The Hacker's Diet - March 2008

Excellent Progress in March. Down 3.8 -- Nearly a pound a week lost again. This brings me to 165 and change -- over 24lbs down from where I started at 190. 3.8lb is 13,000 calories more that I burned than I ate.

So I am nearing the end of the campaign. At this rate, it will be about another 8 weeks until I reach my first goal of 160. We'll see what happens then.

This week marks 6 months that I've been on the hacker diet. Over 6 months I've lost 24.25 lbs. I do not feel like my "eating life" has been very negatively impacted. Sure, 5/7 of my lunches are boring but that makes me savor the weekend lunches that much more! I could definitely live this way forever if I needed to with nary a complaint.

I guess that's what they mean by lifestyle change.

Due to some unrelated stuff, my Doctor had some blood tests run, and as part of those my HDL cholesterol is under 200 (normal) for the first time ever. I shouldn't be surprised but I wasn't expecting it.

Also, "Healthy Choice Steamers" pretty much kick ass if you add some salt to them. They are way delicious and I can't believe how much food it is for only 260 calories. I bought a stack of them and they get me by.

The Statistics:

Lost in March: 3.8 lbs

Lost since starting diet: 24.25 lbs

Pounds still to lose: 5.75lbs to go.

18 days working out or exercising (out of 31).

235 calories burned per "workout".

The Hacker's Diet -- Examining the Trend line

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the Hacker's Diet is the Trend Line. The trend line is a simply a moving average, or more precisely, an exponentially-weighted smoothing average of the previous weights. The formula for its calculation is simple enough.

Let t be the trend and let t-zero be yesterday's trend.

The trend adjusts itself by taking one tenth of the difference between today's measurement and the existing trend. So if you are 2 lbs lighter on the scale then trend, the trend will adjust downward by 0.2lbs.Why divide by 10? Taking a tenth of the difference as your true signal provides a nice, smoothing effect. Let's take a look at how the smoothing effect works. Here's a contrived example: You weigh 177 at the start of the month and immediately lose two pounds so that your true weight is 175. Of course you vary a little from day to day (let's say alternating between 174 and 176). Here's what the trend line looks like:

The red line is the trend line. It appears to take the entire month to finally match your true weight of 175! Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Its bad in the sense that for three weeks or more you are operating under the assumption that you are losing weight when you are not. But its good in the sense that you are carrying forward your credit so you can coast for a while and still appear to lose weight!

Using a larger multiplier, like say 0.3 (dividing by 3.33) gives a little bit of smoothing, but not much. As a result it becomes much more "accurate" in that it achieves you true weight in only 10 days or so. Here's what that looks like:


In the end, I must say it probably comes down to some level of personal preference. I find the 0.1 multiplier to be not just smoothing, but soothing.