Hacker's Diet

New target: 0.8 pounds per week (was 1 pound per week)

Hacker's Diet - public accounts - October 2008

reposted from: Hacker's Diet, Alpha entries in October 2008, at least 10 months using Hacker's Diet.

Crabsallover weight

The PhysicsDiet chart shows red when I go over the moving average trend line.

The Hacker's Diet shows that the target 1 pound per week (yellow line) has not been met in the last fortnight In the first fortnight I was losing 1 pound per week (following yellow line), but in the last fortnight 0.77 pounds per week. Over 4 weeks I've lost 0.9 pounds per week.

Physics Diet v Hacker's Diet graphs

PhysicsDiet has a straight line trend and pretty red/green blocks. Hacker's Diet has the more functional lines on a grey background.

Both diets use the same exponentially weighted moving average formulae.

Hacker's Diet allows addition of comments per day.

PhysicsDiet allows Body Fat %, Resting Heart Rate, Calories Eaten, Calories Burned to be recorded. PD has a fairly active 'self help' forum, HD does not and this means that HD does not have a sense of community.

Both allow Rung (exercise level) recording and monitoring other peoples progress (HD uses pseudonyms to disguise people).

HD has a yellow target weight loss line, PD does not (a major shortcoming).

PhysicsDiet has 247 users, HD has 1800+ users.

PD started in 2001 but only had more than a dozen members in 2006. HD has gained many members in 2007/8.

Can 15 minutes exercise a day give an extra 3 hours a day to your life?

source: Hacker's Diet, Exercise 

Where is the evidence that doing 15 minutes exercise a day will increase life span by an extra 3 hours a day? Via NHS Direct gave a link to Bandolier. 

Bandolier say "This site is for those of us who want to know that getting breathless is a good thing, but need assurance or reassurance that it has powerful benefits for our health now and in the future."

What, Me Exercise?

Those who do not find time for exercise now will have to find time for illness.

—The Earl of Derby, 1873

Don't kid yourself into thinking that exercise, by itself, will make you lose weight. Consider the following activities, and the number of calories an average person burns per hour in each.

Activity	Calories/hour
Walking	300
Bicycling	300
Aerobics	400
Swimming	400
Tennis	500
Basketball	500
Jogging	700

Compare those numbers, remembering that they're for a full hour spent nonstop in the exercise, with the calories in the following food items:

Tasty Treat	Calories
Peanut butter sandwich	275
Pizza (3 slices)	500
Big Mac	560

Clearly, even an hour a day of exercise doesn't account for much food. And what's the likelihood you'll find the time to spend a full hour, every day, month after month, year after year, doing those exercises?
So, don't exercise to try to burn off calories and lose weight. Unless you're a professional athlete or obsessed with sports, you're not likely to spend enough time exercising strenuously enough to make much of a difference. Exercise will help you lose weight in more subtle ways. Regular exercise increases your rate of metabolism: the number of calories you burn all the time. Plus, for many people, exercise actually reduces appetite.
But these are side effects: hardly reasons to start exercising. The real reasons to exercise are that you'll live longer and feel better. Let's consider the case for exercise from those standpoints.

Living longer

I was never much of a one for sports. Every time I played baseball, I got hit in the mouth with a ball or bat. Whenever I played football, I ended up with a mouthful of mud. Imagine my delight when I discovered that the physical education requirement at my college could be satisfied by playing ping pong or on the rifle range.
After reaching that glorious stage in life when other people couldn't make me do things I'd rather not, the case against exercising seemed straightforward and overwhelmingly persuasive.

1. Exercising consumed time.
2. Exercising was not programming.
3. Therefore, by exercising, less time was available for programming.

I'm a hacker—I like to program! Substitute your own favourite activity for programming and you'll see what I mean. In addition, exercise carried all the unpleasant connotations of high school calisthenics, or the equivalent indignity of more modern, yet equally regimented, forms of workouts.
But is there a flaw in this argument after all? Indeed there is. The premises are correct, but the conclusion doesn't account for the fact that regular exercise will, in all likelihood, allow you to live longer. Let's look at the numbers.
This “Life Extension Worksheet” is provided as an Excel worksheet. You may want to load LIFEXT.XLS and plug in your own numbers to compare with mine. Directions for calculating increased lifespan by hand are given in the Pencil and Paper chapter.

So, if you're 40 years old, and you exercise 15 minutes a day from now until you turn 65, you'll have spent a total of about a quarter of a year exercising in those 25 years.
But, if by exercising you manage to live 3 years longer, you're ahead by a total of two and three quarters years by age 65—1000 days. Your increased life span works out to an additional 172 minutes per day from age 40 through 65. Even after spending 15 minutes exercising, the life extension you can expect from getting into shape gives you what amounts to two and half more hours per day to do whatever you enjoy most! Even if you live only one additional year through physical fitness, you'll still end up with 270 more days by exercising.
Of course, we're talking percentages here; you could be run over by a truck tomorrow. But hey, if you're in shape you may dodge that truck!

Feeling better

Exercising not only gives you more time to live, it makes the time you live more enjoyable. You'll feel better, think straighter, sleep more soundly, and have more capacity and endurance for everything you wish to do. How much? It varies from person to person; the only way to experience the benefits is to start an exercise program and see for yourself.
Fortunately, the payoff becomes apparent pretty early-on, particularly in a program like this one where you can always compare your current level of fitness with the much lower levels you strove to master only a few weeks before.
If you don't buy the “feeling better” argument, consider this. Virtually all medical evidence shows that if you don't exercise, you're more likely to suffer a heart attack or, if you're going to have one anyway, to have it earlier in life. Even if you're resolute in believing you won't feel one whit better from exercising, you'll certainly concede that you'll feel a whole lot worse after collapsing to the floor with a coronary. I've no direct experience with this particular unpleasantness from life's menu of surprises, but folks I've talked to who have are unanimous that it's best avoided. Those who dropped dead right away were unavailable for comment.

Hacker's Diet

Over the last 2 weeks, since starting Hacker's Diet, I'm bang on target at 1 pound per week. OK, 0.99 pound if you are splitting hairs or weighted moving averages! Things can only get worse!!

Hacker's Diet is an improvement on 'Google 15' charting.

Hacker's Diet - 270908

Since I discovered The Hacker's Diet on 13th September (thanks: Jason Coleman) I've set a target (yellow line) of one pound per week. To date I've achieved 1.03 pounds per week.

The yellow weights are 'flag' days when I've run for 30 minutes or more.

Right scale is a 1-48 Rungs fitness exercise. I started at Rung 1 - the blue line on 22nd September.

From 1-12th September (no yellow line) I gained 0.17 pounds per week. Overall between 1-27th September I've lost 0.49 pounds per week.

I no longer plot Google 15. Its only 'advantage' over Hacker's Diet is that it tells how many pounds that you must lose until you reach your target weight. A rather dispiriting figure!

The PhysicsDiet

Based on The Hacker's Diet (THD), the PhysicsDiet (PD) has a community forum and a few tools to measure other parameters such as Body Fat %.

Unlike THD, PD has a plethora of Google ads etc.

For Active Activity Level:
Based on the information in your PhysicsDiet.com Profile crabsallover Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is 1648 calories per day. Crabsallover Adjusted Metabolic Rate (AMR) is 2307 calories per day.

For Sedentary Activity Level:
Based on the information in your PhysicsDiet.com Profile crabsallover Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is 1648 calories per day. crabsallover Adjusted Metabolic Rate (AMR) is 2143 calories per day.

These figures are based on the

FAQ
When should I weigh myself?

What Should I Eat?

How many calories does my body burn?

Recommended Books, Articles, and Sites

How the term 'The Physics Diet' was invented

Want to lose weight? Easy! Just remember the first law of thermodynamics: conservation of energy. Oh, and you'll have to not mind being hungry. By Richard A. Muller

The Hacker's Diet - examples

Google 15 and Hackers Diet - 20th Sept

Read graphics in reverse order.

Google 15 Moving Average Weight Change one week ago: -1.4 pounds

Hackers 1 week: -1.00 pounds

Rest of graphics shows how to patch process images in Macromedia / Adobe Fireworks using Clipmate to copy screen images.

Jeremy Zawodny on The Hackers Diet

reposted from: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006845.html

found this via google "hackers diet".

I particularly like Habit #3 is about resetting your notion of when to eat (or stop eating). The easiest way to say it is "eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not." Notice that this says nothing about feeling full.

jeremy.zawodny says:-

Yesterday I mentioned that you'd need three new habits, one of which would be difficult. Here they are...

Eat Fewer Calories and Monitor Your Intake

I hate to make this sound simple but it is. There are 3,500 calories in every pound of fat. So if you eat an "extra" 250 calories every day (meaning 250 more than you use), you'll gain 2 pounds every month. That's 20 pounds a year. If you eat an extra 125 calories every day (a large banana or apple), that's 10 pounds per year. If you eat an extra 50 calories per day (half a tablespoon of creamy peanut butter), that's still 5 pounds you'll gain in a year.

Like I said yesterday, small changes have a big impact over time.

You can, as many people do, exercise to combat the effect of extra calories. But, honestly, that's a lot of work and takes a lot of time. For example, you'd need to spend an hour walking to burn off those 250 calories. Every day.

I'm not arguing against walking (I do it myself in the morning), but consider how much easier it is to simply not eat the ice cream bar in the first place. Spend a minute or two looking at the list of calories in various foods from the Hacker's Diet. Just give yourself an idea of how easy it is gobble down a bit too many.

Habit #1 is to record what you eat every day. For each meal, jot down the foods and their calorie counts. Then total them at the end of the day. Bonus points for keeping a running total throughout the day. We'll use this both for historical purposes and to help develop your sense of how much to eat every day.

In addition to reading your food packaging (pay special attention to the serving sizes), you can use any number of web sites to figure how roughly how many calories are in various foods. I've found that Calorie King is the best. You simply type the name of the food into their search box and click on the result that best matches. Then pick the quantity and they'll tell you how many calories you ate.

Record everything you eat. Even the little snacks and scraps. It all counts.

After you're comfortable doing this, it'll take you less than five minutes per day. The sooner you start, the sooner you'll know what your daily intake is.

More on that tomorrow.

Weigh Yourself Daily but Don't Obsess Over It

The other thing you need to do is weigh yourself every day. It's best to do this using the same scale and at the same time of day. I do it first thing in the morning, after I roll out of bed and hit the restroom.

You need to record this in the spreadsheet too. This is habit #2 and takes about 1 minute per day. We'll look at how to set this up tomorrow, but there is one important thing you need to know early on:

You must not judge your weight from day to day. Don't worry if it's a bit higher than yesterday, and don't get too excited of it's gone down by two pounds. The reality is that your weight will fluctuate by as much as 2-3 pounds from day to day for various reasons. We'll factor that out mathematically and focus on the long-term trend: loss, gain, or neutral.

Again, we'll look at the spreadsheet tomorrow. I'll provide a copy of mine from early on in my weight loss cycle.

Learn the Difference Between "Not Hungry" and "Full"

After thinking about why I always ate a bit too much, I finally realized it was a problem with my physiological empty/full gauge. If I eat until I feel "full" I've probably eaten too much. And, worse yet, I end up feeling sluggish for an hour or so after eating. You know, the "food coma."

Habit #3 is about resetting your notion of when to eat (or stop eating). The easiest way to say it is "eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not." Notice that this says nothing about feeling full.

This is the single most difficult thing to do. If you're like me, it means breaking 30 years worth of training your body. But after the first few weeks, you'll start to find that the "not hungry and not full" feeling starts to seem normal. If you keep a running tally of your food intake during the day (habit #1), that'll make it a lot easier to know when you should stop.

Once it starts to take hold, you'll be amazed at how powerful this is. You'll be able to look at the ice cream bar and say to yourself "that looks good, but I'm not hungry and... heck, it'd take over an hour of exercise to burn it off. It's just not worth it."

Closing Thoughts

Note that there's nothing in here about eating healthy. It's not necessary at all. You can get 1/4 of your daily calories from "junk food" if you'd like, but it will probably make this harder for a variety of reasons.

The first thing to focus on is how much you eat, not what you eat. Trying to change too many things at once is a recipe for failure. Once you have a handle on that, you can worry about tweaking what you eat. It can wait.

Another thing you'll find (as I did) is that the mere act of tracking what you eat and how much you weigh each day will make you much more aware of your eating habits. That alone will put you on the right track. You'll be far more conscious of those extra snacks you grab when you're not really hungry.

Once you've done it long enough, much of this becomes intuitive--especially the act of figuring out how many calories are in a meal. You'll find that you can glance at a plate of food and guesstimate to within 10% or so much of the time. That's a skill that'll serve you well when you go out to eat.

Next Up

• The Diet Plan and The Three Habits
• The Diet Spreadsheet
• Diet Tips: How To Eat Less

Previous:

• Diet Tips or How To Lose Weight with a Spreadsheet and a Web Site

Posted by jzawodn at June 05, 2006 07:46 AM

a bit More....

small pee - half a pound, large pee - 2 pounds

Today my pee was 2 pounds. Weigh after pee when recording weight for diet exponentially smoothed moving average trend analysis.The eleven pounds of water is lost mostly by water vapour in breath but also via pee.

Source: The Hackers Diet by John Walker

Change of plan

As per Hackers Diet, a bang-bang approach to dieting is inferior to a Proportional approach.

When I know I will have a large dinner I will have a small lunch and vica versa. Approach July-September has been to guage on the day after I've reached a one pound per week and 0.2 pound over previous day.

• I'm going to ignor the previous day moving average figure, focus on the moving weekly total exclusively
• MWT 1.5 pounds loss per week target
  
• Hackers Diet online charting
  

Since I can control my breakfasts and lunch completely but Sharon makes dinner I will plan meals:

Breakfast: bowl Alpen & milk (200 cals)
Lunch: Banana (100 cals) - NOT All Day Breakfast / Lasagne (600 cals) - 500 cals difference
Coffee with milk: x6 (200 cals)
Dinner: 600 cals (NOT 900 cals) - difference 300 cals
Wine: half glass (100 cals)
Total: 1200 cals (normally 2000 cals)
Total Difference: 800 cals

Assuming 2000 cals usage, 1200 cals represents a 800 calorie per day deficit or 800 x 7 days = 5600 cals deficit / 3500 = 1.6 pounds per week loss.

Main changes

• banana every day for lunch
  
• half glass wine with dinner
  
• dinner portions two thirds normal size
• no pinching family food
  

The Hackers Diet - Signal and Noise

reposted from: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/signalnoise.html

Take a look here for explanations.

The Hackers Diet - Feedback and Control

reposted from: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/feedback.html

Hackers Diet discusses feedback (positive and negative) and control (bang-bang and proportioanal).

The problem isn't losing weight, it's gaining weight. If you hadn't already gained more weight than you're happy toting around, you wouldn't be reading a diet book. Anybody can lose weight…for a while. Many of us have lost weight on numerous occasions, only to put it right back on within a short time. The problem isn't weight loss, it's weight control, and the insights into feedback and control from the thermostat were necessary to allow us, finally, get a handle on our problems with weight.

Rather than temperature, what's being controlled is the number of calories of food eaten. Rather than switching on a furnace or air conditioner, control is accomplished through a signal called appetite. The effect is the same.

It isn't necessary to exactly balance calories eaten with calories burned. If you eat a little too much, the body cranks up the burn rate a little: you feel warmer and more inclined to run up a flight of stairs rather than walk. If you eat a tad less than ideal, you may feel chilly and inclined to curl up with a book under the blankets and get a little extra sleep.

This is the lowest level of proportional weight control, and it works for all of us. It means that there's no need to become obsessed with matching calories eaten and burned; it's only when the balance shifts decisively and consistently to one side or the other of the ideal calorie intake that we get into trouble.

Staying the same weight requires proportional negative feedback control.

But if the proportional appetite control is 'out' a little a life time of dieting is the result.

If the 'i'm stuffed signal is weak then you get really obese.

Fun with feedback

The temperature charts used as illustrations in this chapter were made with a mathematical model of the thermostat system implemented in Excel. Playing around with this model, entering different values that control the feedback, will give you an excellent feel for the kinds of behaviour a system exhibits in the presence of various kinds of feedback.

To experiment with this model, load the Excel worksheet FEEDLAB.XLS.