Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

I’ve been taking a psychology class over at DVC and while going through some assigned reading came across a section titled “Behavioural Dieting”. I’m not sure if this is what Dr. Phil, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and others suggest but I thought it was interesting, and might be of interest to others who spend their days, and nights, and weekends, working at a computer.

1. Get Yourself Committed To Weight Loss - get yourself involved with others to help you work towards your goals. Things like weight watchers, jenny craig, etc.
2. Exercise - Yeah, still gotta do that, changing your eating behaviors isn’t a silver bullet, you still have to exercise, which is just changing another behavior.
3. Learn Eating Habits By Keeping A Diet Diary - they advocate making a complete 2 week record of when/where/what you eat, how you felt about it. Note if your feels/emotions just before and after eating.
4. Learn To Weaken Personal Eating Clues - Once you’ve figured out what you learned from the previous step, try to restrict your eating to a single room. don’t read, study, listen to the radio, watch tv, etc. The idea here is to have to interrupt what you are doing to eat, and to only eat when you are eating. ( ha! )
5. Count Calories, But Don’t Starve Yourself - Interesting thing here, if you’re having problems problems dieting, try dieting every other day. Apparently, people who diet moderately everyday lose as much as people who diet intensely every other day.
6. Develop Techniques To Control Act Of Eating - smaller portions, wait 15 minutes before you get another plate of food etc.
7. Avoid Snacks -eat a meal if you’re hungry, if you’re not hungry enough for a meal drink water, or set a timer and make yourself wait 20 minutes, and see if you’re still hungry.
8. Chart Your Daily Progress - you need to keep track of your progress, but you need to realize that the real goal here is to change your habits towards food, and eating.
9. Set Threshold For Weight Control - studies have shown people that set a threshold limit on their weight, tend to keep the weight off.

I though this was pretty interesting, the points that really caught my attention were items 4 and 6. As a developer, or any computer/network professional, we spend a lot of time in front of the computer. When we’re hungry we eat, but we don’t want to lose our focus, so we end up eating in front of the computer. Pretty soon we’re snacking in front of the computer, and then we’re never leaving our desks and having food flown in. ( well perhaps it’s not quite that bad but you get the idea ). There’s two really great things about forcing yourself to eat in a particular spot. You tend to eat less, because you have other things to do, and you take a break from what you’re doing, so you feel less and less like you spend the whole day sitting in front of a computer working.

The second point about “controlling the act of eating” is also interesting. I discovered the reality of this for myself last November when Shad ( a friend ) and I had lunch together at an indian buffet. I got a plate of food, and sat down and wolfed it down, and was headed back for another plate, when we got into a conversation. Fifteen minutes later I finally got up to get food and I was still pretty hungry, when I got back to my table with another plate of food, I took two bites and realized I was stuffed. Since then I’ve been forcing myself to wait 15 minutes for seconds, and if I still go back I try to make sure that it is a smaller portion and filled with only veggies and such. I can’t say that I’ve lost a huge amount of weight, but I definitely don’t get up from the table wishing I had stopped sooner. It’s nice to not overeat.

Not a lot to report on these days.

I’ve been taking a Film class and a Philosophy class over at DVC. They have been interesting, and somewhat more challenging than last semester as I’ve had to write a bit more than I did last semester.

I was afraid the Philosophy class was going to be very dry, I’ve been pleasantly surprised and find myself looking forward to going to class. I’ve been considering taking some additional philosophy classes, and will probably take the philosophy version of a critical thinking class that’s a requirement for IGETC.

I wrote a paper for the Philosophy class that I might post here when the semester is over, or perhaps just utilize the format to write something similar. I don’t want to post anything I’m writing for classes while I’m taking them though, I think that could get a little difficult. In fact, perhaps the idea of posting papers is a bad idea when I’m done, I donno, I’ll have to think about that some more.

The film class has been good, not what I was expecting, but I’ve been learning things. I have seen quite a few films that I would never have seen otherwise so that’s good. I finally saw the original King-Kong and learned something about myself, I’m not a big monster movie kind of person. I like horror films that have monsters (Alien/s, Feast) but giant (monkey/dinosaur/etc) films don’t do a lot for me (although I thought Lake Placid was hysterical).

Speaking of Feast, I watched that this last weekend, that’s a pretty funny film, the writing is a bit corny, but the director’s abilities saved that film from being a total load of crap. There’s some really, really, spooky parts, some gross parts, some funny parts. It was good film, and the shots were brilliant. The director knows his stuff. It’s not a terribly deep movie, but if you’re looking for something different it’s worth a watch.

After my entertaining visit with the Diablo Valley College counseling center last time, I made an appointment to talk to a regular counselor ( not a drop-in counselor ). On the appointed day, I arrive, check-in and wait and eventually I am called by a counselor back to her office.

Upon arriving in her office, she introduces herself, asks me to sit, and opens a folder with my transcript in it. We talk about that a bit, and then she asks what I wanted the counseling appointment for. I tell her what I was told in the last meeting, and that I need to get some old records cleaned up at LMC ( which is another community college within the same system ).

She looks a bit baffled and tells me that I’m at DVC and not LMC and that I would need to talk to them.

me : “i was told that this was a rather common thing and we would be able to get it worked out here, that i wouldn’t have to go to lmc to take any more classes”

counselor : “well I don’t know who told you that”

me : “the lady with the messy office, around the corner”

counselor : (raising her voice) “well, if she knew all the answers, why don’t you go get her to help you and leave me alone”

me : “now wait a minute, i’m just going on information that your organization gave me, you’re the professionals here, I’m just trying to get this figured out, i was told you could deal with this”

counselor : “i don’t know who you think you are…blah blah blah blah blah blah” ( she went on for a few minutes and attacked me personally at one point. I let her run out of steam, i just wanted to get this all figured out so I can get on with life, when she finally finished…

me : “are you done?”

counselor : “excuse me?”

me : “do you feel better?, can we continue?”

counselor : (her jaw hit the floor, and she tried to stare me down, it was rather cute, I met her gaze and she continued to sit there staring, so i leaned in a little, she turned bright red ) “do you want to get an appointment with a different counselor?”

me : “no, i want you to do your job, and help me figure this stuff out”

We went back to work and before i left she apologized for her completely unprofessional behaviour. I accepted the apology and left. She ended up being rather useless, but she did show me one particularly useful thing, the counselors at DVC rely heavily on a website ( she didn’t answer one question that she didn’t get off of the website ) that is available publicly, When I got home I was able to dig through it and get some answers that she couldn’t answer when i met with her.

Overall my experiences with the DVC counseling center have been comical, i’m going to try and get the information I need from somewhere else…perhaps talking to UC Berkeley counseling would be a better place to go to get the information that I need.

In May, when it looked like I was going to continue to go to school, i went to a drop-in appointment at the Diablo Valley College counseling center. I wanted to make sure that the classes I were picking made sense for what I wanted to accomplish at DVC.

I signed in and was told that they couldn’t see me before 5pm ( it was 4:15pm ), but that I was the first appointment for 5pm. I thanked the person working at the desk and said i’d be back in 35 minutes. She got indignant and informed me that it was policy of the counseling center that students remain present after they have signed in, in the event that a spot opened up earlier. I asked her to confirm that I had an appointment for 5pm, and she said yes, i had an appointment for 5pm.

I said that i was happy to be seen at 5pm and that if someone else wanted to wait they could go ahead of me if a new spot opened up, but that I would be there 10 minutes before my 5pm appointment. To which she replied : “if you’re not here when we call your name, your name will be removed from the list”

I thanked her, suggested that she might want to get a dictionary and look up the word appointment and left.

Returning at 4:50 I sat down, and waited, at 5:05 i hadn’t been called. Then at 5:10pm a counselor walked by yelling across the room to the woman working the counter.

counselor : “What do I have on my schedule at the moment?”

counter: “You have drop-ins starting at 5pm”

counselor : “They’ll have to wait a few minutes I have something I want to do first”

5 minutes later, the counselor walks past the counter to her office, gets a cup of something or another and strolls out and calls my name.

I grab my bag and head to her office, the counselor starts talking to me over her shoulder as we’re walking

counselor : “what did you need to see me about?”

me : “well i’d like to talk with you about….”

counselor : (interrupting) “please hurry, we have a lot of people waiting…”

me : “right…so as i was saying, i would like to talk with you about confirming my choices for what i’m trying to accomplish at dvc”

counselor : “well we don’t have a lot of time to be doing things like that, since this is a drop-in, if we didn’t have a lot of people waiting i could go through things in more detail…”

( at this point we had arrived at her office, and there was papers, coffee cups, and shit all over the floors her desk, the shelves, it was a disaster, she started in again on not having a lot of time, and if I didn’t have specific questions i should just make a regular appointment. I didn’t even look at her at first, i just looked around the office while she was blithering, and when she got done i turned and looked at her and said “this place is a pigsty”, and sat down )

She completely changed her demeanor, answered all of my questions, except for one that she said would require some research, but it was easily done in a regular counseling appointment. I thanked her and left.

Not sure what that was all about, it was very strange.