Losing weight in 2011
Since the beginning of the year I’ve been living under what we’ve been calling ‘the new regime’. This ‘new regime’ basically involves not living like a fat useless slob, so I’ve been getting fit, eating healthily and losing weight. So far I’ve lost over 10kg and can now run around the park a few times without collapsing to the floor clutching at my chest and screaming about ambulances, so I’d say its going pretty well. The basic concept behind the new regime is:
Eat less + do more = lose weight.
This will be followed once some weight has been lost by:
_Eat a normal amount + do more = stay the same. _
About a month ago, I came across someone somewhere on the internet recommending “The Hacker’s Diet” as a guide for weight loss. Not having read such a guide before I started on ‘the new regime’ I skimmed it a bit; the tl;dr version is:
Eat less + do more = lose weight.
This doesn’t exactly seem like rocket science to me, but lots of people seem to have a problem grasping this concept. The Hacker’s Diet does a pretty decent job of describing the human body as a simple system with inputs and outputs and manages to explain that if you limit your input and increase your output, you get a deficit and lose weight. So if you find anyone that says ‘Oh, I really struggle to lose weight’, slap them round the back of the head and point them in that direction.
The whole point of this post is that the last couple of chapters of the book contain a lot of information about tracking the calories you eat, the calories you burn, analysing trend from daily weight figures and so on. There’s a lot of detail on how to create spreadsheets to calculate weight trends, how to keep a daily log of calorie intake, and pages and pages of calorific information for food. The thing is, it’s 2011 now so none of those chapters are necessary, because as with anything that’s a pain in the rear end there are now loads of apps available to make life easier. As I’ve been using a number of them for 5 months I figure I’ll share the knowledge and review some of them over the next few days.