I’ve been classified as “overweight” for most of my adult life, and people who follow my blogs very closely may remember that I was on a diet for a while called the Hacker’s Diet, using a running average.  The diet focused on caloric intake, trying to figure out your basal metabolism based on counting calories and weighing yourself daily, using a running average to determine the calorie surplus or deficit, so you could make decisions to change your intake accordingly.

I had an issue with the program, because I like to go out to eat with my lovely wife fairly frequently.  This means that I am constantly trying to calculate the calories in meals, constantly overestimating or underestimating. Fast food is generally okay, because as a company gets larger in size more people will start asking for the nutritional facts. Of course marriage actually adds a lot more problems with the scheme because Diana likes to cook (and she cooks delicious meals), and those also don’t usually come with calorie content.

It wasn’t working out, so I ended up basically quitting after a while, because of the frustration with both the calorie counting, and I didn’t have an accurate scale.  A scale that you can depend on across the weighings is very important.  Luckily I fixed the second part of the equation.  I still haven’t figured out how to fix the first part, so I ended up giving up and modifying the diet.

My current plan is reliant on the weighing system, but doesn’t deal with the calorie counting.  So I weigh myself every day, and keep track of the average just like on the original diet.  Additionally, I’m adding an exercise component, in order to burn more calories off and make sure that I am calorie negative.  Of course, exercise has other benefits beyond just burning calories.  Getting out of the house and walking around helps me with listening to the podcasts that I want to, as well as some audiobooks.

I started the exercise at the beginning of the year, exercising on the treadmill and on the crosstrainer in the newly installed exercise room in the apartment complex.  My normal schedule was an hour five days a week, with a break day Thursdays and Sundays.  That was great and helped with my determination by having the days off. Everything was working for a while, but I think I started unconsciously eating more calories, compensating for the exercise, and I started to see stagnation.  To give my diet a kick, I started watching my intake as well, and that seemed to have the intended effect.

From the last month:

So just like the last time, I am using the tracking tools on physicsdiet.com to generate pretty graphs and give me the trend lines. Actually, I’m keeping track of my weight daily in a Field Notes memo book that I got on special and which is about the perfect size to keep right next to the scale, and then I transcribe them to the website about once a month. You can see here the time where I was stagnating at the beginning of June, and when I started watching my intake where the trend line starts going down more smoothly.

Entirety of the diet:

Here the stagnation is a lot more apparent. I was still making progress, but it was much slower from mid-April to the start of June.  Overall though I like this rate of weight loss.  One pound a week is what most people would call sustainable weight loss.  My short-term goal is to be below 300 pounds, which looks like it will occur this year. I don’t know what the long term goal is yet.  I’m hoping to make a post about once a month, if only to keep myself reevaluating myself.