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Calorie Counting Pitfalls and the Hacker's Diet?
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. -- QUOTEBLOG: http://kisrael.com SKEPTIC MORTALITY: http://kisrael.com/mortal "There are two adults and one child. Majority rules. Live like an animal or die." --James Israel |
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