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Hacker's Diet
MrSpock writes "John Walker, founder of AutoCAD's holding companay Autodesk, has written a 200 page weight loss guide called The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition that takes a very hacker-friendly perspective on weight loss (and god knows many of us hackers need to lose weight). If your Geek Code includes "s:+>:", then you might want to look into the book. It's not a dry read, and seems to be pretty well-reasoned. " I
especially liked Walker's "Eat Watch" concept. It's funny,
yes, but it also makes good sense. I heartily recommend this
online book to any Slashdot reader who is starting to think
about entering Michelin Tire Man lookalike contests.
Also, somewhere in there he specifically says he won't program for Windows any more since it's gotten to be such a PITA to do so.
I think I sorta left the impression from that last message that I am a die hard vegetarian. I'm not. Last night I ate shrimp and steak, and I just now finished a spaghetti dinner with meatballs. But I balance that out with a lotta greens. I am not under any dissolusionment that I am doing anything for my health eating meat, I just like it. And when I'm training for a sporting event, I adjust accordingly: little or no meat and right before the event, nothing but fruit and plenty of water.
That brings me to the other thing I forgot to say. There are groups of people that are justified in writing down numbers and crunching them for health reasons: Incredibly obese people (we're talking like 500 pounds and up, all fat) who need liquid diets and/or have some kind of disease/syndrome that got them there. The other is very competitive athletes who use training schedules and diets. Anywhere in between, there is simply no need.
And sorry everybody for the errors, I am just too lazy to proofread, or something.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Think about what you just said.. We are meat, but we can't produce those 8 ameino acids. Other animals are meat, but they can? That doesn't make much sense. I'd be willing to bet that your right about the 8 ameino acids that we can't produce, but I'd also bet that those acids come from plants, of which animals also have simply because they eat plants, or eat animals who have eatten plants. (I'm not expert on the matter just using common sense, as I know vegitarians (who don't eat eggs or drink milk) can survive, they just have to have a good balanced diet.
Today, any weight loss guide should include three things:
Not everyone gains weight on high carbohydrate diets. Not everyone quickly drops weight on a 40/30/30 diet. But it happens to enough people that no discussion of nutrition is complete without it. (And for the critics of the Zone diet out there, I tried it on the recommendation of a dietitian I consulted after gaining weight on a 1000 cal/day high carb, very low fat diet.)
Also, his monitoring techniques work even better with a Tanita scale. For those unfamiliar with them, they measure both weight and body fat.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Being serious though, I think being underweight is also a serious problem for hackers. It can lead to bad health, and lack of concentration. I visited my aunt recently (who has a phd in nutrition) re: my eating habits and I am slightly below the minimum healthy weight for someone my height. The fact that I don't eat meat probably doesn't help, but it is possible to have a perfectly healthy diet without meat. My aunt told me loads of interesting stuff - for example, did you know that iron (something we all need) will not be absorbed if you consume it with dairy products? This means that when Cornflakes claims that it is full of Iron, it may be right, but very little of that iron will be absorbed. Further, if you don't eat meat as I do, protein is also something that you need to think about. There are actually two types, and most non-meat foods only have one of those types, where as both are needed.
Perhaps someone who knows about these things will post an Eating HOWTO for hackers to /.
--
Most of this book is concentrated on weight loss by caloric deficit. While this can have great effects for someone seriously overweight, there's a limit to which you can shed weight in this way. In the end, you'll look thin, but still have too much fat. The difference will be visible when you take your clothes off :-)
:-)
Remember, the only way to look like a man again (i.e. have some visible musculature) after you shed all except those difficult last 10 kilos is to exercise.
//Mr. Experienced
I used to be a fat slob myself - 210ish. I'm now just a somewhat-chunky slob at 165. Total time, 5 months since reading The Hacker's Diet. 10 pounds a month, consistently and reliably, with negligible hunger.
What impressed me about The Hacker's Diet was its lack of touchy-feeley new-agey "it's all in your mind" crap as well as its lack of what I call the "magic bullet syndrome". I'd studiously avoided dieting, gaining about 10 pounds a year over the past 5-6 years, because I couldn't be bothered to exercise or change my entire life around for the sake of some book from some quack who obviously had no idea what he was talking about in the first place. 99% of the "diet books" are basically about how to lose 10 pounds of water the first week, and maybe 5 pounds of muscle in the second week. Feh. The rest of the industry - diet programs - are basically "come here for touchy-feely-crap and pay a fortune to the overpriced proprietary food we sell"; little more than glorified brainwashing centres. Come in, get hooked on our One True Plan, and pay us for the rest of your life whether you lose weight or not. No thanks.
Written by a geek for geeks, The Hacker's Diet cut through the crap, explaining the physiological processes involved in weight gain/maintenance/loss in the simple language of thermodynamics, which totally blew me away. "Hey, no crap, just numbers! Nothing to buy, just data on how the body works! Here's something I can understand and follow!" What you eat doesn't matter, only how many calories you consume and how many calories you burn. In retrospect, yeah, that's a "duh" kind of insight - I have newfound grudging respect to the diet industry for its ability to keep such an obvious thing "secret" for so many years.
Anyways, I've been living on 1200 calories per day for the past six months - the rest of my requirements come from burning fat. I still can't be bothered to exercise, but I'm able to wear clothes I haven't been able to fit in for 2-3 years, and can walk about twice as far as I used to be able to before getting winded - no more carrying around the 50-pound laser printer for me - and feel all-around better than I used to. In a month or two, I start running out of fat and get to start eating again, building my caloric intake up to a maintenance level where I'll be able to sit for the forseeable future. (Do you have any idea how much pasta you can make with an extra 500-1000 calories to work with? Every night will be all-you-can-eat spaghetti night! :-)
Another site that will be useful - http://www.dietitian.org". This is a site run by a dietitian (duh :) who is equally unafraid to explain human physiology in technical terms. No BS, no pseudo-scientific crap, and relatively little dumbing-down of the relevant biology.
So, if you're of the globular persuasion, if you can't stand the thought of turning your life over to someone who'll tell you never to eat your favority brand of burnt cow flesh again, if you "don't have the time" to spend hours at the gym (since you'd rather be reading /. anyway), and you still wanna lose a few pounds, check out The Hacker's Diet and the dietitian site I mentioned above.