The Hacker’s Diet Condensed

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.