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Diet, end of week 3

At the end of last week, when I came off Atkins, I was at about 71.5kg. After a week of calorie control (max 1500kCal per day) I seem to be somewhere between 71 and 71.5. That’s not bad. In the middle of the week I was hovering between 71.5 and 72, as my body was adjusting to having carbohydrates again, and I’d been resigned to the idea that going cold turkey would result in a net weight gain at the end of the week.

But…Carbs! Bread! Yay!

I can have weetabix for breakfast, a ham sandwich with yummy brown bread for lunch, a banana in the morning, an apple in the afternoon, and a pretty much normal dinner in the evening. I am so much happier with this than with Atkins. I feel in control of my weight, and of my diet now. With Atkins, I felt out of control. Even though I was sticking to the diet plan, I felt it was just my innate stubbornness that was stopping me from going off the rails and bingeing on baguettes and rice.

Now, I can look at a chocolate biscuit and think, okay, if I’m willing to give up my banana, and make sure that I have a slightly smaller portion at dinnertime, I can squeeze it in. That’s cool. I haven’t given in to chocolate yet, but I did have a jam donut at work on Friday. I’m losing weight and feeling good about it.

Not being able to eat two or three donuts is not a hardship. Not being able to eat bread was torture.

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SAProxy update

SAProxy has successfully caught all fifteen pieces of spam that have arrived since I installed it on Friday, with no false positives. That’s good. What’s bad is that it has a habit of dying while I’m away from the computer.

My computer runs XP Pro unattached to a Windows domain, so that we can use the fast user-switching features. (Sometimes it’s faster for Abi to just log on to my computer and check her email rather than switching on her laptop.) What I’ve been finding is that when I come back to my session after being away for a couple of hours, whether another user session has taken place in that time or not, SAProxy will be gone, and I have to restart it.

I don’t know if it’s crashing or if it just figures that I don’t need it any more. It doesn’t leave behind any log files, nor does it write to the Windows Event log, so I just have no idea.

For the volume of spam I receive (low, by all accounts), I think it’s probably less annoying to just delete it when it arrives rather than to restart SAProxy whenever I resume a session. It should be running as a service rather than as a user program anyway. I reckon I’ll give it another chance when the product has matured a bit.

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SpamAssassin with SAProxy

I’m happy to say that spam isn’t usually too much of a problem for me. I get about half a dozen messages per day on my main sunpig address. That’s a manageable volume. Most spam is very easy to spot based on its sender and subject line, and hitting the “delete” key a handful of time just isn’t that much effort.

Nonetheless, it’s annoying that I have to. I try to be careful where I pass out my email address, and even though the sunpig web site features email links (click on my name at the bottom of each post, or on the page banner), they are obfuscated by some custom javascript. I don’t run around signing up for random mailing lists, or buying stuff from companies without opt-in/opt-out mail policies (although they’re not always worth the bits they’re encoded in).

This is where SAProxy comes in. SAProxy is built on SpamAssassin, which is generally regarded as one of the best spam filters around. I had looked at SpamAssassin last year, but I’d been put off by the fact that it ran under Unix (or Linux). And even while I was running Linux on my desktop last year, it seemed confusing and difficult to get set up effectively.

Not any more. SAProxy rolls up the SpamAssassin engine in a nice little package for Windows that sits between your email program and your mail server. Normally your mail client (Outlook, Mozilla Mail, etc.) contacts your mail server directly to download its mail. SAProxy adds a proxy layer into the mix: your mailer speaks to the proxy, and the proxy contacts your mail server. When your mail is downloaded, the proxy runs all of it through the SpamAssassin filters. If it finds any spam, it adds the text “*****SPAM*****” to the subject line of the message. Then all you have to do is tell your mailer to automatically shunt all messages with this text into a junk folder. Every now and then you can quickly run through this folder to make sure that it hasn’t accidentally tagged any non-spam, and bulk delete the rest.

It’s very easy to set up, and it works with most modern mail programs under Windows. I installed it yesterday, and so far it has successfully caught all seven spam messages I received since then. It’s a small sample, but it looks very promising.

Ultimately, I would prefer a server-based solution, because the spam still does get downloaded onto my own computer. If the volume of spam were to increase, this could become a problem. But until then, it’s nice to have a clean inbox again.

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Mail delays

Blueyonder, our ISP, has been having some mail problems in the last few days:

“The current queue on the secondary MX (Mail eXchanger) for blueyonder.co.uk has grown to approximately 1.2 million e-mails that are queued for delivery to the primary server in Knowsley as well as the business domains that this server acts as a backup MX for.

“Of this 1.2 million we have identified that approximately 95% of this is spam due to a sustained attack against the mail platform over the last few days. Therefore this entire queue is going to be placed into quarantine and filtered into the mail platform in a controlled manner.”

I know that some people have seen their mail to me bounce back (including someone looking for more information about the Minidisc player I’m selling on eBay, causing them to retract their bid) so if you’ve sent me something important…you might want to try it again.

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Diet: end of week two, end of Atkins

When I stood on the scales this morning they said 71.5kg. Two weeks ago I was up at 77kg. The Atkins diet may have lost me 5.5kg (12lbs) in just two weeks, but it has been really difficult. The bread cravings weren’t quite so bad in the second week. The nausea before mealtimes also mostly disappeared, only to be replaced by a complete lack of appetite. And I still got no joy from any of the food I ate.

I said I would stick with Atkins for the two weeks of the “induction” period, and I have, but that’s quite enough. I’ve switched to a low calorie diet now instead. If previous experience is anything to go by, 1500kCal per day should lose me about 0.5kg per week. I don’t expect to lose much this week, as my body will be adjusting to taking in carbohydrates again. If anything, I’ll probably go up a bit.

My goal is to get to 67kg. I’m pleasantly surprised that Atkins has got me half-way there in just two weeks, but that’s just not sustainable. On a low calorie diet I can eat everything I enjoy most (bread, rice, bread) and still lose weight. It may take longer, but I’d always expected to be in this for the long run.

Being able to have bread at lunch today was a joy beyond words. Forget chocolate. Give me a couple of slices of wholemeal, and I’m a happy man.