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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.
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.
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.