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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?"
I have an IV Caffeine drip, and a catheter. I once 'moved' in order to see whether the big shiny thing in the sky was still there. It was.
if you eat the right stuff. Some diets recommend you eat 5 small meals a day instead of 3 bigger meals. Why? There is a significant "fixed cost" to digesting food, ie the amount of calories you burn to digest any amount of food, however after you pay the fixed cost the incremental cost is quite small. So you are actually doing yourself a favor if you snack on stuff like carrots and apples during the day. Esp. since your body has to do more work to break down carrots and apples than it does a Snickers bar.....
Monstar L
from TFHD: "There is no magic secret to losing weight and keeping it off"
Incorrect. There is one great key to losing weight and keeping it off. Its called Math. If you take in more calories then you use, you will gain weight. If you burn more calories then you take in, you will lose weight. It is that simple. Eat a healthy blend of foods. Eat less and exercise more and you will lose weight. Period. Whether you eat nothing but stake, are a vegitarian, a junk food muncher, what ever your gimmic is, you need to burn more calories then you digest.
Go out and drop a few bucks on a quality diet/exercise tracking system. They are simple to use, just plug in what you eat and what type of activities you do during the day. They can spit out graphs of your expected weight changes and make recomendations for how to meet your weight goals over a period of time.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
> Do you find yourself correcting 'fade' by snacking (careful or otherwise) as you
> work?"
If by `fade` they mean `falling blood sugar levels` then the answer is to not binge on sugary stuff in the first place. But no-one wants to do boring stuff like eating properly, especially if you want to stay up all night debugging...uh, I mean coding.
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.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
I've been following Atkins diet for a while and it worked until I reached a line that my body refuses to cross, so I changed to a hipocaloric one (less than 1600 KCalories every day) and a little of exercice (walking as much as I can, and 2 hour gym every week), the results are very promising, and at this moments I think that I know a little about dieting and losing weight, some things that work for me :
1.- Watch what you eat, (http://www.nutritiondata.com/ has been a wonderful help) 1600 Kcalories enables you to loose up to 2 Kg every month.
2.- Eat frecuently, no more than 4 hours without eating something, 100 gr of fruit is right between meals when you are hungry. This way you are not empty (and hungry) when you do the real meal.
3.- If you are really hungry between meals, 10 gr of butter (yes pure butter only) helps me to avoid the starving feeling (thanks to Atking, this really works).
4.- Don't eat outside meal time, and stop doing it as soon as you have enough or you don't have hunger, this is really important, and it is an habit change that you need to track carefully.
5.- Make a little exercice, you don't need to train like Mr, Universe, just 20 minutes walking every day and some serious aerobic exercice 2 times (or more) a week is right.
6.- Avoid highly carbohydrated food, like rice, sugar, pasta, flour etc..., vegetables and fruit will give you more than enough for your needs.
7.- Drink, no less than 3 Liters of water every day, but no sodas or similar, just water or tea with a sugar substitute, saccharin is better than aspartame.
8.- Put the maximun food intake in the breakfast and the lunch, and the minimun in the dinner, this way you go to sleep almost empty.
9.- Loosing weight is a SLOW PROCESS, so don't try to recover your perfect weight in 2 weeks, put a realistic schedule, 1 to 2 years is a correct one. Going faster will not work in the long term.
10.- Persistence, all this is nonsense if you do it for 1 week and forget it the next one, loosing weight is a state of mind.
I've lost 20 Kg, in the past 18 months, and today I'm quite happy, even my sexual life has improved a lot, but I understand that every person is a world and at the end you need to decide what is right and what works for you, so watch how your body reacts to your actions.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fuck losing weight, I need to gain it. >_<
[o]_O
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
It's interesting how you're able to mix the insightful with the oblivious. Most people can't do that. You've got your facts right, but your attitude renders you incapable of properly interpreting them. Since essentially anonymous postings on public message boards don't change anyones attitudes, I won't try. Let me just point out the basic contradiction you've presented.
You said that "diabetes is believed to develop when..." any of several insulin-related things go wrong. That's right and there's nothing in there about weight. Later, you say that you know people who got diabetes "as a direct result of 30-40 years of doing nothing but getting fat and lazy." That's not the same thing. So, which is it? Do people get diabetes because of an insulin problem or do they get it because they're fat and lazy?
Here's a hint - characterizing people as lazy and attributing (even in part) an endocrine disorder to that characteristic is, shall we say, counterproductive to the pursuit of effective treatment. Understand, though, that remaining factually correct and accounting for attitudes and lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. A better way to explain to a new or pre- diabetic would run along these lines: "Parts of your endocrine system aren't working right. It's not sufficient for you to eat and move just like normal, thin folks. If that's all you do, you'll get fat. You're going to have to work twice as hard as most people to stay thin and you simply must do so because if you don't, that endocrine problem will spiral ridiculously out of control and put you in a world of hurt. It's not fair, but you got dealt a bad hand. You're going to have to play it perfectly if you don't want to lose the game."
See the difference? Or are you going to persist in being like those asshole ex-smokers who insist on denying that nicotine is addictive just because they were able to kick the habit?