tony_merlino

It's so easy to burn, but it's also so easy NOT to burn. The only way you really know is by monitoring your weight, and doing some filtering on it (even if that's just a moving average, or a simple regression), to see what's happening under the noise.

I don't think this is as much of an issue for people who have never been fat. Somehow, their bodies have a regulatory mechanism that we don't have, that adjusts their appetite to maintain equilibrium. If I let the way I feel guide me, I would keep gaining weight until I exploded.

cmcgarvey

Oh, definitely, that's how I have gained about ten pounds over the last 4 months. I stopped working out due to injury, it only sidelined me a month, but I kept eating the way I was when I was working out constantly. But went significantly more sedentary and now I am up almost ten pounds because I had zero desire to workout after I was medically cleared. But, I am taking action to correct that now so, fingers crossed, that ten will come off fairly quickly.

cohophysh

would you consider sharing the spreadsheet?

goldfinch

The Hacker's diet site has good online tools and an excel spreadsheet that will keep track of a whole pile of things for you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/comptools.html His idea is watching trends long term can catch things before they are out of control. As Tony says, we are likely not going to get the calories right playing it by ear.

tony_merlino

I'd be happy to share mine if anyone wants it, but with the caveats that (1) It's pretty hard coded specifically to me, e.g., the BMI tracking stuff is pretty specific to my height, the ranges on the graphs are chosen to focus on my weight, etc. You'd have to modify it to fit you. (2) I'm experimenting with looking at the data in a number of different ways, trying to find the best set of things that capture the "truth". So some of the things I track, or the filtering done on the data, some of the charts, etc - may just be fluffy and not really useful. I'm still playing with it and learning. The bottom line is that I have to sit on a lot of boring conference calls, listening with one ear for someone to ask me a question, so I fill the time with stuff like playing with Excel and messing around on BF. So this was something I hacked up because I was bored. (3) I'm not an Excel maven - there are graphs that I do with the spreadsheet, but it's not in any sense "user-friendly" - it's pretty high-touch.

I'm sure (without looking) that what's on that website is probably a lot more professionally done, but if anyone is interested in what I have, I'd be happy to oblige. Just PM me.

tony_merlino

I just looked at the hacker's diet site, and am pretty excited. This approach is very much in line with the philosophy and approach, (still untested), that I've been developing on my own. I'm downloading the book and some of the tools, and will give it a serious look. It looks pretty cool on the surface.

What I like about what I'm able to tell so far is that they avoid a lot of theory and gobbledegook, and take a very pragmatic, measurement-based approach. I've been through over 40 years of various diet plans, philosophies, etc, and honestly, my eyes start to glaze when yet another person starts to talk about how the body, food and exercise interact based on some made up pseudo-science plus philosophy.

I've heard "eat almost no fat", "eat a lot of fat and protein", "eat carbs", "don't eat carbs", "eat natural foods", "calories is calories", "don't eat food at all, just drink", "eat tons of fiber", ... and so on. And every scheme seems to work to lose weight, to some extent, as long as it ultimately converges to eating less than your body burns.

The idea of starting with a simple model of the system, deriving the model parameters from noisy measurements, and then using the adapting model to analyze trends, predict future behavior, etc, really appeals to me. I'm excited about digging into what they have. (But it will have to wait a few days - that work thing is taking up a lot of time this week...)

goldfinch

I have now entered my weekly weights into the charting tool since the first of the year and daily for the past week. The trend tools showed as I knew that I was still trending down. Based on those trends I was running a calorie deficit averaging 131 calories a day since the first of the year. (Nice to have that estimated for me!) This tells me not to increase my calories more than that amount and based on what I read, probably less to start.

Very helpful!

I really recommend the book and the charting, as Tony says, it is very practical. Plus, it has a simple way of figuring out how many calories to start with in your weight loss venture.