(Originally written August 28, 2001)
How America Is Making You Fat. [via John Rhodes] Modern “time-saving” and “labor-saving” devices do exactly what we want them to do: save us time and labor, and therefore reduce our opportunities to burn calories throughout the day. Ditto for delivery services. And drive-throughs. And all-in-one superstores. And so forth.
In other words, it’s not your fault that you’re overweight. “Except for the fortunate few people who are not going to gain weight no matter what they do, you can’t live life today in our society and maintain a normal weight,” [some expert] says. “The environment is going to get you.”
Please.
This reminds me of a story. It’s a story with a happy ending, but you’re not going to like it.
I’m 6′ 1″ tall. I used to weigh 235 pounds. I lost 60 pounds in 11 months on The Hacker’s Diet, and (more importantly) I’ve kept it off for over a year.
Despite the too-cute title, the book is full of detailed, down-to-earth advice that you don’t want to hear. Here’s what I learned:
You should, of course, also exercise, since this will increase your metabolism in the long run, as well as firm up your shape as you lose pounds by eating less food. “The Hacker’s Diet” gives details on a very simple exercise regimen which takes no more than 15 minutes a day. You can do it in the privacy of your own home, and it requires no equipment whatsoever. It is built like a ladder; you start on the bottom rung (2 bends, 3 sit ups, 4 leg lifts, 2 push ups, and 105 steps running in place) and work your way up slowly, about 1 rung per week (assuming you really do it every day). At rung 15, the exercises themselves become slightly harder, but other than that, you do the same thing every day until you plateau at your optimal exercise level.
I’ve plateaued on rung 30 — that’s 36 bends, 28 sit ups, 40 leg lifts, 23 push ups, and 515 steps running in place. Every day. Which is why I’ve maintained my weight loss for 14 months since reaching my optimal weight.
That, and I’m still eating less food.
While I was on my Hacker’s Diet diet, the Atkins Diet became wildly, wildly popular. I mean, you couldn’t spit on the sidewalk without hitting someone on this thing. Everybody in my office was on it. (This is not meant to imply that I was spitting on my co-workers.) I forget the particulars — something about eating the meat but not the bun. Forgoing carbohydrates but keeping everything else. Something like that. Everybody had a different interpretation of the diet anyway. And they all thought it would magically solve all their problems and then (and this is the important part) they could go back to their normal eating habits.
The only problem? It didn’t work. The fad passed, and all my co-workers went back to their normal eating habits, and they all gained back all the weight they’d lost. Some gained back more. Any fad diet that tells you to do something extraordinary in the shorm term and “gradually go back to normal” will work in the short term and fail in the long term. Your body is a summary of your lifestyle; if anyone tells you that you can be exactly who you are now, only thinner, they’re either lying or trying to sell you something. (In the case of the Atkin’s Diet, they were doing both.) Your “normal” eating habits are what got you fat in the first place. Your normal eating habits involve eating too much food.
The Hacker’s Diet posits something called the Eat Watch. It’s a hypothetical gadget that you could strap on your wrist that would tell you when to eat and when to stop. “Some people are born with a natural, built-in eat watch. You and I either don’t have one, or else it’s busted. But instead of moping about bemoaning our limitations, why not get an eat watch and be done with it?”
Once you have the basic concepts down, the most important thing is tracking your progress. The Hacker’s Diet tells you how to do that too. It involves math stuff like moving averages, and lots of pretty graphs, pictures of walls, and some other stuff. Luckily, it comes with freely downloadable software to help you track your progress. Consider it your virtual “eat watch”.
Losing weight is not accomplished by blaming time-saving devices or delivery services or even fast food joints. It is accomplished by eating less food. Forever. Starting now.
I told you you wouldn’t like it.
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