Discovering the Hacker Diet

Three weeks into my difficult diet, I stepped on the scale on a bad day and my weight was virtually the same as it was when I started.

I was simultaneously demoralized and re-motivated.

Demoralized in the sense that I felt that I was making no progress.

But re-motivated because here was another signal that I did not know what I was doing and that I needed some kind of help, some kind of plan if I was going to make this work.

And then, completely out of the blue, I read about the Hacker's Diet. I wasn't looking for Diet information - I was reading Jeff Atwood's daily software development blog (www.codinghorror.com) and he was talking about Geek Diets, of which the Hacker Diet is the grand-daddy.

I read the entire Hacker Diet online book over a few mornings -- I was fascinated and so motivated I was almost giddy. I was definitely receptive to the message. Here are the main points that I took away from it.

1. Small Changes over time Add up.
   
2. Reset your expectations about a successful diet.
3. Use Simple Techniques to track a real weight trend.

Small Changes over time Add up. Suppose that you eat just a tiny bit more each day than you burn off in your daily activity, say, two oreo's more than you should have (an extra 100 calories). Not a big deal for one day. But if you do this every day you will gain ten pounds a year. This is what I did for four years -- the equivalent of eating just a tiny bit more than I should have every day. In fact, I know the exact culprit, but I'll get to that in a later post.

Reset your expectations about a successful diet. Armed with a little bit of math I could see why losing more than a pound a week would be difficult. In fact, I now consider the loss of a pound a week to be just right. Two pounds a week would be like, crazy-talk! The reason for this is simple -- a pound of fat is 3500 calories. My metabolic rate is about 1800 calories a day. If I ate absolutely nothing I could lose a maximum of 3.5 pounds a week. Of course, I would probably collapse and be completely useless.

And look at it this way -- losing a pound a week is still fifty pounds a year. That's a lot. And years pass quickly.

Use Simple Techniques to track a real weight trend. This is key. Weight varies by several pounds a day due to random variations making it very difficult to get a feel for how one's diet is going. By applying the same techniques used to tease out trend data from financial market data one can get a true representation of their weight loss.

For example, check out the first two weeks of my diet. If I were just to look at the numbers on the scale I would be ecstatic in the first few days as I appeared to lose two pounds and then horrified two weeks later as I appeared to backslide.

But by looking at the trend of the loss you can see that its much more realistic representation and more importantly, its never going up, which is the all that really matters, right?

Deciding to Change

In mid-September of this year, I stepped on the scale and saw a number that I'd never seen before -- 192 lbs. Even though that day of reckoning had clearly been coming for a long time I was surprised and dismayed. I'd never weighed that much before. That same week, I saw a video of myself that I thought was downright disturbing. On the video, I looked so much larger (or should I say wider) than I felt.

I was determined to do something about it so I started dieting. I'd been successful dieting exactly once before when I went from about 180 to 145 shortly after Casey was born. And I'm not sure that time counts because I basically followed the Troy McClure diet, Smoke Yourself Thin. While that diet did work, I do not recommend it.

Anyway, since then I had had no luck losing weight -- in fact, it seemed that every year since then I had gained exactly 10 lbs and had gone from 145 to 190 in five years. And once I got past 155 or so, I wasn't particularly happy about it. This is the one thing in my life that I wasn't satisfied with. Everything else has been going so well that in some sense I was resigned to just being heavy as if it were the price I had to pay for success in everything else.

So when I saw the video, and saw that number on the scale I knew I had to do something but I wasn't particularly hopeful as to the outcome.

I dieted hard but after a month the scale was almost right back where it started.

It seemed I was doomed.