Weight loss progress

In September 2014 I weighed over 230lb when I started to swim and fast. After a year of that I weighed under 210lb but it seemed to be plateauing there. At the end of last February I still weighed 205lb so I started to also restrict my calories to their present level of 12,500 per week. For many of the weeks that I was actually on my diet (rather than some kind of vacation or trip intervening) I lost over 1½lb per week and now weigh under 170lb. However, in recent weeks I am down to losing ¾lb per week. That is still a good rate and perhaps simply reflects that the less fat mass I have, the less easily more is lost. I have also lost over six inches around my waist which is reassuring regarding the threat of visceral fat stressing my organs.

In August 2011 The Lancet published a series on obesity that included Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight from the National Institutes of Health: to paraphrase a little,

Every change of energy intake of 10 kcal per day will lead to an eventual bodyweight change of about 1 pound with half of the weight change being achieved in about 1 year and 95% of the weight change in about 3 years.

The above confirms that for constant calorie intake one should expect diminishing weight loss over time. Further, the numbers suggest that, given that I have probably done little over six months' proper dieting, mixed with vacations and similar, I will be able to increase my calorie intake some way without starting to gain weight.

I try to weigh myself approximately monthly: I think that allows sufficient monitoring of progress without the data being dwarfed by irrelevant noise.

Web browsers

Firefox 49 has removed the browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete configuration property which was but the latest that allowed me to undo another user interface change that I really didn't like; messing with userChrome.css and similar just seems ridiculous. Chrome follows the same pattern of making the user interface increasingly minimal and symbol-centric, decreasingly configurable, with the underlying application becoming increasingly featureful in doing things I don't want (even auto-upgrading addons), making it a real hassle to use sites with poorly configured SSL certificates, etc. I can't help but wonder if browser design didn't peak sometime around when Mosaic gained proper support for the table element. I have used Firefox for a long time but, as with Amazon, almost every obvious change for some years now has for me been a regression in usability.

On the other hand, if I use the wrong browser then I can expect many websites to not work properly. Not using Internet Explorer (or Edge or whatever it now is) probably already causes some trouble and I overhear enough conversations where Mac users find that some website doesn't work and the underlying cause appears to be their optimistic use of Safari. I wonder if there are any browsers that remain configurable and largely limit their feature development to actually showing me webpages and otherwise staying out of my way. Perhaps I should check how Pale Moon's coming along.