Brad Westness.com

In the interest of sucking less every year, I read The Hacker Diet. I like it because it solves the problem I had with most diet plans in that it doesn’t purport to work via “magic,” it doesn’t hide the fact that diets suck, and you’ll feel hungry, weak and cold all the time, and it also approaches the problem of weight loss from the perspective of a logic-minded person (or “hacker,” I guess). It reduces the problem to it’s simplest possible formula: if you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you eat less than you burn, you lose weight.

In doing so, the book reduces the number of variables of which you must keep track to one. This is do-able. Every other diet is overwhelming either in the number of things you’re supposed to keep track of (fat [trans- or otherwise], proteins, carbs, sugars, etc). Rather than getting overwhelmed by an unmanageably large set of data that must be kept track of, it frees you to just see each meal as a single number.

The author also provides an online application that will keep track of your weight changes and plot trend analysis data so you can keep track of your weight loss pattern and calorie surplus or deficit and adjust your diet accordingly. This essentially functions as a corrective lens for the consistently overweight person’s internal “eat watch” (the internal sense that tells you when you need more calories or less). Just as it would be foolish for someone with poor eyesight to try to function without glasses just by feeling around blindly, it’s foolish for someone with a broken internal calorie counter to try to get by just by gut feeling (no pun intended).

After all, that’s how I got into this mess. When you’re body doesn’t give you any feedback letting you know that you’ve had enough calories, you’re left with just the feeling of your stomach being full to let you know whether or not you need to eat, which leads to steady weight gain.

Most diet-calculating websites go “data crazy,” asking you to input every single food you eat throughout the day, how many sit ups you did, how many steps you walked, etc. These are quickly discarded, as the amount of effort required is far too high. You’ll start thinking “naturally thin people don’t have to record a log of every time they take a walk or drink a soda. Why should I?”

However, they do have working internal calorie counters, so you have to use some sort of corrective device to account for that. But by simply recording your weight, you can track all the data you need without carrying a notepad with you everywhere you go to record everything you do throughout the day.

Anyway, wish me luck. Hopefully you’ll be seeing a lot less of me in the future.