The Hacker’s Diet won’t tell you what to eat. Instead, think of it as a framework for understanding how weight loss works along with some tools for tracking your long-term weight loss. I recommend it highly.
The Hacker’s Diet is also very dense and doesn’t give you a simple, concise way of losing weight immediately. (That’s not a shortcoming, per se, but does open up an opportunity for me to add my two cents.)
Here’s what you need to know:
• You burn about 2,000 calories a day just living, give or take a few hundred calories depending on your size and build. Just presume 2,000 for now.
• A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. To lose a pound a week, you’ll need to cut out 500 calories from your diet, eating about 1,500 calories daily.
• Calories are calories, more or less. It doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you are eating 1,500 calories or less a day. Bear in mind, you might want to eat “healthier” foods just because they have more volume, but you don’t have to.
The other thing The Hacker’s Diet mentions but does not stress is the use of pre-packaged foods to help you start counting calories. When I started losing weight I went out and bought a bunch of TV dinners and canned soups, each of which had around 300-400 clearly marked calories.
But prepared food sucks, right? In short, yes, it often does, but it also allowed me to eat meals that included greasy fried chicken breasts or macaroni and cheese without any doubt that I was exceeding my caloric goals. Plus, they are handy to have around the house when temptation strikes and help you begin to grasp the depressingly small portion sizes you should expect to be eating.
“• A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. To lose a pound a week, you’ll need to cut out 500 calories from your diet, or 1,500 calories a day.”
I think what you meant to say is that to lose a pound of fat, you’ll need to cut 500 calories a day from your diet–so that you are eating only 1,500 calories a day.
Oh, yeah. That’s bad writing. Let me fix that.
If you get into the hacker’s diet at all, and don’t want to use the provided excel spreadsheets, here’s the Hacker’s Diet Tracker online.
I’ve tried several packaged foods over the past few months, and have settled on the Lean Pockets as my weapon of choice. They actually taste very good – I’d eat them even if I wasn’t counting calories… Their “Ultra” line is a little cardboardy, but comes in at only 200 calories. My fave is the Meatball Sub, with 310. One of those and an apple, plum, or other fresh fruit works well for a lunch around 400 calories. Couple it with a lunch-hour trip to the gym and you can pull off a near-zero gain!
The problems with pre-packaged food are:
Usually too much salt
Usually too much fat
Usually dubious nutional quality
Usually lacking in fiber
Counting calories is not enought, you need to know _what_ you are eating. Are you getting enough vitamins? Are you getting enough protien? Are you getting healthy fats.
Besdies, you just did a week about cooking and kitchen stuff, was that all academic? :)
I find it more satisfing to cook my own healthy meals AND lose weight.
The other problem I see with this “Hackers Diet” based on this post is that exercise is not mentioned. You can lose weight without it, but without increasing lean muscle mass care cardiovascular health, the weight loss wont last.
The hacker diet really is complete shite. It’s a stupid juvenile idea, in concept. I feel sorry for anyone who falls for it. I mean, you could eat 1500 calories/day of Mc Donalds and lose weight, but at what cost?
South Beach/Atkins style is the current state of the art, and it includes nutritional information along with portion size. If you don’t want to spring for the book, all the recipes are online here:http://www.mashby.com/files/south_beach_recipes_phase_one.txt
http://www.mashby.com/files/south_beach_recipes_phase_two.txt
http://www.mashby.com/files/south_beach_recipes_phase_three.txt
Grady, don’t feel sorry for the people who “fall for” a diet based on simple nutritional science. Instead, feel sorry for the people following a diet that has lead to the resurgence of gout, and is warned against by doctors.