I’ve just learned about The Hacker’s Diet by John Walker.  It looks like a great idea and simplifies most of what I’ve been doing to loose weight so far this year.  I’ve lost 17lbs since January 1st, can you guess what my new year resolution was?  I read about the diet plan at http://www.fourmilab.ch/ and immediately began to wish I had known about this earlier, only spend 15min per day to loose weight and maintain your health.  The basic idea seems sound and it that basis of what’s worked for me so far.

For the past two months I’ve been tracking every meal I eat and totaling the calories in an effort to stay under 1800 calories per day.  I’ve charted my weight, measurements, and body fat percentage every Saturday.  I’ve also tallied the approximate number of calories that I’ve burned with each exercise session that I’ve had.  This is fine for a few months to make sure I’m getting into the physical shape that I’ve set as my goal, which is to get down to 200lbs by May.  It’s a difficult goal and that’s why I’ve been keeping all these records to see how I’m progressing toward achieving it.  But there is no way I will maintain this level of data for the rest of my life.  This is where The Hacker’s Diet comes in.  I can weigh myself daily and perform 15 minutes of calisthenic style exercises in exchange for remaining physically fit for the rest of my life.  The basic idea is that these charts show you how your weight is trending.  If you are gaining weight on average, all you have to do is eat less for a little while until you’ve lost the few pounds you gained.  If you are loosing more weight than you want, I know that’s hard to imagine  if you’ve been struggling to get in shape, all you have to do is eat a little more.  By charting this daily and working with averages you don’t get discouraged if you put on a pound or two in a day, but you can easily see if you’ve been averaging a gain of one pound a week for the last six months and it’s time to do something about that before it turns into 20 pounds that seem to have come from nowhere.

I haven’t had a chance to read over all the other materials this guy has to offer on his site but based on this and the little piece of software he’s more widely know for, AutoCAD, I think he may have some good stuff here.  Best of all it’s listed as being public domain and free, two of my favorite things to hear when I find a good resource.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p0TJzuifEnhUyKyneXeKLfw