Eat what you want and lose weight!
Posted by: brrrrt, in Health |Everyone is concerned about their weight. Don’t lie. You know you worry about it, at least once in awhile. Some of you may be like me, horribly out of shape. Unless you count “round” as a shape.
Every day we’re bombarded with advertisements for diets. Warnings about getting fat. Inspirational stories from women who went from a size 4 to a size 0. Take these pills, eat this special diet food, buy this expensive exercise gadget. Of course, these commercials are interspersed with McDonald’s commercials. I’m lovin’ it, aren’t you?
Now, I’ve been fat all my life. I was doing Slim-Fast at age 12 (and again at 25 and 30), Weight Watchers at 16, Dexatrim at 17. My most recent thing has been one of those online calorie counting sites, SparkPeople. It’s a great site because not only do you get to count calories, they provide a personalized exercise plan and all the support you could ask for via message boards. They also have articles on different health and diet issues, as well as recipes. I highly recommed this site. It helped me lose 20 pounds. But those pounds are back. Time for a new approach.
How about a diet where you can eat anything you want? You could live on french fries and chocolate milkshakes if you want. How about just five minutes of exercise a day, to start? It’s hardly anything. What about weighing yourself every day? Great! Wait… what? Weigh yourself every day? Bad idea, right? If you weigh yourself every day, you’ll freak out. Your weight can vary from day to day by about thirteen pounds. That’s right. Thirteen pounds. If you’re trying to lose ten pounds quickly so you can look good for Spring Break, you sure don’t want to be doing this.
Enter the Hacker’s Diet. It’s a system of engineering and physics created by an engineer fed up with fad diets and being fat. It’s very simple, actually:
1. Burn more calories than you take in
2. Eat what you want (in moderation, of course)
3. Do a few minutes of exercise
4. Weigh yourself every day
In order for this to work, you have to keep track of your daily weight. The way to do this is via a spreadsheet, where you calculate daily trends with a given formula. The aforementioned website contains detailed instructions on just how to create and use the spreadsheet. That’s a lot to deal with, as not everyone likes math. Luckily there are places on the internet where you can plug in your numbers and let the computer do all the work, no math or programming involved. Bonus: You can download and print a pdf of the Hacker’s Diet.
The easiest and simplest tracker is via Google. Go to Google’s homepage and click “personalize this page” in the upper right-hand corner. Beneath the search box is a link to “get started” personalizing your home page. Click that. Here’s where the magic happens. Basically you’re creating a google page of your own, with customized content. On my page, I have the weather, a calendar, my horoscope, a list of my most recent emails in gmail, and the current moon phase. I have that page set as my browser’s homepage. For the Hacker’s Diet tracker, you want Google15. Every day you simply enter your weight, and it will tell you how you’re doing. Easy stuff.
Another way I found is via Physics Diet. It’s more in depth and gives more information on your weight loss status, but you still only have to enter your daily weigh-in. It’s free to sign up for, and there is help available on the site from both articles and a forum. You can also enter your daily calorie intake, calories burned, resting heart rate, and what exercise rung you’re on (we’ll get to that momentarily). The site calculates your BMI, body fat percentage, and several other things that I don’t find important, partly because I don’t know what they are. By the way, the guy who created the Physics Diet site lost over 100 pounds in less than 9 months on this program.
A third way is to use the Excel worksheets available for download on the Hacker’s Diet website.
These calculators give both numbers and graphs of your weight loss. Don’t pay too much attention to the ups and downs of your daily weights, as that’s not what’s important. What’s important is the trend, which is the average of your weights calculated by this very specific formula. It’s not important how much you’re losing, but that you’re losing, or simply not gaining.
Now for the exercise. The system is basically a ladder where you start out slow, and move up at your own pace. There are only five things to do: bends, sit ups, leg lifts, push ups, and steps. You start out doing 2 bends, 3 sit ups, 4 leg lifts, 2 push ups, and 105 steps the first day. Keep that schedule for a week or so, until you’re comfortable with it, then move up the ladder. That’s it. Simple as that. Honestly though, I don’t think it matters what sort of exercise you do as long as you do something.
There it is, folks. Eat what you want and lose weight. All you need is a computer and a little willpower. Good luck.
Additional resources:
The Diet Plan and The Three Habits by Jeremy Zawodny, programmer for Yahoo
10 Unconventional Diet Tips by Kyle Pott of Lifehack
The Physics of Gluttony found in MIT’s Technology Review