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Just stop eatin’ so fuckin’ much! — Jonesy’s one-step weight loss program on Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!

There is one, simple, unavoidable fact of dieting. To lose weight you have to eat less food than your body needs. — John Walker, The Hacker’s Diet

Another unpleasant fact of dieting it’s worth facing up front is that while you don’t need to go hungry to maintain your weight, you will need to go hungry in order to lose it. — John Walker, The Hacker’s Diet

These seem like simple rules to me, but I learned a lot in the last few months about weight loss. It’s stuff most of you know if you’ve already been on diets before. I’ve never seriously been on a diet. I’m 5′10 and weigh about 225 pounds. That means I weigh between 220 and 230, but it varies around there. That’s considered “seriously overweight” by all the health scales I can find. But am I fat?

Yeah. A little.

A couple of years ago I was training in Tae Kwon Do. I lost about 10 pounds over the course of a year, during which I continued my normal diet for the most part. I did cut out fries for a while, but they crept back in. When I dropped TKD (I broke my toe) the pounds came back.

So I’ve been reading The Hacker’s Diet in my spare time. I stopped reading it around March, actually. Life got in the way. But I started watching how much I ate, and how much I needed to eat. I remembered that John’s book told me these simple facts:

• Fat, carbs, protein don’t matter to weight loss. Calories are all that matter.
• 3,500 food calories (kcal) is equal to one pound of body fat.
• Therefore if you eat 3,500 calories less every week (500 per day) you will lose a pound. Every week.

Simple right?

Some days I’ll work through lunch without noticing. Once I’m past the normal noon hunger level, it doesn’t get much worse. I’ll bet that’s about 800+ calories I missed that day.

I don’t have food around me, so I don’t eat compulsively. But when I do eat, I go to the cafeteria and get a sandwich, some chips, and Oooh!Look-they-have-cobbler-today! Here come the pounds.

When I do eat lunch (most days) I noticed that I could eat just half a sandwich and no chips and be satisfied until dinner. So I could save half a sandwich for tomorrow. I even did it a few times. But not often. But I knew I could.

I also noticed that that little bag of chips was 180 calories. That’s a pound and a half per month, right there!

And then I had a Breakstones Cottage Doubles cottage cheese snack one day. 140 calories. I thought, hey, I bet I could just eat this for lunch and nothing else, just to get me through the day. So I tried it one day. And it worked. Then I bought a week’s worth of these little snacks and kept them in the fridge at work. Every day, I don’t go near the cafeteria. I get my Breakstone’s and a cup of water and eat in my cubicle.

I didn’t change the rest of my diet. I didn’t change my activity levels. I do try not to overeat at dinner, but I don’t try to avoid calorie-rich foods any more than I used to. I have a dark chocolate bar at my desk that I nibble on sometimes (one square = 67 calories), and a pack of sugarless gum to help clean my teeth and tide my hunger (5 calories).

The results were immediate. Day by day, the scale began to show a decline. I began to lose almost three pounds a week. I’ve been at it for four weeks now, and I’m proud to say I’m 10 pounds (35,000 calories) lighter today.

Am I hungry right now? You bet. But it’s lunch time. Time for some cottage cheese.

Things that helped me

I encourage you to read the The Hacker’s Diet book (read it online for free!), especially if you’re an engineer. Read it all the way through. Then start thinking about your diet. John Walker only eats one meal a day, so he had to cut it back to lose weight. I eat three meals per day, but I only cut one of them back (and I became more sensible about indulging at other times).

I use the FitDay online software (it’s free!). It tracks my daily calories and nutrients as well as my weight. You can see my progress here.

And for those foods that FitDay doesn’t know about, I go to DietFacts.com. It will even add foods there to my FitDay account automatically.

Update [07-11-07]: I’ve been tracking weight and food with Calorie-Count.com instead of FitDay.com. I tried to find some php script that implemented weight loss tracking like John Walker’s Excel spreadsheets (Excel is too buggy for me); I didn’t find any I liked, but Calorie-Count.com comes very close. I was able to write a script to import my data from FitDay right into Calorie-Count. (Don’t ask me for it; I lost it. But it’s simple with Curl or even wget.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Personal, Weight loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.