Body Status:
About a month ago, I tried out HGOMAD (Half Gallon Of Milk A Day) for a couple weeks to try and build some muscle. Funny thing was, I kept up enough discipline to drink all the milk (1200 cal/day), but not enough discipline to hit the gym even once in two weeks. The result is a little bit of flab, and no more mediocre abs.

I'm fixing this with the "slow-carb" diet:

• Rule 1: Avoid "white" carbohydrates (or anything that can be white). 
• Rule 2: Eat the same few meals over and over again. 
• Rule 3: Don't drink calories. 
• Rule 4: Don't eat fruit. 
• Rule 5: Take one day off per week and go nuts. 

Rule 1 stabilizes blood sugar by relying on the glycemic index: "white" carbs get absorbed really quickly, blood sugar spikes, insulin spikes, fat cells see insulin and start making fat. Rule 2 is just for simplicity and will probably help me a lot during finals, less than 2 weeks from now. Rules 3 and 4 are for avoiding fructose (here's a damn good UC lecture on why fructose is killing us, but it's 90 minutes long). Rule 5 is fun: it induces the insulin spike that you've been avoiding all week, which keeps your thyroid from getting used to the lack of spikes, and keeps your metabolism cranking at a higher rate than it would be at otherwise.

Basically, the only carbs I can eat are beans and lentils, aside from cheat day. I'll stay on the slow-carb plan until I think it's time to start gaining again, and I'll try to hit the gym at least twice a week during that time, using the general G2F full-body 5/5 to failure workout plan.


Supplements:

Yerba Mate: A tea that kicks harder than coffee. May have the same benefits green tea is so hyped for.
CLA: Conjugated Linoleic Acid. Really only present in grass-fed cattle, and that stuff is expensive. When I take 2g/day of CLA for 2 weeks, my meabolism goes so fast that 4 hours without food makes me woozy.
ALA: Alpha Lipoic Acid. Controls blood sugar, it's complicated. Supposed to help. We'll see.

The Food Feed is back online for morning body weight measurements and body fat measurement with calipers when they come in the mail.

Let's see how this goes.

Reboot?

In my trademark style, I ran out of money and motivation, and abandoned the G2F plan and blog for three months. Let's try this again.

A lot's happened. Last weekend, I went to San Francisco with some engineer buddies of mine to participate in Robogames BarBot 2012, a fundraiser for Robogames. The idea is to build robotic bartenders that mix cocktails. We spent the preceding 11 days welding, soldering, hacking and coding, and I'm really proud of the result, Santa BarBot. Here's a pretty good video of it in action:

The forearm holding the iPod drink menu is none other than Zach Rubin, whose blog covers more tech details and links to coverage from Make Magazine(!). We got a couple hundred people a little too drunk, made some money for a non-profit, and had an absolute blast the whole time.