Kill La Kill

Here's a weird thought: I love the anime Kill La Kill, but I'd hesitate to recommend it. That's odd, isn't it? Why wouldn't I recommend a show I enjoy?

Kill La Kill has fantastic fight and action sequences. Everything about the show is over-the-top, so the fights are just crazy awesome. The fights are easily some of the best I've seen anywhere, on a level with Gurren Lagann (of course, because it's the same creators). One of my favourite little details is how the show does debris in explosions - instead of rocks and dust, it's often dozens of people thrown screaming into the air. It's just a background detail, but it's hilarious. 

It's also got some surprising depth to it with commentary on fascism, our relationship with clothing, self-confidence, and rejecting society's hangups. There's a lot of subtext if you're paying attention. It's notable that the first scene opens with a history lesson on Hitler's rise to power.

The big reason I hesitate to recommend Kill La Kill is because of how fine a line the show walks . 

The show frequently and extensively sexualizes its high school girls. From what I understand that kind of stuff isn't taken as seriously in Japan, but here in Canada, the amount of skin and butt shots and voyeur gags make me want to avoid having the anime on around other people. The main character's outfit is very revealing, and action scenes work in gratuitous butt shots or excuses to show more skin. Male characters frequently gawk openly and it's treated as an "oh, you" thing, as if the writers are shrugging their shoulders and saying "boys will be boys".

On the other hand, the four most important characters in the show are all women, and of those, the three fighters are the most powerful people on the planet (and the other most powerful is also a woman). They have unique personalities and complex relationships with each other and with the supporting cast. They deal with challenges to their viewpoints and relationships that force them to confront themselves. The hero and the antagonist actively reject society's conventions on how women should dress and are stronger for it. The show mostly doesn't even acknowledge romance as a thing - everyone's too busy dealing with more pressing issues - which strikes me as very unusual for a series about high school girls.

(as an aside, male characters spend more time naked than female characters, but it's usually played for laughs rather than titillation)

Whether Kill La Kill is empowering or demeaning or awesome or embarrassing is going to come down to individual taste. I'm usually very good at judging whether someone I know will like a given piece of media, but I'm really not certain about this one because of how it takes both sides of its issues to the extreme.

So rather than recommend it to anyone I know, I'll just leave this here and you can decide for yourself if you want to give it a shot.

Why and how I'm losing weight

I've been working on losing weight over the last few months and I've been making some progress. Some people have asked me why I'm losing weight, or told me that they didn't think I needed to, so I thought I'd write about it here. It's also an excuse to post something because I haven't updated this blog in months.

I've never thought of myself as fat. I don't recall anyone calling me fat or making fun of my weight. If you passed me on the street, "fat" would not be a word you'd use to describe me.

But I have been carrying a little extra weight for a long time. After a certain age, if you look at photos of me with my three brothers, you can tell that I'm proportionally the heaviest. I've never been ashamed of my weight or embarrassed to be seen without a shirt, but when I look in the mirror I think I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. No one's ever called me fat, but a couple of people whose opinions I care about and who meant well have told me that I'd be more attractive if I lost a little bit of weight. 155 pounds at five-foot-six isn't considered unhealthy, but it's a little high for someone who doesn't work on their muscle.

In other words, it's never been a health concern and has never bothered me enough to make a significant lifestyle change. Every once in a while I decide to start going to the gym in the off season when I'm not working, but boating season starts again and work eats twelve hours a day five days a week, it's hard to put any meaningful amount of time into exercise and still have hobbies and see friends. Or maybe those are excuses and I just don't like it. Over the years I've made some changes to what I eat, and those I've kept up with - I've been eating fewer processed foods and smaller amounts of sugar. But those relatively minor changes weren't having an effect.

A few months ago I read that cutting fat is 100% down to "calories in, calories out". To put it simply, if you want to lose weight, it doesn't matter how much you exercise if you're eating too much. Of course it's much more complex than that if you have specific health goals or want to build muscle mass, but if you already eat relatively healthily and just want to lose a few pounds, that's all there is to it.

At the same time the MyFitnessPal app was recommended to me. You punch in your current weight, your target weight, and when you want to get to your target, and it'll tell you how many calories you should eat each day. It also has a huge database of foods and nutrition information to make it easy to see what's in the food you eat. If you want to be really accurate you'll need a food scale, but you can get those for $20 or less.

This app is pretty much 100% responsible for my weight loss. Once I started accurately tracking my meals and snacks, I realized that what I was eating wasn't the problem - the issue was how much I was eating. All I had to do was pay attention to portion sizes and stop eating when I hit my daily limit. There's a bar code scanner, so most of the time I don't even have to search for what I'm looking for - just scan the code, punch in the weight, and that's it. And for pre-portioned foods (like a single-serving yogurt cup) I don't even have to input the weight. If I knew it could be this easy I would have done it years ago.

The best part is that I'm not dealing with any big restrictions. I can still split a pizza or go for drinks after work every once in a while as long as I make sure to stick to my limits most of the time (though it's even better if I plan ahead and work that stuff in). On the other hand, the biggest challenge was that I was really hungry for the first few days of eating less, but I got used to it. If I get hungry when it's not food time or I've already hit my limit, I drink some water.

In the last month a lot of people have told me I'm looking good and asked me if I've lost weight. I have - about ten pounds so far. But despite the compliments and the numbers I wasn't feeling like I was making any significant progress, probably because I've been seeing less progress in the mirror day-to-day than people who have gone a month without seeing me. 

Today, though, I put on my belt and it felt too big. I had to tighten it a notch. Maybe I'm not seeing the progress with my eyes, but I felt it this morning.