{"id":46463,"date":"2021-08-20T08:09:56","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T12:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=46463"},"modified":"2025-09-12T15:21:36","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T19:21:36","slug":"the-hackers-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/the-hackers-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hacker&#8217;s Diet: The Simple Guide to Weight Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What is <em>The Hacker&#8217;s Diet<\/em> about? What is the key, according to its author John Walker, to successful weight loss? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <em>Hacker\u2019s Diet <\/em>was written by John Walker, founder of software company Autodesk. This is an engineer\u2019s approach to weight loss, described in terms of control systems, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/feedback-loop-meaning\/\">feedback loops<\/a>, measurement noise reduction, and practical problem-solving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here is a breakdown of Walker&#8217;s advice from <em>The Hacker&#8217;s Diet.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p><em>Editor\u2019s note: This article is part of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/hub\/personal-life\/health\/nutrition\/dieting-guide\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Shortform\u2019s guide to dieting<\/a>. If you like what you read here, there\u2019s plenty more to check out in the guide!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-hacker-s-diet\"><strong><em>The Hacker&#8217;s Diet<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>How do you lose weight? Eat less than you\u2019re burning each day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Everyone has a different daily calorie requirement based on height, weight, and activity level. Very roughly, the average man burns around 2000 calories, and the average woman around 1500 calories. <a href=\"https:\/\/tdeecalculator.net\/\">Determine yours with this calculator<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Simple doesn\u2019t mean easy. Like anything else in life, successfully losing weight requires:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A fixation on the goal you want to achieve<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>An understanding of what\u2019s required to achieve the goal<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Developing a rational plan to meet your goal<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Carrying out the plan<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Willpower and a high tolerance for pain<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-calories-in-calories-out\"><strong>Calories In\/Calories Out<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The Hacker&#8217;s Diet<\/em> says that the way to lose weight is to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/reduce-calorie-intake\/\">eat fewer calories<\/a> than you\u2019re burning each day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A pound of fat contains about 3500 calories. <strong>Losing a pound of fat requires you to burn 3500 more calories than you eat. <\/strong>There\u2019s no way around this. Fad dieting techniques like keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, etc. are all merely different ways of restricting your calorie intake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Likewise, eating an extra 250 calories a day causes you to gain a pound in 2 weeks. Or 26 pounds a year. And this just requires one more helping at dinner, one beverage per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For purposes of weight loss, you could eat 1500 calories of butter a day and still lose weight. It\u2019s not what you eat, it\u2019s how much of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-eat-watch\"><strong>The Eat Watch<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Imagine that you had a watch that told you when to eat. When it flashed Eat, you would eat. When you reached your calorie limit for the meal or the day, the watch would stop flashing, and you\u2019d stop eating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People who have been skinny their entire lives have perfectly tuned Eat Watches. When they eat over their caloric requirement for the meal, they simply stop eating. Eating past this point becomes unbearably uncomfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People who gain weight easily have broken Eat Watches. Cutting calories is painful; eating excess calories is easy. It might even be easy for you to keep eating past the point of discomfort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But this doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re doomed for life.&nbsp; Many of us are born with bad vision, but you can get glasses to correct your problem. If you have a broken <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/eat-watch\/\">Eat watch<\/a>, you can build your own artificial one, by tracking your weight and calories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-tracking-weight\"><strong>Tracking Weight<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>If you\u2019ve ever tried to lose weight and measure your body, the path your body takes is startling.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>When you first start dieting, you seem to lose 5 pounds in 2 days. Wow! What progress!\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Then it quickly slows to a trickle. This is the plateau of misery.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>You get antsy and frustrated, so you have a cheat meal. You stand back on the scale, and you weigh 4 pounds more. My god! All your progress is lost!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>As you weigh yourself through the days, your spirits rise and fall with your readings. Plateaus are crushing (you\u2019re enduring so much pain! How could you barely have lost any weight!) while the temporary losses are short-lived.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The reason for this wild fluctuation is water, influenced by salt intake.<\/strong> This is NOT solid body mass. Because a pound of fat requires 3500 calories, there is simply no way to gain 3 pounds of fat in a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At a rate of undereating 500 calories per day (which is already viscerally difficult), you lose less than 0.2 pounds of fat a day. This signal is largely lost in the noise of day-to-day weight fluctuations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The solution to this is the <strong>exponentially weighted moving average <\/strong>(EWMA). This takes a moving average to smooth out daily fluctuations, and weighs recent data more strongly than past data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The trend of the EWMA shows weight loss per week, which can then be calculated into calorie deficit per day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-meal-planning\"><strong>Meal Planning<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Pre-planning meals \u2014 <\/strong><strong><em>how <\/em><\/strong><strong>much you eat AND <\/strong><strong><em>when \u2014 <\/em><\/strong>gives you a reliable daily calorie intake. If you eat only what you plan to, then you\u2019re guaranteed to achieve your goal. (Again, simply, not necessarily easy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You would never invest in a company that sets no budgets and whose strategy is \u201cspend whatever we feel like day to day, and hope it\u2019ll work out in the long run.\u201d Not only would this be more likely to fail than methodical planning, there\u2019d be no way to measure actual performance against goals to figure out the problems. \u201cWinging it\u201d in relation to your eating target is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tips:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Plan your meals ahead of time \u2014 specific amounts at specific times. Don\u2019t eat any more than this.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Pre-planning reduces the pain of hunger, since you know you\u2019ll have your next meal at a specific time.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The easy way out is to eat pre-prepared foods, like microwavable meals or liquid shakes. These reduce prep time and make calorie planning easy.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Measure or weigh quantities of what you eat. Highly caloric foods contain more calories in less mass than than you think (eg 20g of nuts is way less than you might guess, but has 115 calories).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-the-weight-loss-journey\"><strong>The Weight Loss Journey<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have little knowledge of calorie content of foods, and tracking weight is new to you, it may be wise to spend a couple of weeks just getting used to the actions \u2014 monitoring your daily weight and measuring your calorie spend. Once you\u2019ve become accustomed to your weight fluctuations and the procedures, you\u2019ll be better equipped to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/execute-your-plan\/\">execute your plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Start your diet in a regular period when you have a regular schedule, when you have time to adjust to the diet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first 3 days are the hardest as your body adjusts to burning fat. You\u2019ll feel cold, weak, irritable, tired, and a constant gnawing hunger. It is this bad, and it\u2019s not good to sugarcoat this \u2014 better for you to know what will come and handle it better. But rest assured, it will never feel worse than this. The hunger softens from an aching pain you think about constantly, to a minor annoyance that becomes a fact of life.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Start your weight loss during a regular period of time when you have a regular schedule<\/strong>, ideally of at least 2 weeks of \u201cnormal life.\u201d Maintaining a weight loss plan benefits from momentum and \u201cgetting in the groove.\u201d During a vacation, extensive travel, or holidays, it\u2019s hard to maintain the discipline your plan requires.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you hit your target weight, give yourself some buffer by getting your average weight trend line by 2 pounds under your target weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then, once you\u2019re ready to stop your weight loss, transition back to maintenance calories slowly, perhaps adding 100-200 calories back per week. Adding back too much at once might cause a weight spike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-perfect-weight-forever\"><strong>Perfect Weight Forever<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Because your eating control system is broken, you need to continue with tracking weight and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/planning-your-meals\/\">meal planning<\/a> indefinitely. People yo-yo between weight loss and weight gain because they fall back into their previous bad habits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Set hard limits to your weight that require dialing back calories. 2 pounds of your weight target is a soft wall requiring calorie adjustment; 5 pounds of your weight target is a hard wall requiring immediate resumption of your previous dieting plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Luckily it gets easier with more time \u2014 you gain an intuition for calorie content, you don\u2019t overeat or binge as much, and your body adjusts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is The Hacker&#8217;s Diet about? What is the key, according to its author John Walker, to successful weight loss? The Hacker\u2019s Diet was written by John Walker, founder of software company Autodesk. This is an engineer\u2019s approach to weight loss, described in terms of control systems, feedback loops, measurement noise reduction, and practical problem-solving. Here is a breakdown of Walker&#8217;s advice from The Hacker&#8217;s Diet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":14149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,16],"tags":[466],"class_list":["post-46463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-health","tag-the-hackers-diet","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Hacker&#039;s Diet: The Simple Guide to Weight Loss - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In The Hacker&#039;s Diet, John Walker discusses weight loss from the calories in\/calories out perspective. Here&#039;s a brief overview.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/the-hackers-diet\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hacker&#039;s Diet: The Simple Guide to Weight Loss\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In The Hacker&#039;s Diet, John Walker discusses weight loss from the calories in\/calories out perspective. 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