain weight, but can also be used to build endurance, to increase top performance or a mix of both. Personal targets can change, and it is quite acceptable to switch your training regime to prepare for a half-marathon, or take it easy and maintain your current level of fitness/weight. You will also find that most of the top-notch fitness instructors (digital or real world) take all this info into account when preparing training plans. If you ask Garmin training coach to prepare you for a specific run, it will put together a mix of slow and fast-paced runs and will allow for enough recovery based on your fitness level. It is quite interesting when you do that and after a run you feel particularly tired and think, I won’t be able to do the next one, but miraculously by the time the next run comes you have recovered and are ready to tackle it. # Alternative approaches Lately, I have been experimenting with alternative methods of calculating my energy consumption. Despite the fact that I love my Garmin smartwatch, I do not want to depend on it. I need to find a way to use alternative methods to calculate my energy consumption, so I am reviewing the performance of my other fitness trackers from Casio, Polar but also no name and comparing them against the gold standard that is Garmin. I have checked Garmin against medical grade equipment, and it was spot on, so it is my reference fitness tracker for most things. Furthermore, I have found that the Polar algorithms are quite good, I could replace my Garmin setup with two things, a step tracker with total energy consumption calculation, and a heart rate monitor device that allows me to track my heart rate zone during training. I have found that I can track my heard rate reliably by either using my Polar M450 smartwatch, my Polar H10 chest strap, and my energey consumption with one of my Casio watches with step tracker and Polar integration. The last few years, Casio has switched from an in-house platform to Polar algorithms for calculating energy consumption. We can see this in the following screenshots: Casio: Garmin: We can see that the difference is only 77 kcal, and this was done with a Casio step tracker watch that does not have a heart rate monitor. Quite impressive results, I would say. Polar algorithms used by Casio are very good.

# Why? As mentioned in other parts of the site, I have decided to re-instate my web site after a break of several years. It is logical to wonder why? Why now and why use Jekyll for it? I have used most web site technologies in the past, and I have also hosted and supported sites for others. I have used anything from writing a simple site with hand crafted HTML and CSS using vi, fully dynamic sites using php, joomla and wordpress with a database backend or static phpwiki based sites for my various projects. Gradually i reduced my presence to the bare minimum of a bare bones blog hosted in blogger.com. This blog is used for publishing snippets and ideas of various useful things i have some across. You will rarely find any long form posts in here and these are mostly notes to myself that might also be useful to others. The question remains. ## Answer Back when i created my first web-site, the Internet was very different from today. People were using Yahoo and Hotmail, Facebook did not exist, google did not exist or it was in its very early days and had as its moto the phrase > Do no evil Back then everyone had their own web-sites and the social network of the time was IRC. Having your own site back then was not that simple, it required a lot of manual work and as things evolved we moved from static hand build web-sites, to dynamic web-sites with database backends. This increased the complexity considerably and even for us who were into technology it was not a very enjoyable task to keep one or several dynamic web sites up to date. Around that time lots of people discovered what we think of today as social networks and thought, since i already have a presence in Facebook, or Twitter or Google +, i do not need to maintain my own personal web-site that only a handful of people are reading anyway. When i post something on Facebook it is viewed by thousands of people. Surely i don’t need that web-site nodoby reads any more. So Internet transformed. Lots of small web sites were deleted and our digital presence was transformed to social networks presence. ## The problem Of course these days everyone knows why this was a bad idea. Social networks have cause myriad of problems. First of all, they have changed the way people perceive reality. They are the main method of misinformation across the developed world and are highly manipulative. They do not care at all for their users, they only care about profits and engagement. They do not respect peoples privacy and are highly invasive into private discussions. They are promoting racist and anti-scientific agendas that are responsible for the deterioration of social cohesion across the western world. They are responsible for the deterioration of mental health of millions of teenagers. I can go on for hours. ## The solution The solution to this problem is obvious, we need to return to the former more open, more democratic and more respectful form of Internet. The one where multiple voices existed. Where people were able to express their views from their own medium. This does not mean that we should travel back in time. This is not yet possible but even if it was maybe it is not the right thing to do. There may be other ways to tackle the issues of discoverability and social networking. Today we have tools that did not exist in the early iterations of the Internet. We have Fediverse, we have RSS and the cost of actual hosting your own services has dropped dramatically. Based on what i have written so far it will come as a surprise to no one that i am a strong believer in Fediverse generally and self-hosting of services specifically. Fediverse is a credible answer to the question of networking and discoverability and self-hosting is the answer to who controls your content. Open source and free software have excellent solutions for all of these and these days the cost of a VPS has dropped dramatically and a small web site can be hosted for as little a6 Euro per month. For technical people even that is not necessary because they can host their services from a PC that lives in their closet. ## How? Having said all the above, we still need to answer the original reason of why we stopped hosting our own stuff back in the day. Setting up a static web site that you have to update manually by editing HTML is not acceptable any more, and after a while maintaining a dynamic with all the effort needed so it is not patched is tedious. The answer is somewhere in the middle. It is OK to maintain a dynamic site as long as its dynamic element is not during runtime. Meaning that if a web site is dynamically generated but this dynamic element is not exposed to the wider Internet, then we are OK. There is no database to exploit, not form to inject malicious code to, no secrets to steal. That is why a static web site generator is ideal for this use case. Of course this is not enough for everyone, but it is enough for me. I have no need of tracking visitors, serving ads or customize my content in real-time based on who is reading it. There are several static web-site generators out there. i First i tried Hugo, a very popular open-source web-site generator written in Golang. Unfortunately i could not make it work in the way i wanted it, and i found that its documentation was out of date, maybe it is a work in progress but when you followed the instructions from the documentation, Hugo was failing to generate the site. After Hugo, i tried Jekyll, a static web-site generator written in Ruby. Even though Ruby is not my favorite language, i have used it quite a bit in the past for work and i am familiar with its ecosystem. I was able to customize Jekyll minima settings to produce the type of web-site i as after. I needed a blog oriented web-site that supported tags and an XML feed so whoever wanted could read my posts via a RSS reader. The fact that the web-site is static will make it very easy to host with Yunohost and also very easy to cache via Cloudflare. ## What is next? Eventually and after some tweaking, i managed to persuade Jekyll to do what i wanted so i have now a functional setup, that allows me to write my posts in markdown and have automated generation of tags, categories and the actual HTML. Now its time to focus on content. I have many hobbies, and many ideas that may or may not be of interests to people. I will use this site to document them and who knows they might be useful to other people except myself.