John Walker, the founder of Autodesk, has written an interesting guide on health and weight loss, which is available for free online: The Hacker’s Diet.
Basically, the book focuses on the fundamental mathematical issues associated with weight loss and gain, and describes some useful techniques for transitioning to a lower weight. In particular, the moving average approach to measurement described seems quite valuable, insofar as it helps to separate the ’signal’ of actual weight from the ‘noise’ of variation in things like water retention. The moving average generates a trend line that seems like it should provide more meaningful guidance than a scatterplot of individual data points, or even a simple curve fit to them.
The book also describes a 15-minute health regimen that ramps up in difficulty and is intended to serve as a minimum level of exercise for life.
The book is quite an unusual one, as health books go. For instance, it endorses frozen microwave dinners as a convenient way to get a predetermined number of calories. It also insists that exercise is not a critical weight loss strategy, and that some degree of suffering inevitably accompanies efforts to move closer to one’s ideal healthy weight. While I am sure people could take exception to this approach, it is good to have variety out there, and encouraging that tools are being created for the ever-larger number of people worldwide that are overweight or obese, and likely to suffer significant health risks as a consequence. Those who don’t want to mess around with Walker’s custom Excel files can use a web-based version of Walker’s approach at PhysicsDiet.com
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Douglas Crockford, author of the respected book “Javascript: The good parts”, is another programmer who writes about weight loss:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/douglascrockford?p=324
Douglas Crockford, author of the respected book “Javascript: The good parts”, is a programmer who has written about weight loss:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/douglascrockford?p=324
Crockford seems to emphasize exercise a lot more than Walker does, though I don’t think the math supports him. It takes a lot of hours to counteract the effect of relatively small numbers of calories.
Losing weight is mostly a matter of intentional starvation.
This chapter explains it well.
“A wise engineer once said that all systems, regardless of composition, do one of three things: blow up, oscillate, or stay about the same. Once you understand feedback, you know why this must be. If a system blows up, it is governed by positive feedback. If it stays about the same, negative feedback is on the job. If it oscillates, either negative or positive feedback can be in charge. You have to look more closely at the details.
Feedback doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a great many things.”
“Losing weight is mostly a matter of intentional starvation.”
Starvation produces temporary weight loss. When the starvation stops, the weight is regained and exceeded. This is sometimes called the yo-yo effect. I am writing about permanent weight loss. If the loss is not permanent, then the dieting is just ineffective self-torture.
Exercise has plenty of other benefits than strictly weight-loss and is essential. For one, it will increase your muscle mass and hence your BMR (ie. Basal Metabolic Rate, the amount of calories you burn at rest) and as a second, it will lower your cholesterol (more specifically raise the good HDL levels so your overall ratio is better). Not to mention, no matter how you slice it, when dieting you burn more than just fat, you are likely losing muscle mass as well, exercise will help counteract that to some extent.
Now, if you are grossly overweight, diet alone will work, and is actually recommended as physical activity is stressful at extreme weights but its when you get down to that last 30 or so pounds to lose, that diet alone loses its effectiveness (just as exercise alone does… the body adapts and you start getting less results for the same things, thats why change in exercise routine and the odd cheat day in food are valuable, to stop the system from getting complacent).
Not to mention, when you do lose significant amounts of weight and have been overweight for sometime prior, loose skin will be a problem. At least with exercise (specifically weight lifting) you can sculpt and tone areas to hide it (not completely though…)
Walker’s book explains an interesting theory about why some people find that their weight oscillates dramatically:
“Oscar has the very same feedback curve as Sam, but his is shifted a little to the right, toward eating too much. One day Sam eats slightly more than he needs, and the next day slightly less. But since feedback keeps him within the range his metabolism can adjust to, Sam’s weight stays the same. When Oscar eats slightly too much, though, he’s pushed immediately into the region where he packs on weight. The next day, like Sam, he may eat less but, since that’s within the flat part where metabolism compensates, he keeps all the weight he packs on whenever he eats a little too much.
The shift in Oscar’s feedback curve with respect to his body’s need for calories acts as a ratchet; each excess runs his weight up, but equivalent shortfalls don’t burn off the excess weight. Over time, Oscar begins to see the evidence of this on the scale and in how his clothes fit. Having lived with this condition all his life, Oscar knows there’s only one solution: peel off the pounds. So, for the umpty-umpth time he embarks on a diet: perhaps a sure-fire plan that’s worked before, or maybe the current rage all the celebrities are swearing by.”
From The Times
October 19, 2009
Exercise? A fat lot of good that is for weight loss
In the fight against obesity, we’re urged to get off the couch. Yet new research claims that diet is what counts
In 1932, Russell Wilder, one of the leading obesity experts, lectured the American College of Physicians, saying that his patients lost more weight on bed rest than an exercise regime.
It’s one of those ha-ha moments of medical history, along with doctors prescribing cigarettes to patients to “clear the lungs”. Now we all know that exercise is the best way to lose weight, in the same way that we all know that our obesity epidemic is a result of Western sloths sitting on our ever fatter bottoms. It’s why chubby will be the new norm, with 90 per cent of today’s children predicted to be overweight or obese adults by 2050, costing UK taxpayers £50 billion. It’s why the most insistent plank of the Government’s anti-obesity drive is exercise. It’s why we look at our pudgy kids and cry “To the playing fields!”, and prescribe them ever more PE. It’s why, every new year, we sigh at our expanding muffin top and resolve to Power Plate it away.
That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.
Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.