Programming and Dieting?

duncan bayne asks: "I've been using the Hacker's Diet to lose weight. What's interesting to me is how hard it is to focus on a complicated task when my body is busy running out of energy. I'm having to pay careful attention to snacking - eating enough that I don't 'fade out' in the afternoon, yet not so much that I exceed my daily kilojoule allowance. This got me to thinking about energy levels of those who aren't dieting. Do you find yourself correcting 'fade' by snacking (careful or otherwise) as you work?"

Comments

work PT at....

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not kidding when I say this. I am a science student and work also at Home Depot. If you work on the floor doing sales it is like a 8 hour visit to a gym. The pay sucks but with all of the moving around, climbing, pushing, pulling, and lifting you will loose weight quickly so long as you eat healthy and not in large quanities. When there, I walk about 7 miles. Granted managment is evil at times and oh the stories I could tell about customers (better to laugh than to get angry), but it is really good at providing a fullbody workout.

Re:The answer is

[Anonymous Coward]

( )Atkins
( )South Beach
( )CowboyNeal
(*) Exercise

Eat all you want (sensible food not Big Macs and fried chicken all the time) but, exercise accordingly. Run, and I mean run like a nigger with the KKK on his heals, for several miles everyday. None of this "jog" or "power walk" shit. Full sprint for more than 30 minutes everyday.

Lift weights regularly. You don't need a gym membership, look around you there are lots of heavy things to lift, dumbbells, chairs, 5 gallon water jugs, whatever. Also, get a chin up bar for a doorway. 30 minutes of chin ups and 30 minutes of sit ups everyday will give you six pack abs, for sure!

Go dancing. Don't go to a club and drink lager all Friday night. Get on the dance floor and shake your ass for three hours. When done you should be breathless and dripping with sweat. Bonus is that your head doesn't hurt on Saturday morning.

Spend all of Saturday and part of Sunday outside doing strenuous activities. Think sports of almost any kind, bicycle, skateboard, roller blade, ski, soccer, football, soft/baseball, hiking/geocaching. Don't spend all of Sunday eating chips, drinking beer and watching football on TV. Go play football!

It's all a lot more fun than any kind of diet. You feel better and can think faster and more clearly. You don't have to deprive yourself of anything/much.

Get off your ass, you lazy fat fsck!

You may want to experiment with your food intake

[arnie_apesacrappin]

I started on the Hacker's Diet earlier this year. I went from 205 to 185 in about two and a half months. While I didn't notice the mental fade you are talking about, I did notice that some days my workouts went really well and other days I could barely make it 20 minutes before I wanted to quit and go home. I started tracking those days inside my weight and workout spreadsheet and I found that the good days correlated with the days I had yogurt and fruit for breakfast. My total calorie consumption was always roughly the same (1800 - 2000), but the difference on yogurt and non-yogurt days was astonishing.

I'm not saying that yogurt and fruit is a magic combination that will work for everyone, but it worked for me. Try different foods and different mixes of the big three (protein, carbs and fat) and see how you feel. If you're already doing the hacker's diet, it shouldn't be too hard to track the additional information.

Good luck and keep at it. It's been about nine months since I started and I'm down to 175 pounds. I lost my workout routine (new job doesn't have a gym like the old one), but I have been able to keep my food intake under control thanks to what I learned using the Hacker's Diet.

The 'Fade'...

[tansey]

I was in your same spot (although I had never heard of the hackers' diet) about 4 years ago. I had gone through surgery and gained significant weight due to being bed ridden for 3 months and having a mother that loved to buy junk food for me. At the point where I finally stepped on the scale and said "enough is enough", I had gained about 45lbs in 5 months, and I was consuming ~8 cans of mountain dew every day (this was when I was in high school, so that's 8 cans after 3pm when I got home), 2 ice cream bars, and 3 sugary meals a day.

Now, I've never been one for exercise. I played a few sports occassionally just for fun, but didn't really exert myself. Since my operation I hadn't played any, and lost the desire to do it. I had to lose the weight somehow, and I reasoned myself into a simple diet: no desserts, only a bowl of cereal for breakfast and one for dinner, and drink ONLY water. This last part was probably the biggest kicker. I lost 15lbs just from cutting the sugary drinks out of my diet. The best way to go on a diet cold turkey is to use water--whenever you want anything that you aren't supposed to have, cram water down your throat. That may sound extreme, but drinking 100 ounces of water a day is what made me lose 90 lbs.

I never really started to notice the 'fade' as you're calling it until I got to college though. The key was that, because of my course schedule and economic status (I couldn't really afford to eat that often), I had to start cutting back my meals. I started eating just 1 meal a day (dinner), and made it a big one. While I got used to that diet, and did continue to lose weight on it, I started to notice that midway through the day I got really tired. I needed more and more sleep if I wanted to feel truly rested, and even then I didn't feel great the whole day.

The main difference between the two diets was that I was eating the two bowls of cereal at regular intervals, everyday, and keeping my glucose levels high. Interestingly, I've recently tried to fix the fade I get now by cutting various things out of my diet and have realized that without a lot of meat in my diet I have a lot more energy. The fade isn't ever going to be completely gone if you aren't having a small meal in the middle of the day, so a snack might be a good idea.

So my 3 suggestions for cutting out the fade is to eat cereal for breakfast (keep cutting down bowl sizes also if you're like me and are used to much larger portions), eat something relatively small for lunch (nothing more than another bowl of cereal would give you (~300 calories)), and cut back on the meat you're eating.

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Re:For me

[ArsonSmith]

I lost 90lbs right about the same time. I went from 290 down to 199.5. the breaking the 200lbs bariare actually took away a lot of my motivation. Motivation was the key. It took all I had and more to lose the weight over about 7-8 months. I dropped to about 1200-1500 calories a day. Combined the slimfast and subway diet for most of it, and ran constantly. I'd run 5-6 days a week. got up to running no less than 3.5 miles a day. The weight came off fast. Once I started to get into the 220 range people started really comenting on how good I was looking. They'd say, "You must feel so much better!!" I'd just glare back and say, "No I feel fucking hungry!!" I was miserable and far more depressed after loseing the weight than I was being fat.

Then I found the Atkins diet. While I never lost any weight I was able to not be hungry, eat all kinds of foods I liked. (I never was a hard core sugar person) And I was able to maintain around 210lbs for almost 4 years now. Recently I had gotten board of the Atkins diet and put on another 20lbs and am about 230 now. I am trying to get the motivation back up to hit 199.5 again but I don't know if I want to go through that. By the way I am 5'10" and 199.5 is still a bit heavy for me. Not much but I'd still have well into the 20% body fat. Somewhere around 27-29%

I'm torn now between being fat and miserable or being skiny and miserable. I know there has to be a better way. Diet and exersize sound great but they just don't work as a total solution.