February 22, 2016 by jdg Leave a Comment

What is Body Fat?

On my journey to understand my body better and improve my overall wellness and performance, I’ve managed to lose 40 pounds as a side-effect. As I haven’t been measuring, I’m not sure what percentage of that was body fat, but the mirror tells me that it was a fair amount.

I’ve learned quite a lot, and I’ve come to understand fat burning in a way that I feel I can finally explain. Plenty of people have asked me about what I’ve been learning. As a matter of fact, no less than 3 people told me at #CLEUR last week that I looked nothing like my Twitter profile picture, and that they were taken aback when they met me. Following that comment, they asked me what I had been doing that worked.

This series will share a very small subset of what I’ve learned about health, but it’s a topic that I feel will be interesting to many people. The series will look like this: I’ll explain what fat is, why we “get fat” (meaning accumulate excess body fat), how to get rid of it, and I’ll share a variety of resources that have helped me. Let’s get started!

What Is Body Fat?

For most of my life, the only thing that I’ve known body fat as is “fat.” Diets and workout regimens target “fat loss.” But to understand why it accumulates and how we can get rid of it, we have to first understand what it is and the role it plays in our body.

“Fat” that is stored on the body in a way that affects how we look and feel is actually triglycerides. You’ve no doubt heard of triglycerides, probably with regard to blood work at the doctor or during your yearly insurance Health Risk Assessment.

Triglycerides in the blood stream are a normal part of your body’s function, which is why the doctor asks you to fast before having blood drawn. If you had been eating regularly, a certain (relative to the meal) amount of triglycerides might be expected to be present. The act of fasting gives the doctor a baseline from which to determine whether or not your body is dealing healthily with the triglycerides or not.

So what exactly is a triglyceride, and how does it get stored on my body? As seen in Figure 1 below, a triglyceride is made up of 3 (tri) fatty acid molecules and 1 glycerol molecule. Knowing that, the name doesn’t sound so intimidating!

Figure 1 - the (simplified) chemical makeup of triglyceride — Figure 1 – the (simplified) chemical makeup of triglyceride

Body fat (or adipose tissue) is created when your body stores triglycerides rather than breaks them down into fatty acids to be burned as fuel for your body. Regarding the fatty acids, there’s always one of two things happening:

Fatty acids are being joined with glycerol to create triglycerides, OR
Triglycerides are being hydrolyzed to release fatty acid to be burned as fuel

It’s sort of like personal growth or relationships. Either you’re growing or you’re atrophying. Either triglycerides are being broken down into fatty acids or fatty acids are being joined into triglycerides. In the second part of this series, I’ll talk more about this process and why it matters.

How Is Body Fat Created?

When you eat carbohydrates – especially things like sugar and white flour – your body digests those foods and the byproduct glucose (a type of sugar) must be dealt with. The hormone insulin is released by the pancreas and the little insulin soldiers deal with the pesky glucose.

Unfortunately, for reasons that will be explained in the next installation of the series, the glucose isn’t always entirely dealt with. If this happens and there is excess glucose in the body, the liver converts it into triglycerides. As we now know, if those triglycerides aren’t broken down, they’ll be stored as adipose tissue. Probably on your butt.

But don’t worry – getting your body to break down those triglycerides and dispose of them for good is really not that difficult once you understand this process. It’s simply a matter of creating the right metabolic state. At that point, you can literally (not joking or being sarcastic) sit on the couch and watch TV and let the fat fall off.

What Won’t Work

Before I finish explaining the process of accumulating fat and how to reverse the process so it all falls off, let me just list off a few things that are silly and aren’t going to make a bit of difference.

Moderate exercise. The input/output problem of moderate exercise is laughable if you think about it. A moderate jog for an overweight person might burn (on the high end) 500 calories in an hour. Assuming you could even run for an hour (which I can’t) you would have to run for 5 hours to burn 3,500 calories, which happens to be the number of calories required to burn a pound of body fat. So, you could jog for 1 hour a day, 5 times a week, and lose a pound a week. But there’s a problem. Once you’re done jogging for an hour, you’ll be so freaking hungry and so good and proud of yourself, 9 times out 10 you will go eat 500 calories worth of food and end up back at the starting line. Not only that, but moderate exercise will actually convince your body that you should hold on to the fat, not burn it! Moderate exercise is pointless.
Adopting a low-fat and/or severely calorie restricted diet. For reasons that will become abundantly clear in the rest of this series, one of the most surefire ways to get fatter instead of skinnier is to put yourself on a low-fat diet. You can’t just reduce all macronutrients without having a problem, and if you reduce only fats, you will inevitably increase carbohydrates. Carbohydrate intake (as you’ll see in the next post) is the reason you have fat to burn in the first place, so a low-fat diet is making things worse, not better.
Some kind of raw vegan drink-your-dinner smoothie diet. If there’s one thing I know about dieting, it’s that satiety is the killer of all otherwise reasonable diet plans. I think that (given proper supplementation) you could live a reasonably healthy lifestyle on this sort of diet. The problem is that if you’re substantially overweight and accustomed to eating the sort of diet that got you that way, the chances of you being able to sustainably eat some kind of radical diet like this are basically zero. I’m speaking from experience. You’ll do it with gusto for 3-5 days and then fizzle out until you get really motivated in a month or two and try again (all the while maintaining the same amount of body fat in the long term).

Up Next

In the next article, I’m going to discuss exactly why body fat winds up accumulating on our bodies. Then, in part 3, the answer to exactly what to do about it. It’s not hard, and it’s sustainable for the long term. Finally in part four, a list of my current recommended resources for learning more about how to take action in this area of life.

February 17, 2016 by jdg Leave a Comment

Simplicity in the Era of IoT

All of the technology I’ve seen at Cisco Live Europe this week has been interesting in one way or another. No one comes to exhibit their stuff because it’s totally junk; of course it has merit in one way or another.

But there’s one thing that is setting vendors apart in my mind in 2016 and especially in T’ Internet O’ Tings era. [Watch the video below to learn about it from a true visionary, John Harrington] And that is simplicity. As with many important industry trends, some manufacturers and ISVs just get it and some just don’t get it.

Learning about t’ Internet o’ things with @networksherpa at #CLEUR pic.twitter.com/QVp2aoEBuM

— Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) February 15, 2016

I’m sad to say that at the event, I’ve seen more of those who seem to not get it. Allow me to explain the problem with not addressing the need for simplicity, especially as the number of devices under management increases.

Limited Operational Resources

There are substantial technical challenges with being prepared for the sweeping influx of IoT technologies and responsibilities IT organizations will have to deal with. But those are the ones that products are being created to solve. We’ve heard about some amazing technologies this week that are being developed by Cisco.

But as the image to the right from the presentation regarding the Digital Ceiling launch illustrates, a large number of devices are about to come under the control of IT that we’ve never had to deal with before, like sensors, lights, and HVAC. (There are many GREAT reasons that this should happen, and I’m not saying we don’t want these technological advances.)

This poses a significant operational challenge because despite the awesome technology, there’s going to be a scaling issue. If current operational techniques stay the same, as device count increases administrator count will need to increase as well. This is a real problem if IT budgets remain flat (which surveys show is likely the case for the near future). Without additional funds to hire personnel capacity, the only option is for IT organizations to do more with less. Hence my demand for simplicity.

I’m not naming any names because I don’t think that’s helpful. Overall, I think that perhaps the smaller companies are more aware of the need for simplicity because of their constraints and some of the much larger ones aren’t aware of that need because money isn’t as much of an issue. (“Just hire a few more folks!” “Hire a consultant!”) I hope that we’ll see as much focus on simplicity from all the big players soon as we’ve seen in cases like VSAN and EVO:RAIL. Regardless of how those products fare from a feature/maturity/technology standpoint, they’ve nailed it from a simplicity standpoint. I hope we can expect to see more technology innovations follow suit.

February 17, 2016 by jdg 2 Comments

Programmable ASICs Will Change Infrastructure Investments

With any technology, whether it’s consumer technology or enterprise IT, it’s only a matter of time from the purchase before the technology is outdated. Most IT departments are extremely good by now with understanding the refresh cycle and how hardware depreciates over time. I learned of some technology at Cisco Live Europe this week that is going to revolutionize the way the buying cycle (at least with regard to switches) works. To understand why this is so important, we first need to understand the silicon that is used in a piece of IT hardware.

Processing Power

There are a few distinct ways that physical processing power can be developed and placed inside an infrastructure component like a switch.

General purpose CPU (x86)
Field-programmable Gate Array
Application-specific Integrated Circuit

The design decision regarding which of these types of chips to use has to do with balancing tradeoffs. As you can see in Figure 1 which is from Dave‘s slide deck, the tradeoffs are as such:

CPU: Sacrifice performance for application flexibility.
FPGA: Sacrifice cost for performance and application flexibility.
ASIC: Sacrifice flexibility for raw performance.

Figure 1 - The tradeoffs between x86 CPU, FPGAs, and ASICs — Figure 1 – The tradeoffs between x86 CPU, FPGAs, and ASICs

There are unique use cases for choosing one over the other, but consider an example of both ends of the spectrum. A desktop computer uses an x86 CPU that can run the operating system and all sorts of applications. On the other hand, an average Cisco switch is built with ASICs built specifically to switch frames or route packets (and other networky stuff). The switch’s ASICs perform a limited, specific set of functions extremely well. But they don’t do anything else. On the other hand, the CPU in the desktop computer can do just about anything, but it comes at the cost of performance.

The Depreciation Challenge

In the case of enterprise switching, the design decision is usually to use ASICs for the performance boost compared to the other two options. The biggest problem with this is that if a new ASIC-level feature is finished 3 months after the switch was purchased, it won’t be available to customers on the 3-month-old switch. A new batch of ASICs will need to be produced with the new feature integrated and only newly manufactured switches will include the feature.

Over the course of the IT hardware lifecycle, decisions to replace gear are based on things like support contracts and such. But they’re also based on the availability of features as compared to business requirements. The challenge with traditional ASICs in the lifecycle is that a business requirement might necessitate that a certain feature is implemented that is not available on switches that are only 6 months old. Unfortunately, this can force IT organizations to have no choice but to stomach the cost of a new hardware purchase.

This is not brand new technology (it’s been in the Catalyst 3850 for a bit of time now, I think) but Cisco has developed something I just heard about for the first time that will make a big difference in addressing business challenges like this.

Unified Access Data Plane ASIC

To make a long story short, the UADP chip (the name has to do with unifying wired+wireless, which is unrelated) shown in the header picture (autographed by Peter, one of the folks heavily involved in the project) is a programmable ASIC. This means that it comes with the application-specific performance that switch manufacturers have always chosen ASICs for, but it can be upgraded with new hardware-level code after it’s already in the field.

This means that if Cisco develops a new feature that will solve the business challenge an organization is facing and the 3850 is capable, a microcode update to the ASIC can enable the feature in a situation that would require the purchase of a new switch under any standard ASIC architecture. This is huge in that businesses will be able to delay the purchase of new equipment until necessary for another reason. There will, of course, still be reasons that switches need to be replaced. Other components will still become outdated. But the ability to introduce new hardware-level features on a unit is already deployed to the field is super exciting to me.

The UADP chip has many other sweet features as well, so it’s certainly even more exciting than just the programmability. But the microcode update ability of the chip which enables the balance of tradeoffs shown in Figure 2 is the most exciting feature to me.

Figure 2 - Balanced tradeoffs with UADP chip — Figure 2 – Balanced tradeoffs with UADP chip

To learn more about the big picture of the UADP technology, be sure to watch the Tech Field Day Extra video – the entire thing is riveting, and I don’t say that lightly. Thanks to Cisco Live EMEA and Tech Field Day for having us out for this presentation!