I was bored yesterday morning before work so I set up a time lapse video. This video compresses about 9 hours of time into 40 seconds. If it doesn’t look like the sun actually moves that much in 9 hours, that’s because it doesn’t. We are on the verge of Seattle summer, after all.
OK Go’s ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’
I’ve spent much of the day watching and re-watching OK Go’s newest music video. I actually really enjoy the song, but beyond that, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the mad genius it takes to CONCEIVE AND ATTEMPT such a thing. Like, these guys must have just sat around, thinking of how they could dazzle viewers with some camera reveals of these spectacular optical illusions? And do it all in one long continuous shot? MADNESS.
These guys have come a long, long way from dancing on treadmills filmed with a household camcorder (just 8 years ago!).
Equally brilliant: the way they chose to roll this out. They shot several exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and gave one each to outlets like Time and Mashable. This ensures coverage from those places while providing them each with unique, interesting content.
I took Buzzfeed’s Clean Eating Challenge. Here’s what happened.
Recently on Twitter, I happened upon Buzzfeed’s Clean Eating challenge, a two-week “detox” diet that required you to consume almost no carbs, no alcohol/caffeine (easy for me, since I avoid those already), and absolutely no processed foods whatsoever. Since I’m always a fan of crazy ideas, I thought I’d take my dietary recommendations from a site that got popular by posting cat GIFs.
So I took the Buzzfeed Clean Eating Challenge, and I kept a mini-diary of each day of my journey. Here are my thoughts from each day, plus my pros and cons of going on the Challenge.
The Diary
Day 1 – Hooray! We’re having fun! Doing a detox and making our bodies better! Woohoo! Look at all this new and interesting food we’re eating. Wow, a shake for breakfast! Exciting! Damn, I’m hungry…
Day 2 – This day is agonizing. Hunger pains throughout, which can lead into mild mood swings and low energy. The hardest part is curbing the impulse snacking. If you need a hit of sugar normally, you can’t just pick up a soda or even an apple juice. Must stay away.
One of the things this cleanse has made me realize is how much I rely on food for emotional satisfaction. Often times we don’t need to eat. But maybe that cookie or that muffin at the lunchroom will make us feel better, and it’s only $1.50, so why not?
Day 3 – One of the most amazing things about the detox is you can eat a whole plate of food (usually greens), or a whole bowl of yogurt, and at the end of it, when you feel like your stomach should theoretically be full, it doesn’t feel that way at all and you are still incredibly hungry. But I actually feel a lot less hungry on today. My stomach is acclimating to the fact that it’s going to be getting less food. In fact, a remarkable realization I’ve had is that I’ve really been eating way more food than is necessary for me to stay alive. And I guess I just got use to that excess over time…
Day 4 – My weight is already declining. I’m down 2 pounds already. But will it stay off?
The thing that surprises me about this detox: the random cravings. For instance, today is Free Bagel Day at the office. Every Wednesday, our lovely admins put together this amazing spread of bagels with cream cheese, PLUS a toaster! And smelling those bagels all day – it was terrible. I desperately wanted to eat one. Which is weird because I don’t usually need to have the bagels, but with this low-carb cleanse, anything that smells like bread is heavenly to me.
Day 5 – Today, I seriously had thoughts about quitting this cleanse early. I’m not losing that much weight (not that I thought I was going to) but most importantly, I don’t feel like my life is that much better or different than pre-cleanse. But I choose to soldier on.
Day 6 – It’s interesting how SPECIFIC the cravings I get are. I’m hungry a lot of the time, but eating a pound of carrots isn’t going to help. I crave carbs specifically, in any form. The body needs carbs. Bread would be amazing. Just need a little bit of bread. Can’t I have some bread? No.
Day 7 – By this date, the desire for carbs has finally started to subside. In general, I feel like my stomach has shrunk and my body needs less food now. Plus the random cravings for processed foods and sugar are now much less frequent.
Day 8 – I had a cheat meal today to celebrate my birthday. Tried not to go out of control at Din Tai Fung, but the birthday comes but once a year…
Day 9 – If this detox was a flight, I’d say that on Day 9, I’ve finally reached cruising altitude. I’m still hungry much of the time, but I can now control that hunger and get used to it. It no longer controls me.
Day 10 – The stupidity of this cleanse has come into full focus for me. All that stuff I said in Day 9? Forget it. I’m in a bad mood, I’m irritable, I’m low-energy, and I don’t feel like working out. This detox is the worst and I hate it.
Day 11 – I hate my life.
Day 12 – Not a bad day. My body chemistry seems to be re-orienting to the new diet, but the hunger – it never goes away.
Day 13 – The end is in sight…
Day 14 – IT IS OVER. IT IS FINALLY OVER!
Now that all is said and done, what are my thoughts on the detox as a whole?
Pros
The recipes – A lot of the recipes are really tasty, and pretty much all of them are healthy. I’d say at least 70-80% of the recipes are dishes I would enthusiastically try again. We will definitely be adding some of these to our rotation, and already have started making “salad dinner” a regular staple of our meals together. By far, this is the greatest net positive on my life.
Weaning you off processed foods and carbs – Carbs are such a huge part of our daily lives. And there’s a reason for that: carbs are awesome! But they also make me feel super bloated and full. Living life with very few carbs for a couple weeks definitely made me understand what an impact this food type has on my body — and made me desire it less.
You will need less food afterwards – If you do this thing correctly, you should be much more conscious of your daily caloric intake, and are likely to want to eat fewer calories each day.
Cons
Time – If my lovely girlfriend Eva did not agree to do this cleanse with me and help prepare the overwhelmingly vast majority of the food, there’s no way I would have been able to successfully complete it. The food for this detox took, at minimum, over 20 hours to prepare over the course of two weeks. That is a staggering amount of work and probably renders this detox impossible for normal, busy people.
Expensive – We spent roughly $400 on groceries for two weeks. That is a lot of cheddar (or rather, not a lot of cheddar since there is pretty much no dairy in the cleanse). You can probably find ways to cut this price down through some creative shopping, but it’s an expensive proposition either way.
It ruins your social life – So much of our social interactions are wrapped up in food (see this beautiful Roger Ebert essay for more on this topic). When your daily meals are heavily regulated, you can’t really go out to restaurants with friends — or if you do, it’s super awkward as they order from the menu and you pull out some tupperware with roasted cauliflower. Make sure if you try to attempt a cleanse that you are willing to take a hit on your social life.
Caloric intake not properly calibrated – I’m somewhat of a large dude, so I probably consume around 2500-3500 calories per day. This detox reduces the caloric intake for males down to about 1500-1800. While my girlfriend had no problems managing this cut, I was constantly irritable and angry for the majority of the detox period. The detox drained me of my energy; I didn’t feel good working out because I could barely drag myself to work and back without collapsing in a heap. What good is a detox if you can’t exercise?
I’m not sure, but I know that for me, the caloric cutback was far too drastic and was not workable for a person of my size. Maybe it’s because I’m gluttonous, but I highly doubt that wanting a few more almonds to fill out the stomach qualifies as being out of control.
So in the end, was it worth it?
I’d say it was definitely worthwhile in some ways: it showed me how little food I could survive on, and it’s always character-building to see whether you can achieve a specific goal. [I should point out I lost several pounds, but put it back on quite quickly after the detox was over].
But there are a few major issues with this detox.
Firstly, it only lasts for two weeks. From conversations I’ve had with friends who have tried similar diets, that is not nearly enough time to have any kind of meaningful or lasting impact. Instead, it just gives you a taste of what it’s like to eat well. That may be enough for you to make good decisions going forward, but the Buzzfeed plan certainly doesn’t lay out a long term strategy.
And secondly, I think that rather than doing this detox, your time/money is better spent making sustainable eating choices that will make you better off in the long run. That means meeting with a nutritionist and/or incorporating some of these recipes (calorically adapted) into your daily life for your needs.
This detox really did a teach me a lot about my body and about how much food I eat on a daily basis. But overall, it’s not something I can wholeheartedly recommend because of its considerable time/money commitment, with no clear payoff. Solid recipes, though.
Another Year in the Life of David Chen
Last year, I wrote a whole series of essays about my attempts to chronicle my life one second at a time. You can watch last year’s video here.
I have finally completed this year’s video, which starts the day after my birthday in 2013. Round 2 of the 1SecondEveryday challenge was considerably more difficult this time around. Here are some thoughts on doing this project again this year:
Time is a flat circle – It’s true: the more things change, the more they stay the same. When you compare the two videos, there are a lot of similarities. A lot of riding the Microsoft Connector bus. A lot of sunsets and scenes from my apartment. A lot of shows at the Seattle Theatre Group (plus Sasquatch!). I’ve started to get into a routine here in Seattle, which is simultaneously comforting and terrifying – it means this place now fully feels like home, but I now fear becoming complacent.
Food – Again, I depended on food for a lot of the seconds. It’s very difficult not to. It’s also hard not to depend upon all the things one sees every day in one’s routine.
I lost the will to go on – About 2/3rds of the way into the year, I definitely lost the will to keep doing the project. It became exhausting to pull out the camera(s) and take some video whenever something interesting was happening. As a result, I didn’t think strategically about stories I could tell using this format. For instance, I could’ve done a whole sequence on the Kickstarter film I’m doing with Stephen Tobolowsky. Huge missed opportunity! Towards the end, as that Kickstarter project started to gain steam, I definitely got a little bit of my mojo back.
Nonetheless…
In the end, it was still incredibly rewarding – Not only do I now have a visual chronicle of my year, but the seconds help me remember a bunch of stuff that I would’ve otherwise forgotten. Plus, the process of revisiting all the seconds, choosing which one was my favorite etc. was as emotional as it was last year.
Moving to a one Month Release Cycle? – I’m thinking of releasing these 30-seconds at a time every month from now on, then perhaps doing a 1-year video every calendar year. The amount of work required for one of these videos just feels like it’d bear more returns spread out over time.
Northwest Folklife Festival 2014
I’ve been having lots of fun playing around with my Panasonic GH4’s slow motion function. This weekend, after driving home from the incredible Sasquatch Music Festival (blog post/album coming soon on that one), I had a chance to check out the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center on Memorial Day. Pretty awesome music and dancing abounded, but I was particularly intrigued by the “rhythm tent,” which apparently has a non-stop beat going on and a bunch of random people just getting down to it.
The above was shot handheld using a Panasonic 12-35mm Lumix lens with OIS activated. Graded using FilmConvert.
What’s in a name?
I was listening to an old episode of the Freakonomics podcast (which is based on the NYTimes bestselling book). The podcast and the multiple books that have come out in the past few years have been wildly popular; it’s hard to imagine a name OTHER than Freakonomics at this point.
But in the episode, one of the hosts talks about asking his sister for help in naming the original book. The term “Freakonomics” immediately leapt to mind, but there were also a bunch of other names that were considered, including:
- Economics Gone Wild
- Dude, Where’s My Rational Expectation
- Bend It Like Veblen
- E-Ray Vision
The publishers/marketers originally HATED the name “Freakonomics” and for a time, the alternates was seriously considered. But at the end of the day, they stuck with Freakonomics and the rest is history.
Now, in retrospect, all of those other names look TERRIBLE in comparison with Freakonomics. I mean, Freakonomics just FEELS like the right name. But that decision was not always so obvious, and certainly, they were going against the grain by choosing that name. Sometimes things that seem obvious after the fact are bold and dicey in the moment.
It’s interesting to think about because we’re in the process of making a film right now, and our tentative name for it is “The Primary Instinct.” I love the name – others hate it or think it’s way too vague. Worth keeping? We don’t really have a way of knowing. Sometimes you just need to make a decision and hope that it makes sense later.
Birthday #3 in Seattle
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This photograph was taken two years ago, after I first arrived in Seattle from Boston. I remember when I first got here, often looking out into the city and wondering what the future would hold. What would my life be like? Would I even have a life here?
While Seattle feels a lot like home now, it was never a slam dunk that this move would be a good idea. It’s not an easy thing, to leave everything you’ve ever known and loved, and set out to a different place (with very little in the way of a support network) hoping that you can improve your condition.
In the past year, I’ve met so many cool people, been to so many beautiful places, seen so many awesome shows, and gotten to create so many exciting things. The ENTIRETY of my concert film project with Stephen Tobolowsky (save post-production) happened all within the past 12 months, including meeting all the talented people that would help make it possible. None of it would’ve happened if I’d stayed in Boston.
So on this birthday of mine, I’m grateful that I’m here, where I am, at this very moment. And I’m thankful for all the people in my life, whoever/wherever you are, who’ve given me any support of any kind, who have followed and subscribed to my rantings and ramblings, and who have encouraged my wildly implausible dreams.
Life in Seattle hasn’t all been easy. In fact, more often than not, it’s been really challenging and stressful.
But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
The Value of an Education
I really appreciated this old episode of Freakonomics, in which the host talks with three of his old professors about what he learned from them:
A classroom is a place where something is going to happen. And no matter how much the professor is prepared, no matter how receptive the student is, there’s no predicting what that’s going to be. And it always amazes me when a student will tell you years later, “I’ll never forget the day you said so-and-so.” You don’t remember saying that. But the student has remembered that and it has meant something to that person.
Most people don’t remember most of what they were taught in college. But they remember those moments of enlightenment, of sympathy, and of transcendence.