The Hacker's Diet: July 2009

At some point in June I realized that I needed to get serious so I buckled down and stopped snacking. Made a huge difference. Here we go with the stats again:

July 1: 169.0

July 31: 166.1

Lost in July: 2.9 lbs

Lost in 2009: 6.0 lbs

To go: 6.1 lbs.

It would have been better but for a 9 day road trip where I pretty much ate whatever I wanted and was on vacation.

The Culprit

For the last four years I had gained about a pound every month, leading to 40+ lbs over 4 years. This even though I was somewhat active; going to the gym, spending all day fly-fishing, etc. After reading The Hacker's Diet, I did some math and determined that I was consuming about 150 calories too much per day.

Well I know exactly where this surplus came from.

For years I have started each and every day with an evil concoction whose gluttony-enducing seduction is matched only by its massive amount of calories. The dreaded White Chocolate Mocha!

Yes, I have had one of those liquid bon-bons every day for the last four years. According to the Starbuck's nutritional site, a 12 ounce white chocolate mocha is 300+ calories. If I had instead been drinking just coffee and cream this whole time I would have lost 10 pounds a year instead of gaining 10 pounds a year.

I immediately gave up the white evil and as a result, if I don't do anything else, I'm going to lose all that weight -- it just might take four years. And you know what? That would be okay with me.

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?