This sounds like a ton of fun. Rachelle Rogers Knight’s reading journal, Read, Remember, Recommend, was released yesterday. In honor of the book release, Knight, better known online as Bibliobabe, has started a one year fiction reading challenge. With all the stuff going on in my life right now, I don’t have any hope of reading the most books, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to participate!

The journal itself sounds like a cut above most of the reading journals I’ve seen. Most reading journals don’t offer reading lists, and Read, Remember, Recommend has lots of different categories of lists, including National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award winners. Each title has a series of check boxes, allowing readers to indicate whether you have or want the book and if you’ve read or would recommend it. There’s lots of books (and websites for that matter) that recommend books to read, but I really like Knight’s way of combining the recommendation and journaling elements. This is going on my wishlist! The book is listed as paperback on Amazon, but I’m told it’s actually spiral-bound, which is great. Journaling-type books are much better when they can lay open flat.

Because of the interactive nature of the book, it’s not available as an e-book. But something that would be REALLY fun (are you listening, Bibliobabe?) is an iPad app that would allow you to access the lists and keep track of the checkboxes in the application. It could work on an iPhone too, but because of the e-reader capabilities of the iPad, it would be an especially appropriate app for the device. If it allowed you to add your own notes about various titles, that would be even cooler. Given the choice between having yet another actual book in my house, or buying an app, I would definitely take the app. Since that isn’t currently an option, though, I’d really like to get a copy of the book and sign up for the challenge.

Update 4/6/10: I found I already have about 47 of the titles listed in the journal at home, so I guess those are going to the top of my reading pile.

I had my surgery on Wednesday, and I am doing pretty well. Yesterday was awful because I had terrible nausea from the pain medication. The doctor took me off the pain meds and gave me a prescription for the nausea, so I had a much better day today. I’m doing pretty well without any pain medication, and if I really hurt, I can take some acetaminophen. I know I am going to be really happy about having had the surgery a couple months from now, but right now I am just really uncomfortable and I’m annoyed about how careful I need to be about moving around. I’m nervous about breaking open any of my incisions, which are quite long. I’ll feel much less anxious when things start to heal up. I don’t mind scars – I will be happy to see them, because that will mean the incisions have healed over. The human body sure is resilient.

I was supposed to take my dressings off and have my first shower yesterday, but I decided that with all my nausea I didn’t think I could handle seeing my Frankenstein wounds. So I waited until today, and was very happy to have a shower. Unfortunately, I can’t really lift my arms to wash my hair, so after my shower, I went and got my hair shampooed and cut. I had about 3 inches cut off and it looks way nicer and neater. I was in desperate need of getting rid of my split ends. Of course I can’t go pay to have someone else shampoo my hair every day, so I am going to have to get that figured out soon.

I am down 20.8 pounds as of the end of week 12. I won’t be too smug about it though, because this is mostly because I had surgery this week and could hardly keep any food down on Thursday. We’ll see how I am doing next week, when things are hopefully back to a little more normal. I plan to be off work all of this coming week just to make sure I don’t have any problems. I am not allowed to drive for a week, and I have a post-op appointment on Wednesday to see how I am doing.

UPDATE May 5, 2010 REGARDING CUSTOMER SERVICE, see end of post

I first heard about the bodybugg in September 2009, when my husband told me his boss was using one and loved it. Stephen knew it would appeal to my obsessive compulsive side. The idea behind the bodybugg is simple. You wear an armband with a small monitor that keeps track of the calories you burn and the steps you take. At the end of the day, you upload the data from your armband device into the online bodybugg program. You also enter all the food you have been eating into the program, and it keeps track of all the nutritional information, including your caloric intake. That is basically all there is to it, you compare your calories burned to your calories consumed. If you burn more than you consume, you lose weight.

My biggest concern, when deciding whether to purchase a bodybugg, was whether the measurement of calories burned was accurate. The bodybugg website provides the following explanation of how the system works: “In addition to measuring motion and steps, the armband is able to see how much you are sweating, your skin temperature and the rate at which heat is being dissipated from your body.” It probably goes without saying that there is no way it (or any other device) could be 100% accurate. The more important issue is probably whether the difference between calories burned and calories consumed is accurate. My understanding is that they used these activity monitors on the tv show The Biggest Loser, which gave me a little bit more confidence that they are fairly close to the mark. I finally decided to go ahead and buy one in mid-October. Now that I have used it for several months, I can say that it has been accurate enough that I have been able to achieve my goals thus far.

The Good

There is probably a certain type of person for whom this device is appropriate, and I seem to be that type. I like to have a formula where I can plug in numbers and have a fairly good idea of what my results will be. I have been on Weight Watchers, which I think is an excellent program, but balancing my exercise against the points I consumed was always a pain for me because it seemed very imprecise. What I like about the bodybugg is that I don’t really have to calculate anything. I just provide the program with input, and it does the calculating for me. It has a fairly large database of foods and it is easy to add your own foods to the program. It can provide you with a breakdown of your calories – how much is carbs, protein and fat. It keeps track of the steps you take and helps you set activity goals. It can also tell you if you are being honest about the food you consume, if you are not losing the weight that your activity and eating suggests you should. It provides a wealth of information, but even if you distill it down to its most basic level – calories consumed and calories burned – that information will be enough to help you reach your goals. The rest is gravy.

The Bad

I’d like to preface this section by saying I know this sounds like a long list of cons for the device, but overall, I would still call this a positive review. It’s just that I think all these issues are very important to consider before you decide to purchase a bodybugg. Even with these problems, I would still buy the bodybugg, but they might convince another person that it is not for them.

COST:
The biggest problem with the bodybugg is that it is not cheap. I paid $200 for mine, and another $100 for the digital display, although sometimes there are sales. I felt strongly about having the digital display, so I could keep track of my calorie burning throughout the day, and make any eating or exercise adjustments that I thought necessary. The armband does not have any sort of display, probably to keep it as small as possible. I wear the digital display on a belt clip, and I really like having it. I don’t think I would like the bodybugg as much if I didn’t have the display.

But more important than the initial price is the continued cost of using the online program. The bodybugg comes with a three-month subscription to the service. After that, you must pay a monthly fee in order to continue using it. I chose the cheapest option, which is to pay for a one year subscription, which is $79.95. Personally, I think this is ridiculous. I understand that this is one of the areas in which they make their real money, but forcing people to pay for a subscription service without which their expensive device will become a paperweight seems very greedy to me. Because I cannot install the full program on my computer and use it freely, there is a very good chance that at some point in the future I won’t be able to access the website and my bodybugg will indeed become a paperweight. The bodybugg could be an extremely useful device for many people struggling with their weight, but the continued cost makes it impractical or simply out of reach for many of the people who could most benefit from it.

In addition to the three-month subscription, you also get one free coaching call with the bodybugg folks. Although I did glean some useful information about the program’s features, the call seemed focused more on sales than on helping me. They try to sell you supplements that you can buy in their online store and they also try to sell you more coaching calls. Here is an extremely useful device that could help a lot of people, and they have made it simply part of a larger sales pitch. It really rubbed me the wrong way and it probably had the opposite effect that they intended, at least on me. Even if they sell some supplements that may be good products, the sales pitch turned me off so much that I would never buy any of them. There are a lot of excellent sources for vitamins and minerals.

SOFTWARE:
We had a lot of trouble getting the bodybugg synced with the software on my Mac. Although the program is online, there are still some components that need to be downloaded from their website apparently. I had seen reviews on Amazon saying that bodybugg didn’t work with Mac, but others said it did and the bodybugg website said it did. After much frustration, we finally figured out that I had to run my Safari browser in 32-bit mode rather than the standard 64-bit mode. Once we made that change, we were able to get things going. There was nothing about this in the manual. Stephen found it on a users’ forum somewhere.

Occasionally the program will crash my browser, but the larger problem has been program updates. There would be periods of time when every single time I tried to connect my bodybugg to my computer to upload my calories burned data, it would say I needed to download an update and restart my computer. This got very frustrating, so I sent an email to customer service. They sent me a very long response with this long list of things I needed to do, including uninstalling and reinstalling everything. After hunting around on a user forum, I realized that all I needed to do if I got the update message was to fully close Safari and reopen it. This can still be a pain if I have a lot of windows open with things I want to keep track of, but it is better than restarting my computer all the time for these “updates”. But any time I have had a problem, I have had to figure out the fix myself. Lately, though, I haven’t been getting the update messages, so I am hoping they have fixed that problem, although I have though that before.

CUSTOMER SERVICE:
Shortly after I got my bodybogg, the plastic clip for wearing my display device on my pants cracked. It was still wearable, though annoying, so I procrastinated about contacting them for a replacement. However, in January, the clip cracked again, breaking an entire section off. This rendered it unusable. I contacted online customer service and explained the problem, asking for a replacement. They never bothered to get back to me. I could have kept bugging them, but I just ordered a replacement clip ($7.95 I think) so I could start using the display again. But I am sure they didn’t get back to me because it would have cost them money to send me a replacement clip, and they seem to be more about making money than keeping customers happy.

Summary

Despite the negatives, the bodybugg is an extremely useful device. I would definitely recommend it, but caution that it is not cheap and it is helpful to be computer savvy. I am definitely glad I got mine, because it is doing what it advertises. It helps me compare the difference between the calories I consume and those I burn, and that is all I need it to do in order to lose weight. That being said, if another company came out with a similar product that worked as well and did not require a continued subscription to use their software, I would switch. I believe there are some other devices on the market, but currently, this one is probably the most accurate according to what I’ve read.

UPDATE: I emailed customer service on February 15, 2010, regarding the defective belt clip. Today, May 5, 2010, I received an answer! That has to be some sort of record for slow responses. Most of the email I received had nothing to do with the issue I raised: “The myapex accounts are private to each individual and are self-managed accounts. To cancel a scheduled monthly order, log-in with your username and password at www.myapex.com.” She did say that I should call Technical Support for warranty items. It really took them TWO AND A HALF MONTHS to respond and tell me to contact someone else? So, let me reiterate what I said in my original review above. Bodybugg is NOT about customer service. No company should take two and half months to respond to a customer, although I guess that’s a step up from not responding at all. The bodybugg is a great device, but be aware that if you have problems, you are likely on your own.

Here’s my weight loss graph for February. Stephen saw it and said, “You flatlined!” Thanks, honey. But I am actually continuing to do pretty well. It took me awhile to make the graph because I’ve been procrastinating. I am sticking this in my blog prior to the iPad and bodybugg posts, because I think they are more interesting. But I didn’t want to leave it out altogether because I want to have one for every month, even if I am a little slow on this one.

A friend of mine is having one of those weeks. You know exactly what I am talking about. The kind where not only does everything go wrong, but also the things that wouldn’t normally get you down start to seem like the end of the world. It’s a busy week at work AND she has some major things going on at home (not necessarily bad things, just BIG things). Her week started out with her boss flying off the handle at her for something for which he bore the bulk of the responsibility. Then the website where she could download her W2 was offline for hours, when she needed to get to the tax accountant’s office. She hasn’t been getting the results she wants with her healthful eating and exercise. It has just been an endless series of mishaps and annoyances that add up to a very frustrating week. Individually, she would have no problem dealing with any of these, but together… Well, together they can feel like defeat.

She needed an opportunity to vent, so we chatted for a little bit while she worked to get her game face back on. I hope it made her feel better, but oddly it definitely made me feel better. It’s not that I am happy she is having a terrible week, but when I was giving her a pep talk, I realized I was pep talking myself as well. It is so easy to give someone advice or encouragement when they are down, but we rarely listen to our own advice. So this week, as I struggle with my challenge, I am going to give myself some advice. Some of it is pretty obvious, but we are all very good at not doing the things we should. Here’s hoping I learn something from myself.

Be kind to yourself
I need to get this tattooed on my forehead so I see it every time I look in the mirror. We often hold ourselves to such impossibly high standards that anything less than perfection looks like a failure. But it’s just not true. The problem is when you give yourself a laundry list of all the things you should be doing or could have done differently, it starts to look like there was nothing you did right. DON’T make that list. Make a list of the things you have accomplished. And when things do go wrong, just cut yourself some slack and think how you could improve the situation in the future. I have been struggling with what (or more accurately, how much) I have been eating in the past couple weeks. It has been stressing me out, and that stress makes me want to eat even more. But here’s what is good: My challenge is not blown by any stretch of the imagination. I am still well ahead of where I expected to be in my weight loss challenge by the middle of week 10. I am definitely healthier and I feel better than I have in a long time. So why should I focus on my mistakes? I am going to focus on what I need to do today. And tomorrow. And I will keep moving forward. I won’t give up because I had some bad days.

Know when to let go
Comedian Mike Birbiglia tells this awful story of being hit by a drunk driver and, due to an error on the accident report, ends up being told he must pay for the damages to the drunk’s car (which the drunk smashed into a tree after t-boning Birbiglia’s car). The story is classic Kafka, and everyone keeps telling him to pay for the guy’s car. He fights it for quite some time, becoming obsessed with proving that he was not at fault. Listening to this story fills you with indignation, but you know that certainly justice will prevail in the end. Except it doesn’t. He finally decides to stop letting it consume his life, he pays for the guy’s car, and he moves on. It’s the same with my friend who was unfairly blamed by her boss. She knows she’s right, but forcing her boss to lose face to prove she is right is not going to end well. She proactively informed her supervisor about what happened in case her boss complains, and then she wiped her hands of it. This is one of the most difficult things for me. I HATE to let go when I know I am right. I find it easier to do at work, but in my personal life I have to work hard not to let perceived injustices get the better of me.

Expect the Unexpected
You may get it right the first time, but if not, make sure you have given yourself enough time and resources to get back on track. There have been so many times when I completed a task and patted myself on the back for a job well done, then got surprised by an unexpected hitch. This is not infrequent. The worst was the year we got a letter from the IRS saying that we owed several thousand dollars because we claimed too much interest on our mortgage and missed some of the taxes on our investments. Once I started breathing, I realized that they simply had not received the tax form from the bank holding our mortgage, and all I had to do was send them a copy of the backup. The investment miscalculation was my fault, but that was only a couple hundred dollars, and we sent back a check and our mortgage interest statement and all was well. Sometimes, even if you have done EVERYTHING right, something will still go wrong. Be prepared for what goes wrong, and things (or you) don’t have to fall apart.

Most of the time, it does get better
I won’t lie, sometimes things just suck and there is nothing you can do about it. But there have been so many times when I have been at rock bottom and I couldn’t see how things could ever get better. Yet they have always gotten better. Occasionally, they have gotten worse first, but they have always gotten better eventually. I have a LOT of examples of this, but here’s my favorite. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived in a rooming house with a bunch of other girls. Instead of a landlord, we had more of a house mother, kind of like a sorority. I had always gotten along well with her, even though I thought she was a bit unstable and sometimes treated other people unfairly. I should have known it was only a matter of time before she turned on me too (and perhaps I deserved it for not standing up for the other people she turned on). I happened to mention that my Dad was disappointed that he didn’t know sooner that our house would be closed over spring break, or he would have come out to see me and we could have stayed in a hotel. I certainly wasn’t upset when I said this, I just mentioned it because the house had always stayed open during previous breaks. If there ever was an appropriate time to say that someone “flipped out”, this was it. She went from zero to sixty on the crazy scale in about two seconds flat. I’ll leave out most of the details to keep this short, but the gist is that she decided that I must be evicted and gave me a three-day eviction notice. I spoke to someone at the city, and found out that what she was doing was illegal. Even if she had grounds to evict me, she would have had to give me a 30 day notice because it wasn’t for non-payment of rent or anything. Then, while this was going on, I got a letter from UCLA saying that I did not get into the grad program I applied for. And worst of all, my Dad called me and said that he was having some heart problems. This was all in a two-day period. So what it felt like was that I had no place to go, had no future, and might lose my Dad. Well, to prevent this from becoming a novel, I will just say that I did end up finding a place to go, and I did have a future, and I still have my Dad. I feel very strongly that some of these things that seemed so awful at the time probably set me on the path to the life I have today. And I like my life. It isn’t perfect, but I like it. So I have accepted that suffering is just a part of life. Sometimes things do get better. Sometimes things happen that we can’t fix, like losing someone you love. However, when something awful (or even something sort of awful) happens, chances are that it is not the end of happiness.

Knowing that someone has it worse doesn’t make your pain go away
One of the things people do that really gets on my nerves is when you are talking about a problem or annoyance and they respond, “Well, you should be happy you are not in Haiti. Those people really have it bad.” Well, of course they do, and I am happy that is not my situation. But the fact of someone else’s pain does not negate your own pain. Sure, sometimes we get a little ridiculous about our problems, but it is okay to feel bad if your dog dies or you have an awful day at work. You don’t have to justify feeling bad to anyone, as long as you keep some perspective. Just because someone has it much worse doesn’t mean that this makes your problems better. They are not related. No one can tell you that you don’t have a right to hurt. Of course you do. I don’t have a lot to say about this – I just have a big problem with people diminishing someone else’s feelings or trying to assign a relative value to them. It’s just not relevant.

There are probably a zillion other points I could make about dealing with life’s hiccups, but I’d like to hear what other people do when they are faced with crises big or small. Please post a comment and share your advice. Yes, I know these flower pictures have nothing to do with the subject of my post, but they are pretty and made me smile, so they’re in!

I am almost caught up now on my reading, which will hopefully make me less stressed about my challenge. Surprisingly, I’ve done much better with the weight loss portion than the reading portion, but I am trying to even that out. I finished Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child tonight. Child is one of my favorite authors, but I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed in the book. It was well-written and exciting, but the plot was kind of a retread of Relic, which he wrote with Douglas Preston. When I read Relic the first time, probably 15 years ago, I couldn’t put it down. I ended up staying awake most of the night to read it. Now I couldn’t stay up all night if I wanted to, but I didn’t have that sense of urgency with Terminal Freeze anyway. I knew where it was going, and luckily, getting there was still a fun ride. His new book with Douglas Preston is coming out later this spring, and I am really looking forward to that one.

I’ve been collecting books from the Portable Library of Korean Literature, so I’ve decided to tackle those next. I only have seven of them, but there are probably at least 50 in the series. Most of the books are novellas or short story collections, and they usually only run about 100 pages. I am starting with A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball by Cho Se-Hui. It was first published as part of a short story collection in 1978, and is considered a modern classic in Korea and remains very popular. The translator of this edition, Chun Kyung-Ja, has won awards for her English translations of Korean literature, so I am hoping it is a good translation.

I am having surgery in about three weeks that will hopefully help with my back problems, which will probably result in a brief spike in weight loss like when I was sick a couple weeks ago. So don’t be worried if I lose weight a little more rapidly that week. I am just hoping it has a positive effect on my back. The bummer is that I won’t be able to walk Chiqui for awhile. Well, I can walk with her and Stephen, but I won’t be able to hold the leash.

Sorry for the delay in posting my challenge update from last Friday. It was my birthday weekend, and I was busy having fun! After losing more than six pounds in week six, I gained just under four pounds in week seven, making my overall weight loss so far a little more reasonable. Plus I seem to be over whatever stomach bug was ailing me.

Yesterday, I started reading The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. I enjoyed it so much, I ended up finishing it yesterday too. I’m on week eight now, so I need to read two more books to catch up. I liked it so much that I put the movie in my Netflix queue. I hope I enjoy it as much as I did the book. I got rid of a few more books too. My friend’s daughter is an avid reader, and I went through my book donation boxes and picked out a bunch of titles I thought she might like. We need to make another trip to the library this weekend though, to get rid of the rest of these boxes.

Cando Vestibular Disc

I have made an adjustment at work that will probably contribute to weight loss, although the reason for it is to reduce back pain. My desk has been converted to a standing desk, so that I do not have to sit all day. This means that I will be moving around a lot more. They have ordered a stool for me so that I can sit when I need to, but I am going to try and stand as much as possible. To alleviate stiffness and pain in my legs from standing all day, I ordered a vestibular disc. It is kind of like a balance ball, but flat. You stand on it so that you are shifting your weight and moving all day, instead of standing in one position with your feet flat on the floor all day. They raised my desk much more quickly than I expected, so hopefully my stool and my disc will arrive soon.

Stephen put together this nifty graph of my January weight loss. It actually starts on January 14, when my weight was 212.9. For the first week or so of January, we were in Jamaica and I didn’t have access to a scale. My starting weight as of January 1 was 215.3. I lost 8.3 pounds during the month of January. My goal was to lose four pounds, so I exceeded my target. Without Jamaica, I might have done even a little better, but I couldn’t help eating at least a couple Jamaican patties.

I have been concentrating on trying to eat a balanced diet and get all the right nutrients. The hardest thing for me is getting enough protein. I am not a big meat eater, so on days when I don’t eat any meat, I try to eat other high protein foods. I use The Wellness Encyclopedia of Foot and Nutrition from UC Berkeley to look up nutritional information for various fresh foods. Unfortunately, this book is no longer in print in any of its various incarnations, although you can buy used copies on Amazon. There are probably lots of similar books on the market. I find this one to be extremely useful.

I read four books in January, which is almost on track. I am about one week behind. In January, I read the good, good pig by Sy Montgomery, Tongue by Kyung Ran Jo, Food Rules by Michael Pollan, and a children’s book called, The Wicked Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House by Mary Chase. I found the last one when boxing up books for donation and figured I could read it very quickly (like an hour or less) and then give it away. It doesn’t seem to be in print anymore, but it was originally published in 1968 (as The Wicked Pigeon Ladies in the Garden), so there are probably zillions of used copies floating about. I would have loved this book when I was about 10 – lots of creepy elements. A quick and enjoyable little read. I really wanted to be reviewing the books I’ve read so far, but I haven’t had a chance yet. Of the first four books, Tongue is the only one that I definitely would not recommend. It may be the translation, but I found it a little dry and slow.

I haven’t been too diligent about updating my blog, but luckily I have been diligent about my challenge. I went to the doctor for my annual checkup yesterday and I was down to 205 lbs. I got a big surprise though. Every time my height has been measured for the past 20 or so years, I have been 5’9″. Yesterday, I was 5’8 1/4″! I thought I was a bit young (a couple weeks shy of 42) to be shrinking, but I asked the nurse if it could be related to my ruptured and herniated discs. That is exactly what it was. I had no idea it would affect my height – especially not that much. I am still calculating my BMI based on 5’9″ though! I figured the change in height didn’t affect my body composition – my spine is simply compressed.

I got a little behind in my reading because I had been driving to work. I started taking the train to work again, so I am getting caught up this week. But the big news is that I have decided to let go of some of the books in my To Be Read (TBR) pile. I will never get through 911 books, so I decided to keep only the ones that I REALLY want to read. I have donated about 150 books so far, and I have another 150 or so boxed up. I got more boxes and I think I can probably get rid of another 200. This will put a huge dent in the massive numbers of books I have around the house. I feel better already! I am donating all the like new books to the Friends organization of my local library, and sending the beat up ones to Goodwill.