So my weight has been climbing steadily for a few years now.

I've heard good things about the "Hacker's Diet". It's definately oriented
to my geek lifestyle. ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ )

The big idea is the idea of an "Eat Watch"/clock, a hypothetical device
that would tell you to start eating or stop eating based on your caloric
needs... fit folks have a well tuned one of these built-in, folks who tend
to be overweight need to use an artificical one, just like folks with poor
vision can use glasses.

The core ideas seem to be:
1. Carefully know # of calories in, and make sure its below your
guesstimated daily burn rate
2. Weigh-in daily, and here's some nifty software to let you chart a
weighted average
3. Weight loss is calories in minus calories out, though the day to day
water variance swamps a day of weight loss, which is why you take such
statistical care in step 2
4. Consider adding in this simple Royal Canadian Air Force-derived
exercise routine DAILY (which is "stepped" to start very easy, and then
progresses to be a very decent work out) but don't fool yourself because
the amount you can incidentally add with "extra" food overwhelms what you
can remove with extra exercise.

I've *always* though Daily Weigh-In made a lot of sense, despite the
conventional wisdom of doing it weekly. Ideally, either the daily news is
good, and you're happy, or it's bad, and you're encouraged to be more
strict.

So besides the difficulty in knowing calorie counts in social settings,
what are the gotchas of this sort of approach? Is calories in minus
calories burned a reasonable rule of thumb?

(Actually, it's similar to the approach I've successfully used once
befo daily weigh in, record that, and put an estimate of how "well" I
did in eating less.)

I would guess that one big bugaboo is your metabolism slowing down in
response, so that it becomes more and more difficult to eat few enough
calories to make a difference.

And he glosses over nutritiion; he thinks as omnivores, from a weightloss
perspective WHAT calories we eat just doesn't matter that much, though
obviously you want to maintain decent nutrition through all of this....

So anyway, I dig the palmpilot weight tracker you can get for this, which
does the graphing for you. (Before I used a palmpilot db, but it did no
graphing. The site also has some Excel spreadsheets) Also, I like the idea
of simple, scaling, no-props-needed, do-anywhere exercises for maintaining
and gradually improving conditioning.

--
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"There are two adults and one child. Majority rules.
Live like an animal or die." --James Israel