Or how to loose your weight by eating ice cream and pizza. :D

Backstory about training persistence

When I was in the primary school, we had natural science homework which seemed too hard for me at that time - keep a weather observation journal. Every day you were supposed to add a row to the table with a temperature, wind direction and intensity, cloudiness, precipitation, etc. etc. At the end of the month teacher would grade your table.

It made no sense to me at that time, like what would we learn from that? So I just filled in all the dates just before submitting, by writing down random wind directions and temperatures in a range that seemed plausible for the climate of current season. Now I realize that that was maybe one of the most important teachings school could have done - trying to train consistency. You could really achieve a lot if you do a little, but really consistently.

A book

Now, somewhere at the beginning of 2024 I finally read book The Hacker's Diet (How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition) and finally decided to try it. I heard about it before, but this time, because BMI calculator from my health insurance showed that I'm a bit above healthy value, I decided to apply what it writes.

Idea of the book is simple - if you eat less calories than you burn, you'll burn your stored fat. The rest is details about how (there are many ways), most importantly measuring your progress.

And the method in book works. From 21st of January 2024 (a bit late for New Year's resolution, but better later than never) to June I reduced my weight from 91 to 81 kilograms, and it stayed there until July, after which I stopped tracking. Here is my graph with moving average, on average getting 2 kg lighter in a month:

I thought the weight would stay the same if I shop tracking and thinking of what I eat, but I was wrong, in the end of January 2025 my weight was back at 88.

It looked like this:

Still better than 92, but since I did it once, I decided that I would do this again:

Tracking

To know how much less - you need to do daily measurements & simple calculation on that measurements. Because you might think you are doing fine, but still eating too much, so maybe you would need to decrease your intake more. And watching your weight steadily go down gives motivation to continue. It is just explained in a more verbose way, is a book in the end.

What is important, is to watch moving average of your weight, not an actual value on a scale. Why? Because your weight is too much influenced by water intake. (You could see that on my graph above). Actually most of your weights is water, just small percent is solid matter, so just by sleeping over night you dehydrate a lot. Like at night I weight 89.3. After wake up - 88.5 (-0.8 kg). After peeing - 87.8 (-0.7 kg). After dressing up into home outfit - 88.9 (+ 1.1 kg) Then you drink your morning tea or water or whatever and you again half a kilo heavier. So, to reduce all this noise, it is advised to weight yourself naked in the morning (after peeing to feel even better about your progress), and instead of looking at the value - look at the moving average.

How to compute moving average? I do it in spreadsheet, where todays average = 0.9 * yesterdays average + 0.1 * todays value. Looks somewhat like this:

That's about it, the rest is details on how to make it go down.

Nutrients

Fun fact, uranium is bad for your health, because a gram of it contains 20 million calories.

Book also gives you energy content of different macronutrients:

• Fat - 9 kcal/g
• Carbohydrate - 4 kcal/g
• Protein - 4 kcal/g
• Water - 0 kcal/g
• Alcohol - 7 kcal/g

But keep in mind that you still need all that macronutrients to live (except alcohol, that's poison, feel free to skip 100% of it), so don't go just only water and proteins.

For start, you could just keep your current diet (hurray, ice cream and pizza, as promised at the beginning!), just reduce the portions (or number of portions). Smaller plate, skipping meals - anything goes. Through, replacing high-calories food with healthier version also helps, because it sucks (literaly) to have emptiness in stomach, so padding space reserved for pizza with raw tomatoes helps. :)

There are also calorie calculators that estimate how much calories per day you need depending on gender, weight and height. For example me, 35 y/o 85 kg male needs 2500 per day. Average human - 2000, which is convenient, because % of daily need shown on packaging is assumed for average human, and if I target that it means that I'll loose weight.

Training muscles

One inventive farmer wanted to breed new kind of horse that would work without food. So, he decided to train his horse by giving him less and less grass every day. One day horse was just skin and bones he received just one blade of grass to eat. Horse looked at that blade of grass with a long face and sad eyes and died. Farmer gave a disappointing sigh: "If only he hold on for one more day, I would have a horse that would be able to live without food".

Also, that book reminds you that physical exercise, through having negligible impact on your energy expenditure (ex, running 10 kilometers in one hour when you weight 80kg burns ~850 kcal, approximately a Big Mac with fries), is still important? Why?

Well, because once your body notices that your energy intake is low will start to search for ways to reduce energy expenditure. And turns out that maintaining muscles takes a lot of energy, so body will prioritize reducing muscles (they are not used anyway, so why keep them?). You don't want that, because less muscles would mean less energy expenditure, and it will make it harder to loose weight. And muscles not only look nice, but are useful, in cases when you need to stand up from the computer and move somewhere. So use them, so your body knows they are still needed and keeps them.

Also that's also the reason to go gradually. If you'll choose too ambitious goal and starve to much - your body will eat your muscles, reduce your energy expenditure (even on thinking) and you'll fail. Willpower also requires energy, and once you give up and start eating, your weight will raise, because you have no muscles that burn calories.

But hitting a gym for me is too much hassle, so instead I do "7-minute workout". If I'm too lazy to do even that, I do even shorter ones - push-ups until I can, sit-ups until I can, then squats, and then try to repeat until I can.

Also I try to balance with pull ups, so on some days I run to the nearest outside pull-up bar. I once had pain in shoulder when doing pull-ups, turns out pull-ups need to be balanced with push-ups to avoid discomfort. And I thought as a software dev pull-ups are more important to fix the spine.

Energy

You need to be mindful of your state or treat yourself like a baby. We are often tired, sometimes it might be hard to do some work. That is usually fixed by caffeine and sugar restarting your brain. But maybe you could repair your brain in other way?

As a fresh father I had a baby cry troubleshooting checklist. Babies cry when they are not comfortable. So first you check if diaper needs change, then check if it's thirsty (give drink), or hungry (give food) or it is tired and wants to sleep. Do same for yourself. When you are uncomfortable - try other things before sugar. Are you sleeping enough? Go sleep earlier. Sleep is very important for weight loss (for starters you don't eat while you sleep, and still rest). Maybe you just need enough water, not food, because hunger signal is often confusingly similar to thirst.

With that in mind - here are other checklist items of

Changes and habits to try

How to reduce calories without counting calories:

• There is no need to throw away junk food supplies right away, cold turkey. Food waste is bad for environment and your finances. Just reduce it intake, and use it for cheating here & there. But try to not buy new junk food. No junk food at home - there is no need to waste willpower avoiding it, willpower could be saved for something else. Start filling your groceries basket with vegetables to have less space for chocolates (chocolate will still fit, but try)
• Drink more. There is no limit on not-sweet drinks without sugar & milk - tea, coffee, water, whatever. But really limit juices, soft drinks, beer, alcohol etc, since it has a lot of calories.
• I like coffee only with milk, since dark one is too bitter for my taste. I try to adjust proportion to more water, less milk, and make it with 1.5% fat milk instead of 3.5%
• Avoid cookies with tea or coffee, just learn to enjoy tea by itself. And don't put sugar into your tea. First you will not like the taste of raw tea, but soon you'll get used to and will like it.
• Another unlimited thing you could have whenever you want (because basically calorie free) are vegetables: cucumbers, cauliflower, cabbage (sauerkraut), tomatoes. And is better fills emptiness in your stomach, compared to drinks, because thanks to fibers it is not absorbed as fast.
• Fruits could replace sweets, helps to eat them as snacks when there is craving for sugar. Every time you want a cookie, take an apple. Gradually apples will feel sweeter and sweeter. It could be any other type of fruit you like.
• Decrease intake of fat. Fat has the most calories. Less butter on sandwich, less fat milk, less oil in salad, less bacon with the eggs, etc. Split avocado in two meals and pad the freed space with cucumber. But still, fat is better than sugar, because it lasts longer, helping you to have energy without eating for longer.
• In general decrease your intake of food, lower your portions. Take smaller plates, leave space on a plate. If your eat 80% of what you normally eat, you will still be having a lot of calorie deficit, and eating everything that you used to eat. Including pizza, chips, chocolate and ice cream.
• Sleep (see above)
• Move (see above)

Benefits during & after

Various benefits of bringing your BMI to norm:

• Feeling more energy
• Desire to run, jump and use your leaner body
• When you run, boobs does not jump so much, running is easier and more fun experience
• Food tastes heavenly when you eat when you are hungry.

• Toilet visits before weighting have additional joy because they add to the feeling of the progress :)
• You could measure yourself coming home tired after hot day outside at summer and realize that you are weight 0.8 kg less than normal and probably are severely dehydrated. So you drink and it fixes your tiredness!
• 6 pack - almost visible, maybe I need to go a pair of kilos lower than 80 for it to be really visible, or maybe I need to really go to gym. Also I saw in some magazine (probably Mens Health?) that women achieve orgrasm 50% faster with fit men, so this could give you more time freed to read other hacker books. :D Through, I had not verified if it is true, because of not using timer in bedroom and not filling spreadsheets for that.

And finally, seeing that you could do something gives confidence that you could do something else. Currently I'm trying bullet journal to simplify my work life (retros, giving feedbacks, etc, all requires some tracking so here's that) and learning German by reading a lot and building https://deuk.dict.cc/. Maybe I'll try some other long projects in the future. But overall it's a nice feeling, similar to one at the end of first Matrix movie: "A world where anything is possible. Where do we go from there?".

And yet another thought - IMO we (humans) still need to write and create, even in the age of generative AI. Could AI write text like this? Yes, but fake one. Nowadays it's just as easy as generate graph with randomly fluctuating line that goes down, but that line just demonstrates random number generator, this one demonstrates experiment AI could not do because it consumes electricity and tokens, not food, drinks and oxygen.