“Well, if I’m really interested in engineering and management, and I’ve been learning about managing towards the right metrics for complex systems, I have no excuse for letting my weight get out of control.” — Early draft of this post, about 60 days ago.
A few years back I started tracking my weight and calories using the Hacker’s Diet method but I ran out of patience, especially with calculating calories. I also tired from the unnecessary effort of keeping a perfect record of my food intake and producing unnecessarily interesting spreadsheets.
Fortunately, I know myself a lot better now. I set out on a new plan to record my daily weight, calorie intake and exercise as simple daily sums, without setting stricts limits or goals for myself.
I figured I could use the basic Hacker’s Diet formula backwards to estimate my metabolism rate. If the metabolism estimate was within a reasonable range (I’m 5′8″ and overweight so my metabolism should be somewhere between 1800-2400 calories per day) and if I found that I could regularly eat less than that amount, I would conclude that the diet would work for me and make a more specific plan.
Here are the results after 60 days. The green lines are my weight (exponentially smoothed average), then 10- and 30- day moving averages of my “implied metabolism”.
- My recent implied metabolism while dieting is around 2200.
- No practical problems should prevent me from continuing to lose weight this way. I just need to eat small portions, keep recording calories, and exercise occasionally.
- During the first 30 days I frequently felt hunger and weakness, but exercising helped me feel better.
- During the second 30 days, I noticed myself eating more just because I was bored.
So, I’m willing to set a public goal: By the end of the year, weigh 180 or less.
That’s 17 more weeks and 8.5 more pounds, so I just need to maintain a weight loss rate of 0.5 pounds per week or a calorie deficit of 250 per day. I expect to be able to do this by eating 1900 calories daily (net of exercise), because my implied metabolism is around 2200 calories per day. If I’m not on course for this in another 60 days, I’ll probably find this goal motivating enough to evaluate and adjust my behavior.
2 responses so far ↓
joyce // September 2, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I’m impressed, although still in the dark as to how you figured out your metabolism (guess I need to consult the “Hacker’s Diet”)! It is so cool that you’re making this difficult effort personally meaningful, which should keep you interested enough to reach your goal. The best part is that you’ll probably be around long enough to enjoy your great-grandchildren, something your grandfather did not achieve! Oh, you’ll probably get to go clothes shopping soon too!
120 days of dieting, 18 pounds lost « Dylan Salisbury’s weblog // November 23, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] The report from the first 60 days is at http://blog.dylansalisbury.com/2009/08/29/diet6/ [...]