In 2015 New Year’s resolution , I said that I want to lose 10–15 pounds by June 2015. In Weight-loss progress report, Second weight-loss progress report, Third weight-loss progress report , and Fourth eight-loss progress report, I provided monthly updates.
For May, I was keeping to the same diet as the previous three months: only raw fruits and vegetables for lunch on weekdays and trying not to overeat in the evenings. Because I was in my target weight range, I was a little less strict with myself about evening and weekend snacking—I allowed myself to eat peanuts between bouts of grading assignments, and I even had ice cream a few times in the month. Because of this slight relaxation of my dieting rules, I never hit the low set-point for the control algorithm I described in Fourth eight-loss progress report, but have continued officially on the same regime as I have been following since the New Year.
My weight has been fairly steady this month:
I’ve stayed within my target weight range since 2015 Apr 20.
It looks like I’ll have to stay on the “raw-veggies-for-lunch” plan indefinitely, since I am now holding steady at my desired weight. I don’t know how well that will work over the summer, when I won’t be going into work very often, and so will have both reduced exercise and more snacking temptations working from home. If I put on weight this summer, I’ll have to make up something to induce me to exercise more and snack less—those sorts of artificial plans have never lasted more than a few weeks in the past, though. Perhaps I can convince my son that we both need more exercise, and can arrange to jog or bike with him daily—if I have to do it for him, I’m more likely to do it for myself (and the same motivation in reverse may help him keep to an exercise plan).
Gas station without pumps 
Congratulations!
I’d guess that the bigger problem in the summer is not commuting to work on your bike. Why not do something silly like ride in every day to check your e-mail and mailbox?
I’ve been maintaining my new (old) weight right around the same BMI by just what you have been doing: Keeping up the same exercise and diet pattern and adding a few things back in. But I always want to binge snack on things I like when I am up late, so my strategy there is to keep snacks out of the house. That said, sometimes I have succeeded in pretending that I don’t know they are around by never opening the wrong cupboard. I’m curious how you managed to limit your peanut consumption while grading. One for each paper?
Comment by CCPhysicist — 2015 June 3 @ 19:47 |
If I could limit myself to one peanut per paper I wouldn’t have to worry about snacking while grading. I’m more apt to eat a handful of peanuts after each paper, and wander around the house for a bit trying to get up the courage to pick up the next paper. Sometimes it helps to deliberately put the papers I expect to be good last, so that I can look forward to improvement rather than seeing only disappointment ahead.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2015 June 3 @ 23:25 |
I separate papers into groups of 5 or perhaps 10, and as a mini-reward I get to grade a paper that I expect to be good at the end of each group.
Generally, the barrier to grading is initially high, so I need more cheering up near the start, until the mistakes start repeating. After I am done with about 55%, I can go longer stretches without having to cheer myself up.
Comment by xykademiqz — 2015 June 8 @ 18:41 |
I have relatively few, but long, papers to grade. Last quarter it was senior thesis drafts at about 20–60 pages each. This quarter it is design reports for the labs in the applied electronics class. I’ve got 3 edge-inches of redone reports in my backpack (which isn’t quite as bad as it sounds—only 30 reports of about 6–10 pages each—because old drafts are attached to the back of each redone report). I’ve also got 3 senior theses left over from last quarter—students who got incompletes or failed the senior writing course last quarter.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2015 June 8 @ 20:02 |
I sort papers by mistakes. That is, I group them based on the answer to a particular problem or question so that I am looking at people who earned the same partial credit or (for lab reports) copied from each other. This has proven to be remarkably efficient because it tells me what rubric details to focus on (I learned it from a sampling method we used when each of us graded one question on hundreds of exams) while, more importantly, grouping all disappointments of one type into one easily processed group.
It doesn’t work for things like thesis drafts, however, where the papers are measured in inches!
Comment by CCPhysicist — 2015 June 17 @ 19:34 |
I agree that exams and homeworks are best graded by question, and grouped by answers to questions, so that copying and common misunderstandings are grouped together.
That would not have helped me, though, as I was grading either 5–10-page design reports or 30–50-page theses, neither of which is really possible to divide into parts for separate grading.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2015 June 17 @ 19:46 |
As for riding up to campus every day—I considered it, but I’d have a real hard time motivating myself to do it. My laptop at home is a better computer than the 10-year-old desktop machine I have on my desk at work (note to self: order a new computer at work—the vice chair job came with a tiny research supplement that should just cover it). Even when I’m going up to campus every day, I rarely check my hardcopy mail, as it is in a different building from my office or anywhere I have meetings. I check it only about once a month, and have not seen anything interesting delivered there in about a decade.
I go to campus on a daily basis because I have classes or meetings to go to, and without those classes or meetings, it will be hard to motivate myself to go. I have tried in previous summers to set some sort of exercise goal, and the plan has rarely lasted more than a couple of weeks. I do need to find a solution for this motivation problem, as I’ll be retiring in 5 or 6 years, and then I’ll have the how-do-I-motivate-exercise problem year round.
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2015 June 4 @ 07:58 |
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