PDF Summary:The Hacker's Diet, by John Walker

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And the goal is worth it. Within months, people will find it hard to imagine you as overweight. You’ll be able to walk up stairs without noticing the exertion. Once you’ve experienced the joy and confidence, you’ll never consider giving it up.

Health and weight loss are rewards that no amount of money, no degree of knowledge can buy.

Calories: It’s Simple

The human body is a simple system. Everyday, your body needs energy to function — to keep the body warm, to generate new cells, to think. Energy is usually measured in calories.

You eat food to gain energy. Your weight change depends directly on how many calories you eat, and how many calories you burn.

• If you eat the exact same calories as your body needs to function, you do not gain any weight.
• If you eat more calories than your body needs, the excess calories are stored in fat. You cannot gain weight beyond what you eat.
• If you eat fewer calories than your body needs, the deficit is made up by burning fat.

(Shortform note: To make sure you understand this, here’s an analogy: consider a fireplace that burns wood at a particular rate.

• If you provide wood faster than the fireplace is...

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(Shortform note: Other factors also play a role in setting your Eat Watch. Sleep deprivation and high stress make you tend to eat more, as a biological response to a stressful dangerous environment. Addictive foods manipulate your Eat Watch and confuse you about the calorie content if what you’re eating.)

Unlike Skinny Stable Sam, you were born with a broken Eat Watch. But this doesn’t mean you’re screwed for life.

Many of us are born with bad vision, but you can get glasses to correct your problem. If you have a broken Eat watch, you can build your own artificial one, by tracking your weight and calories.

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• Keep this in mind — if you drink 2 liters of water, that amounts to around 4.5 pounds. Your retention of this water is going to blow out any minor weight loss that happens.
• Your weight can fluctuate by up to 5 pounds in a single day! If you have a low-salt day, followed by eating half a pizza at night, your body will store pounds of water.
• We say “almost entirely water” because differences in the weight of food that you eat also make a difference — if you have more food in your gut after a large meal, that will add more mass that will be excreted later.
• Every time you step on the scale, it’s as though you were measuring a water tank filled to an unknowable level by a mischievous elf who’s sabotaging your progress.

Charting Weight Loss

As a result, your day-to-day weight can be volatile. On some days, you lose 3 pounds, and it feels like a huge victory. On others, you gain 3 pounds, and it feels like all your effort was for nothing. Here’s what a weight chart looks like:

So there are high day-to-day fluctuations. But what you really care about is...

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• Keeping a regular schedule helps you deal with hunger. Hunger is easier to handle when you know that in exactly 1 hour and 52 minutes, you’ll be able to quench the hunger.
• The author advises one exception, which is to avoid eating a large meal and immediately going to sleep. This tends to store the excess nighttime calories as fat (when you’re metabolically inactive) and makes you wake up hungry, compared to eating more than a few hours before sleeping.

Keep your diet composition the same as your normal diet. Eat the same things—just change the amounts to keep under the calorie limit.

• There’s no need to suffer by restricting yourself to foods you hate. You can still eat hamburgers and fried chicken — the critical thing is to restrict the amount you eat.
• After planning your diet, evaluate a pie chart of where the calories are going. Consider the happiness / calorie ratio of foods. You may find that certain calorically dense foods are less enjoyable than they’re worth, and you can spend those calories on other more enjoyable foods. For instance, 100 calories of peanuts is shockingly little — you may be happier spending that eating an apple.

**Be very...

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3) Calculate your calorie deficit. This is given by the simple formula:

(Target weight loss in pounds) * 3500 / (Days to deadline)

For example, if you want to lose 10 pounds in 2 months (or 60 days), you will need to run a deficit of (10 * 3500 / 60) = 583 calories per day.

As a rule of thumb, 500 per day loses 1 pound per week. Cutting more than 500 calories per day is difficult, and more than 800 calories very difficult to sustain. It’s better to have a more conservative target first then ramp up your deficit as you get more experience, rather than setting an impossibly difficult target upfront and giving up the whole endeavor.

4) Finally, take a few before pictures of yourself. Ideally get a full-length picture of your front, profile, and back. Do this in a mirror or ask someone to take them for you. While you may be hesitant to do this, it has a number of benefits:

• Weight loss is incremental, and you don’t easily perceive differences in a few pounds week to week. But after you lose 10 pounds, the visual...

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Daily Weight Tracking

Once you reach your target weight, you must not lose discipline in tracking your weight daily. Day to day variations are hard to detect in the mirror. Without measuring yourself, you can gain 5 pounds within weeks, with the only warning sign being your clothes one day fitting less well. By then you have to endure the painful transition to calorie deficit once again.

The goal is to keep tight thresholds around your target weight. If you go overweight and break a threshold, you have to modify your behavior to lose the weight again.

• Within a band of 2 pounds of your weight target, you can maintain as normal. So if your target weight is 150, then as long as you’re between 148 and 152, keep on doing what you’re doing.
• If you break 2 pounds of your weight target, you must correct your eating plan slightly to bring your trend line back to normal weight.
  • Cut out slightly more than the calorie excess from the recent chart. If your trend shows you gaining 1 pound every 2 weeks, that’s 250 calories every day — try cutting out 300 calories from your diet.
  • Eating 100 fewer calories each day over a month means losing a pound a...

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