The Hacker's Diet

Before I had the surgery I had studied as much as I could as a layman to try to figure out how the body and weight loss were related.

I try to take a common sense view of the body and how it works.

First, weight is comprised of the contents of your body. Makes sense. You stand on the scale, it's measuring the force of gravity on the contents of your body. Your bones, muscles, organs, fat, hair, clothes (if you're wearing any), all of that has a downward force on the scale due to the force of gravity. What you're trying to minimize is the excess fat in that body; the hard part is telling how much excess weight is from fat and how much is the water, food in the digestive system, water in your bladder, etc...

That is part of the reason that part of many dieter's rituals include weighing first thing in the morning after doing the morning duties in the bathroom and before getting dressed for the day. They're minimizing the effects of the "extra" weight in the body.

Second, you don't generate your own fuel. Food is fuel, and the fact that we eat food to stay alive is a good sign that sunlight alone doesn't cut it. The vast majority of life on the planet derives food from sunlight thanks to plants, which, through photosynthesis, convert sunlight to sugars and carbohydrates which then is eaten by other animals which then are eventually eaten by us. Or we directly eat the plants.

The point? We don't absorb food through our skin or the sky. We eat it.

Nothing magical about it. Our bodies fuel themselves and gather raw material for repair and growth through our food.

There had to be something to this. As much as we wished there was a simple formula that would allow us to eat all the donuts we want and still maintain our girlish figures it simply isn't true. Spicy foods speed our metabolism? Maybe, but not enough to eat that eclair. Exercise? Average exercise for an hour seems to burn off about a single McDonald's cheeseburger, 300 calories. At most probably a double cheeseburger. I'll tell you that for me riding a recumbent bike for about an hour and a half to two hours at around 7 to 8 miles per hour, according to the bike's computer, burns around 700 calories. It's not a lot when you consider that the average sit-down meal at a restaurant is easily 1000 to 1500 calories (or more, factoring in the starters and accompanying cheddar bay biscuits or breadsticks...)

But despite the fancy claims and various diet fads, it comes down to calories in and calories out. If you have 3,500 calories more going into your body than you expend the body will store it as a pound of fat.

More than what? Your Basal Metabolic Rate, which is the calories you burn just by living. Your heart beating, your brain just working, body keeping your temperature regulated, even your digestive system all take calories to function. If you woke up and sat on the couch all day, your BMR is the calorie count that would be burned by you not dying.

Burn 3,500 calories above that, you gain a pound. Burn 3,500 calories below, you lose a pound. Burn about even, and you stay at that weight level.

There are always variations based on metabolic rates and such but overall you can get a rough idea from the various MBR calculators online like this one. And again, as much as you'd like to think otherwise, your metabolism isn't going to account for why your friend can consume half a pizza and "not gain a pound". Chances are pretty good that if you kept a food diary and activity diary for that friend, you'd find that they aren't eating as much in snacks and other meals so it all evens out for the BMR.

This makes sense. Why? Because you don't absorb food from other sources. Your body can only hold what you put in; water and food, which you expel through heat, sweat, and excretions.

"But if you cut back too much, you go into starvation mode and your body will gain weight."

Neat. I don't claim to fully understand how the metabolism fully works, and I do know that your body will do certain things to conserve energy when it is low on fuel. But it's conserving energy. You become tired. Lethargic. It shifts the source of energy to fat stores instead of quicker burning sugars, going into a state of ketosis. If you continue to lower your calorie intake you'll start burning proteins in things like your muscles.

But the logical part is that you can't gain weight if the food just isn't there. Remember? Energy put into your body is all it can work with. When was the last time starving people carried a stereotype of someone who wasn't rail-thin? Their metabolism would by definition be in starvation mode. What it does is lower their energy use (lethargy, etc.), but it can't make you gain weight unless you take in more calories than your BMR is burning.

If this sounds like an engineering approach to the problem it is. I found a book on dieting that was perfect for my Aspergian mindset; John Walker, founder of Autodesk, co-programmer of world-famous AutoCAD, was overweight and decided to approach the problem as an engineer should. He applied logic and math to the problem and wrote about what he found.

And it boiled down to common sense.

The result was The Hacker's Diet. You can still download the book in various forms for free from the link I provided.

The book breaks down dieting into some very basic points, and none of them should be any surprise. Calories in equals calories out. There is no magic diet plan. Exercise is a supplement that is healthy, but not a dietary fix. Monitoring your intake and adjusting accordingly will lead you to a healthy weight level (and studies have shown that the most effective weight loss results over a long term tend to come from people who keep food diaries!)

The book is a fairly easy read. Take a look, see what it has to say. When it comes to minimum "magic formula" and maximum straightforward logic, the "rubber bag" analysis of the body makes a lot of sense. See what you think by clicking on the Hacker's Diet link!

UPDATE: A link to Jeff Atwood's (of Stackoverflow fame)  blog post about techie dieting...which also happened to mention the Hacker's Diet.