Noob Chef And Katana

Chef likes to play with his katana. So he decides to play a game with N sticks each having a particular height, his aim is to finish all the sticks he has. Now he does this in a particular way! He selects the largest continuous subsegment of sticks in which every stick has non zero height and then selects a non zero height and then swing the katana in the selected segment and removes the lower cut