Enginero.com `en-jin-neer-o`

We all do it in one way or another. For some it just pays the bills, for others it keeps them motivated, but regardless of the reason, we all work. My last work week involved devoting countless hours to debugging and fixing a problem that should never have happened if my former colleague hadn’t been so worthless, but I digress…

This is the first time since starting the blog that I have gone this long without posting. Granted “this long” is only 4 days, but it feels like a long time considering I usually write a post about every day. Unfortunately, I was just too tired in the evenings to post and what little free time I did have was spent reading. This series of events leads me to why I’m writing tonight. When confronted with a shortened free timespan decision of whether to read other blogs and financial related sites or post to my blog, I chose to read.

I can’t tell you why I made that decision with any real certainty, but I tend to hope it is because I feel the need to quench my own thirst for knowledge before devoting time to talking about it. On the contrary, every night I felt an urge to post. I also felt a little guilty for not posting. I imagine that these feelings came from instinct. Once something becomes a habit, we are compelled to continue even when we have no pressure to do so.

So, I’d like to pose these questions to all of you…

1. Do you feel compelled to post to your blog even when you feel like there is something else that you would enjoy doing more?
2. Do you treat your blog like a job that comes with its’ own set of responsibilities?
3. Do you ever feel guilty for not posting every day? If so, do you worry that your posts will become “watered down” as you will inevitably end up struggling to find compelling things to discuss?

As a full time web developer and part time, hobby, blogger it interests me that I feel the urge to treat the blog as another responsibility. I don’t know why this is, but I look forward to hearing about your thoughts and experiences on the topic if you don’t mind commenting on it.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Birthday Dinner Savings at P.f. Changs, my wife and I have been using Paul McKenna’s “I can make you thin” tips for about 2 months now and it has made a very huge positive change in our lives. We saw his mini-series on TLC and I am hoping that they will rerun it, so we can tape it for the friends and family members that didn’t get to see it.

I want to preface this post by saying that what Paul teaches is not a diet. It’s not a “quick weight loss” plan. It is quite simply just retraining yourself to eat in a much better way.

The foundation of Paul’s system, which is the part that we decided to try, has four rules. I am listing them below with links to Paul’s web site where you can read more about them if you like.

Four Golden Rules:

1. When You Are Hungry, Eat
2. Eat What You Want, Not What You Think You Should
3. Eat Consciously And Enjoy Every Mouthful
4. When You Think You Are Full, Stop Eating

Now, I know the rules sound very “self helpy”. We are all accustomed to hearing things like that when we hear or read about diets. In fact, you might even be thinking right now…

Sure, there are these rules, but what am I not allowed to eat? - Or - Ok, those rules are too easy, what is the catch?

There is no catch. There is nothing to buy, there are no pills to take, there isn’t even special food you have to add to your normal diet. However, I want to elaborate a little bit on each of the rules, because the rules themselves don’t really explain how you will benefit from them.

So, here goes…

It sounds so simple. I used to think that’s what I always did. I would go get some food when I was hungry. However, I have since come to realize that I wasn’t truly hungry. I thought I was hungry because I was bored or because it was “that time of day”. Truly eating when you are hungry means that your body is telling you to eat, not your emotions.

Real hunger is slow to surface. You’ll go from being a little peckish to thinking of eating soon to being actually hungry. Emotional hunger is instant. I’ve found that now that I am able to easily distinguish between the two types of hunger that emotional hunger is more like an epiphany. “Hey, I want some potato chips!!!”. That groundbreaking thought comes from emotional hunger. The type of hunger that is normally brought on by watching TV or reading a book and it’s the emotional eating that adds on those extra pounds.

This is a classic no-no in the diet world. More often than not you are given types of foods or even specific foods that you should eat. Well, that can end up being why you don’t stay on the diet. If you are really eating what you want, then you won’t be left feeling like you have deprived yourself of something. That feeling of depravity is what can, and often does, lead to binge eating.

If you have ever dieted, you may have had this thought before “Well, I did good today and didn’t eat any sweets. So, now I’ll treat myself to some cake”. It’s that kind of thinking that can easily turn into you eating half the cake and totally negating any benefits you gained from the day of avoiding the sweets.

This was one that my wife and I were both guilty of; We were shovelers. We would eat very fast. Neither of us knows why it happened, but that’s the habit we had and we formed that habit long before we ever met each other. Subconciously, our minds had decided that eating was like racing and the first to finish wins. The problem with this is that you aren’t giving your stomach time to give you the signal that you are full and by the time you get that signal, you aren’t full, you are stuffed.

Eating conciously also means; don’t eat in front of the TV, don’t eat in front of the computer, don’t eat and focus on anything other than eating. It’s that focus that allows us to savor our food. Since, we’re eating what we want, it should be rewarding to take time to chew each bite and taste all of the flavor. It should also not be a problem to put the knife and fork down between bites. This will help you to focus more on your current bite and not have you chewing while loading up your fork for another “throw down”.

The whole idea behind this rule to help you enjoy your food more and to help you slow down while you eat, thus allowing yourself to pick up on the signal that you are full.

It’s amazing how easy it sounds and it really is easy, but it takes using rule #3 to get there. If you are eating conciously and savoring each bite, you will quickly notice that your stomach is telling you that you are full much earlier than before. I am still amazed at how a man of my size (6′3 and 294 pounds) can eat less than a whole plate of food and be satisfied. This is after years of always having seconds.

The other part of this rule is to recognize the difference between being full and being stuffed. Being full means that you and your body are satisfied. Being stuffed means that you actually feel like you’re bulging and you may even feel a little sick. It’s the classic “Thanksgiving Meal” stuffed feeling that is important to avoid and if you are eating when you’re hungry, eating what you want, and eating conciously it is very easy to stop well before that feeling would hit you.

That is all we have done. We haven’t made drastic changes to our lives. We haven’t taken up extreme jogging, started eating only lettuce, or began taking questionable diet pills. We simply decided to stick to the four gold rules and here are my results:

When we first saw Paul’s show on TLC, my wife and I were intrigued for different reasons. She really wanted to lose some weight and I thought it’d be great if we ate less, because eating costs money. Little did I know that I would be telling people here that I have lost:

I’m down to the last hole on my “good belt” before I will have to go buy another one. I also wouldn’t be able to keep my pants up anymore without that belt. We have tons of leftovers that we never used to have and my work lunches are now always really good leftovers and not just sandwiches or something I could throw together quickly.

However, the single most exciting part of the whole experience to me has been how I am enjoying food so much more. No more shoveling and feeling bloated, no more late night “snack attacks” where a bag of chips seems to never last long, and no more wondering when I will finally have to start shopping at Big and Tall stores. It’s just a wonderful feeling and I’m sure you can tell by the overly jovial tone of this almost “infomercial-like” post of mine.

In closing here, I would just like to say that if you are currently trying Paul’s rules or you are interested, please feel free to post a comment about it. I would love to hear from you. It has been a great experience for my wife and I and we really hope that the habits we have formed will stick with us for years to come.

Check out these other PF bloggers who have written about Paul’s program

• NCNBlog.com - “A New Weight Loss Program - And A Quick Stroll Through My Blogroll”
• FiveCentNickel.com - “Midweek Roundup - Start of Soccer Edition”

Personal Finance blogging simply kicks butt! Going from only reading PF blogs to entering into the opposite world of maintaining a blog has been tremendous. I have only been running Enginero now for about 2 months and I have already gotten to meet some really great and likeminded people online. People that I typically do not get to meet “offline”. The broken down financial taboo-walls of PF blogging let’s people like me be me and not the reserved, keep finances to yourself, type that most people expect in everyday conversation.

Case in point:
The first series that I decided to do for the blog was my Food Budget Tight? Stretch - it - out series parts 1 and 2. In the series, I go into details about ways that my wife and I try to counter the high cost of feeding ourselves. You’ll find that I typically only try to do “self help” types of posts where I can offer pieces of advice that aren’t so common. I tend to think that reiterating the same ideas that are repeated elsewhere doesn’t serve as much of a purpose for my time and yours. I also could, and do, just link to those other bloggers articles to give them the credit for the ideas.

At any rate, I got an email today from PassiveFamilyIncome.com regarding how he had created a post about my food budget series. I was truly flattered and excited that the normal ideals that my wife and I use all the time could really help him and his family do a better job of being educated shoppers.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I get great ideas from other blogs all the time, but this is the first time that I’ve had someone say the same about something I have written. It’s just a really cool feeling. It’s the feeling that you never get when you’re the guy in the group that never wants to go to lunch and the one who thinks birthdays are still a time to be frugal.

So, I’ll keep living, thinking, frugaling? (new word?), and posting about it and I hope you’ll keep staring bewildered at your monitor while reading the rambled musings of a frugal engineer.

I’m finding that whenever I make a development based update to the blog, it gives me motivation to post about it. I guess it could be that I’m compelled to share my new found knowledge on how the developers have used PHP to build the content management system that is WordPress. At any rate, I like to think that with me making this information available online, it is there to help someone else down the road.

Today’s Task:
Today I wanted to customize my theme a bit more by redoing the code that handles the
<title> of the pages. Prior to my changes, my titles appeared like this:

Home Page: Enginero.com
Post (single) Page: Enginero.com >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
Category Page: Enginero.com >> CategoryName

… and so on.

I didn’t really care for the “»” spacing characters and I wanted to change the output a bit.

Making the changes:
If you are not at all familiar with HTML or PHP, I will try to make this explanation make some sense to you, but if you need help, feel free to post a comment. Keep in mind that HTML codes are encased in less than < and greater than > symbols. So, when I say “title tag”, you are looking for <title>Title Here</title>.

1. You’ll need to locate your header.php file. You can do this by using the Wordpress theme editor or as I do it, by downloading the file itself from your web server and editing it locally.
2. Next, you need to find the place in the file where the titles of your posts are being set. The exisitng code will be placed between two <title> tags. ex: <title>bloginfo(’name’)</title>
3. Now you are ready to make your changes. For my changes, I wanted to use a colon “:” as my spacing character and I also wanted to make some wording changes.

   &nbsp

   Examples (I wanted my new titles to look like this:):

   • Home Page: Enginero.com : My Blog Description
   • Post (single) Page: Enginero.com : Post Title
   • Category Page: Enginero.com : Category : CategoryName

   To accomplish this, I replced the old code that was building my titles and wrote this new code:

   <title>
   <?php 
   bloginfo(’name’);
   if (is_home()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	bloginfo(’description’);
   }
   elseif (is_single() || is_page()) {
   	echo ": ";
   	single_post_title();
   }
   elseif (is_category()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	echo "Category : ";
   	single_cat_title(); 
   }
   elseif (is_search()) { 
   	echo "Search Results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
   }
   else { 
   	wp_title(’:',true);
   }
   ?>
   </title>
   

I would imagine that you can study the code above for a minute and guess how it works. Since WordPress uses a pretty good naming convention for its’ native functions, the code “reads” pretty easily. I hope you get some use out of the code I wrote above and if you need help making changes and adding your own personal touch, feel free to post your question in a comment.

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