Unless you count the daily 200 metre walk to the shop and back to buy cigarettes, the sum total of my exercise is zero.  Actually, that’s not quite true, I do a 10 mile walk with a friend every 6 weeks or so but, while it’s enjoyable and I feel good after it (albeit knackered), it isn’t enough to have a significant impact on my health.

The Hacker’s Diet outlines an exercise plan in the form of a 48 rung ladder, with each step getting increasingly harder.  The idea is that you spend a minimum of 5 days on each rung before moving up, or as long as it takes until you feel it becoming ‘easy’. I plan to start on rung 1 this evening, and have the defibrillator and oxygen masks at the ready.

According to PhysicsDiet.com my Total Energy Expenditure is 2645 calories per day. To lose 2 pounds a week, which is what I am roughly aiming for, I need to eat 1000 calories fewer than this a day:

2 pounds of fat = 7000 calories
7000/7 days = 1000 calories

So 1645 calories a day.  This doesn’t seem insanely low, I just need to start counting how many I’m eating.  Today’s count was:

Breakfast
Nothing

Lunch
Can of Baxter’s Leek & Potato Soup – 186

Dinner
Co-operative Cajun chicken and red pepper rice – 450
Mango chutney – ~30
Muller Fruit Cornet strawberry yoghurt – 198

Total: 864 calories

Ah, only about half of what I should be eating!  This evening will be spent planning the rest of the week’s meals so I’m getting enough.

You’ll see I’ve put a couple of simple graphs up on this site, but to properly follow the Hacker’s Diet it is the trend that is important, not each daily measurement.  Your weight can fluctuate each day because of the amount of water you’re retaining so it’s easy to become disheartened if you suddenly have a day where your weight goes up by 4 pounds.  The Hacker’s Diet comes with a set of Excel templates for keeping track of your weight and tell you how many calories you should be eating but, to be honest, they all seemed a bit complicated.

Instead, I’ve signed up to Physics Diet which uses all of the same principles and calculations but does all the hard work.  You enter your height, weight, age, sex and activity level when you register and, based on these,  it calculates your TEE (Total Energy Expenditure), how many calories you use each day.  From that you work out how many calories you need to eat each day, based on the speed you want to lose weight.

It’s nothing fancy to look at and I’m a little concerned that the site seems to have been abandoned by whoever developed it, but you can export your daily stats so if the worst comes to the worst I can always enter them elsewhere.

You can view my public profile here.

I’ve tried a few diets in the past:

Atkins – Fast weight loss but I felt like death warmed-up and knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain such a low carb diet.  I couldn’t, and the weight soon went back on.

Crash – This was as a side-effect of a medical problem I had a few years ago and wasn’t meant solely as a way to lose weight.  For three months I was eating virtually one meal a day and lost 42 pounds in that time.  As soon as I was better and started eating normally the weight returned.

Weight Watchers – Kind of worked but I resented having to pay someone every month just to convert calories in to points.

I’ve known about the Hacker’s Diet for some time but never really sat down and read it all.  The idea is very simple – eat too many calories and you’ll put on weight; restrict the number of calories you’re eating and you’ll lose weight.  Simple really and based on sound science.  There will be people who argue that there are good and bad calories, and that’s probably true to a certain extent, but when you just want to get in the habit of watching how much and what you eat it seems a good place to start.

And the best thing about it?  It’s completely free.  View it online or download the pdf, all 338 pages of it, here.

If you were to sit down and think up the most unhealthy diet you could, there’s a fair chance you’d be pretty close to what I used to eat.

Breakfast would consist of whatever cakes or biscuits were left over from the night before or, more usually, nothing at all.  For lunch I would pop to the bakers 3 doors down from my house for a Cornish pasty, bag of crisps and a Belgium bun, then a chocolate bar in the afternoon.  Dinner would usually be a ready-meal, pizza or sandwich, followed by a chocolate bar or bag of sweets; at weekends the ready-meal would be replaced by a takeaway.

Hard to believe I’m overweight, eh?

About the only thing my diet had going for it is that I only drink water – no soft drinks or alcohol at all – for reasons I’ll go in to another time.