Concern

Quite a while ago I whined about my station in life, and while many bits of that post are still true enough today, I took one recommendation to heart (to lose weight), and started doing it in earnest.

It worked extremely well.

I used The Hacker’s Diet for inspiration and advice, as was recommended, because while that book is quite detailed on the subject, and describes it in rigor, the point is extremely simple:

If you eat fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight.

I took John Walker’s Excel spreadsheets and imported them into OpenOffice, making a few tweaks as I went, and worked around much of the macro lossage (I’ll send these to you if you want them, but it’s easy enough to work with the Excel ones to start with). I bought a scale, and used a notebook to log how much I weigh every morning.

The process was simple enough: every morning, step onto the scale, record your weight. While you eat throughout the day, make a note of what you eat, and approximate how many calories each item is. Try to keep the amount you consume every day at or below what your body theoretically requires (around 2000 calories, for a man of my size) minus 500. The 500 calorie shortfall is meant to place a baseline for loss — a shortfall smaller than 500 calories is probably not enough to get around your body’s metabolism.

Try to exercise every day. My workout consisted of about 15 minutes of sit ups, push ups, and chin ups (I also bought a chinning bar that I can hang in a doorway). I also did some occasional jumping jack sets, and like to take a walk along West Cliff in Santa Cruz on weekends. This resulted in a more rapid shrinking of my waistline than I had anticipated, but which I was overjoyed about:

This plots my measured weight (the dark blue line) and my weight “trend” (the light blue line), which is the weighted average of my weight since I started this (this is described in detail in Walker’s book). I recently imported the spreadsheet data into Apple’s Numbers, which is a slow, big, beautiful piece of crap. Likewise for Numbers users, if you want a copy of the spreadsheet, I’ll send it to you.

I started this near the end of January, and throughout February and March I really stuck with a rigid calorie restriction and exercised every night. The green band (around 155 pounds) is my approximate goal for the year — it’s my “ideal” weight according to some old and probably bullshit theories. I’ve slacked off in tracking how much I eat every day, and don’t exercise every day, but I’m still monitoring my weight every day, and will adjust my habits if I think I see it creeping back up again. You can see periods where I was away from home, since they’re flat on the chart (I didn’t bring my scale with me, so I just copy the last value I did measure for days I was elsewhere).

I’m rather satisfied to be at this weight, so I’m not sure if I’ll try to slim down any more. I’m feeling healthier, and more attractive (though, I don’t think many other people seem to think so, still…). I’ve also recently cut out almost all meat from my diet, only eating fish and seafood, and even then not all the time.

You can hack your body to do some neat, sometimes necessary, stuff. You just need to know how it works. I’d like to hack my mind next, and get myself out of this anti-social rut I’ve been in for far too long.