Managing Your Weight: Simple!
There is nothing mysterious in losing weight, and in fact it's all pretty simple: your body needs certain amount of energy to survive and develop. The energy comes from the food your eat and from stored body reserves (fat). Lower your food intake (through dieting) or increase your energy consumption (through exercises) and you'll start losing weight.
Simple arythmetics
Calories consumed compared to calories used is the key: if one eats more calories than one burns, one gains weight; if one eats fewer calories than one burns, one loses weight
Your Body Is A System
(from an engineering point of view, that is)
Yes, your body is a system, and controlling your weight is just another engineering problem. "The Hacker's Diet" book (see the box below) describes how to implement a simple feedback control loop. The idea is to monitor your daily calories intake and your weight trend. If the weight changes (decreases) too slow, you need to reduce the calories per day (eat less or exercise more). If the weight changes too fast, increase the calories.The key point here is to be able to identify the true weight change and the long-term trend from the clutter of the daily measurement. In the book, this is implemented with excel tables and the trend line is drawn via moving average calculation. Of course, you can use what suits you (a sheet of paper and a calculator will do) or a specialized tool like HPlanner.
"The Hacker's Diet"
Written by the founder of Autodesk, John Walker, this is a serious book on how to lose weight and keep it stable afterwards.
Read it here (it's free)
Getting Started
A Practical, Step-by-Step Guide
By all means read "The Hacker's Diet" e-book first. Then follow the steps below:
- 1. Determine Your Target Weight
What is your ideal weight? It depends on your sex, your body composition, or your body fat percentage. As a guide, you can use the BMI (Body Mass Index) value, which is the ratio between one's height and weight. In general you should aim for BMI value between 19 and 24.
Once you select the desired BMI, use a BMI chart to get the target weight.
For example, if your height is 5'8", your ideal weight would be 151 lb (BMI of 23)
- 2. Determine The Daily Calories Needed
What is the amount of calories per day that your body consumes? Again, it depends. A typical value for men leading sedentary life is 2000 kcal per day, and for women 1700 kcal/day. You can easily calculate yours online using the Calorie Needs Calculator.
After you have a number, subtract 500 kcal from it and you'll arrive at your daily calories target.
Why 500 kcal? 500 kcal less daily will result in 3500 kcal weekly which should lead to losing 1 pound (half a kilo) per week. Which is considered healthy rate.
Use this value just as a starting number. After you start your diet you need to adjust it according to the achieved result. For example, if you start losing more than 1 pound per week, you can increase your target calories a little bit.
- 3. Start Daily Weight Log
How much do you weigh today? It's hard to say if you only measure once per week. Even if you measure daily, your day-per-day weight can vary significantly, depending on the amount of water you drank, the last time you've been to the toilet etc. The best method to determine your true weight is to weigh yourself every day, at the same time (e.g. right after going out of bed) and then calculate the average value from the last several measurements. A program like HPlanner can greatly help here, but a simple Excel sheet can also do.
- 4. Count Your Calories
Start writing down everything you eat and drink, and sum up the calories.
There are a lot of calories tables on the Internet; the one from Hacker's Dictionary is available here.
Make a point not to exceed the daily calories limit. If necessary, plan your meals in advance - it's easier this way. Drink a lot of water or tea (no sugar ;-) to suppress the feeling of hunger.
- 5. Compare And Adjust
At the end of each week, compare your real weight with the expected weight. If they coincide, everything is well and you do not need to change anything. If you have dropped less weight than expected, reduce your daily calories allowance. If you weigh less than expected, increase the calories per day. Repeat the same procedure each week, until you reach your target weight.
Precautions
1) It's not a good idea to lose weight too fast. Your aim should be to lose about half a kilo (one pound) per week.
2) Eating too few calories can lead to muscle mass loss, in addition to fat loss. It's essential to exercise regularly in order to prevent this.
I'm Thin. Now What?
How To Stay Fit All Your Life
Getting fit is only half of the job. Once the diet is over, in less than two years most people will regain every pound they have lost. To prevent this from happening to you, just continue keeping your daily weight log. In this manner, you will be able to see any upward tendency in its beginning, and will be able to adjust your eating habits to return back to your target weight.
Keeping A Weight Log
How Much Do You Weigh Today? Are you gaining or losing weight? Is your diet working?
These are not simple questions. A tool like HPlanner can help you with the answer.
Exercises
Exercising is important; not so much to help you lose weight (it helps, but dieting is more efficient) but to keep you in shape, and let you feel better and live longer. As little as half an hour of exercise three times a week makes a big difference. Choose the activity that's most suitable to you and get started!
Resources
Here's a short summary of the resources used above
- The Hacker's Diet Online Book
- How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition ;-)
- BMI chart
- Text-based BMI chart. Useful to determine BMI from your weight and height
- HPlanner
- Weight tracker for your Palm PDA or smartphone. Use it to keep daily measurements log, display trend line, calculate BMI
- Harris Benedict Formula
- Calculate your daily calories needs. Based on BMR (basal metabolic rate)
- BMR calculator
- Calculate your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate).
This is the number of calories you'd burn if you stayed in bed all day.
Acknowledgements
Scale photography by Pak Gwei (Under Creative Commons License)
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