I've been reading an online book called "The Hacker's Diet." It was written by an engineer who sees life as an engineering problem -- he was extremely successful as an engineer and became moderately wealthy but still looked like, well, an engineer. So he decided to lose weight, and he succeeded, and wrote a book about it, and put it online because he apparently already has enough money and he thinks too many trees are wasted on diet books full of psychobabble. The book says, in a nutshell: Eat less. Eat. Less. Eat Less. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than you burn, and you can't really burn off that many extra calories by exercise -- though exercise becomes part of the program as well -- but no matter how you look at it, you have to eat less than you used to, because that's how you got fat to begin with. All the diet books out there are essentially padding to fill up the book on how to eat less.
He also says that skinny people have an internal "eat watch" -- it tells them to eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full. For the rest of us, we never had the watch or it got broken. So the part of the book I haven't gotten to tells about tools to help us restart the eat watch. But I've been enjoying the analysis of calories taken in and going out. The most interesting bit is on the water vs. food -- we take in 9 pounds of water a day, to only 2.5 pounds of food, so of COURSE water has a larger impact on day-to-day weight. So, once again, one needs to focus on long term daily averages and not get distressed by any particular day's number on the scale (so long as you continue to see the general downward trend -- you should probably get distressed if it goes up by a pound every day for a week).
The link to the book is: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/. But I suspect this is mostly an "Emily" book. Mostly it helps because I'm reading something that reminds me that I'm on a diet!
I kept to my 1200 calories again yesterday, though I didn't get any real exercise because it was Wednesday. Today and tomorrow I have gym appointments. This weekend's camping trip got cancelled because the leader's daughter had her first athsma attack this week and so she's not allowed to be that far from a hospital, but there isn't another leader in our troop or the junior troop we were joining who has the training to make it a legal Girl Scout trip. And my weight today was the same as yesterday, still down from Tuesday. :-)
4 comments:
That kind of reminds me of Calvin's self-help book "Shut Up and Stop Whining." Or whatever the title was. His concern was that if it was successful, he wouldn't be able to write a sequel.
But your engineer guy is right--I've never understood the daily needs calculator that tells me I should eat 2300 calories a day to maintain my weight and 1800 to lose weight when I KNOW from my own experience in the past two years that 1800 a day will not help me lose weight--I have to have under 1400 to see any difference, and between 1200 and 1300 to lose a pound or two a week. And that's with exercising.
And he's also right about exercising--on a good day with a really hard workout, I'll burn an extra 400 calories or so. Really not much in the long run. While it helps speed up weight loss, I can't do what I've been doing--exercising well but not watching my diet.
I don't know about the "internal watch" thing--even when I was a skinny little kid I think my problem was that I just didn't like the food being offered to me and didn't have the resources to go out and buy my own stuff that I DID like. So maybe I need to ban good food from my house and only have plain roasted meat and overcooked frozen veggies and mashed potatoes. No wonder I was skinny when I was a kid!
See - another promoter of the eat less plan. In theory it should work - take in fewer calories than you burn - but SERIOUSLY - if you aren't taking in enough calories you don't burn any of the calories effectively. Your metabolism slows down. The only time I lose weight is when I eat regularly. I have to eat six times a day - and it makes me MORE hungry, and so I eat MORE. And I lose weight - at least for a week or two... I still think the shake it up theory is the one that would ultimately work best for me. I have to keep my body guessing - because as soon as I figure it out - I plateau and then gain.
Amy, yes, in order to lose weight you do need to eat consistently, and he says that, too. You can't eat too few calories for exactly the reason you state. But if you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight, and if you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight. If you eat so little that your body shuts down and stops burning anything, then you *are* eating more than you burn! For most people, most of the time, that's not the problem. His book is trying to encourage a healthy steady-state in the long term -- not too much, but not too little. He's trying to wake up people who think they just need to find the right magic plan to allow them to eat everything they want and still be thin, and he's just saying it's never, ever going to happen -- physically, scientifically, mathematically speaking, it doesn't work. When he says "eat less" it means "eat less than just enough and way less than too much," not, "eat less than the bare minimum!"
That wasn't nice.
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