Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

On this date last year I weighed 223.8 lbs. Today I weigh 178 lbs.

I reached a high of 260 lbs back in 2000.

I’m a man with a husky frame who stands at 5 11.

A combination of old sports injuries, bad habits, and lack of health insurance put me at 260 lbs. A new career with health benefits, several surgeries, and several years of healing got me back to the point where I could exercise again. My weight came down to and was stuck at the mid 220s for several years. Having always had a slow burning system and being a bit older I thought I was stuck there for good.

I used to read a personal development forum where I learned about The Hacker’s Diet last year.

This day last year was my first full day on it.

I haven’t changed any of the foods I eat. The feedback mechanisms built into the Hacker’s Diet basically showed me that bad habits kept me fat despite my good food choices. Things like snacking in front of an open refrigerator and simply eating too much.

My meals on the Hacker’s Diet looked pretty much the same as before, but with the bad habits cleaned up my weight came down about a pound a week.

I’m going to relax and focus on maintaining my new weight for a while. Then I am going to find a good sports medicine clinic to get physical therapy to get my bad shoulder ( reconstructed after ligament damage, torn rotator cuff ) and bad knee ( torn, missing cartilage ) ready for weight lifting.

My female friends have been telling me that I am in serious need of non-baggy pants. Apparently, women get just as bothered by seeing a pair of well formed glutes as men do, they are just discrete about it. After I get a chance to get a new haircut I will start on slowly rebuilding my wardrobe.

Anyway, since everyone who loses weight becomes a guru, here is what you can do to lose weight the way I did:

Read this SHORT article for valuable background information:
Why The Scale Lies

Read the Hacker’s Diet
The Hacker’s Diet

Buy a GOOD scale:
I recommend the brand called “tanita”. The most important quality of a scale for The Hackers Diet is consistency. You should be able to step on and off of a scale 3 times in succession and get the same weight each time.

Set up a FREE account at the Hacker’s Diet site
This site has a FREE and the best implementation of The Hacker’s Diet software.

Track the calories in your food in a daily food diary:
Don’t whine! This is amazingly effective and it only involves a few minutes of writing a day to get visible results. How is that for a miracle cure? Writing! Most people underestimate how much they eat. It is exactly like when you decide to go on a budget, begin writing down how much money you spend and become amazed at how much money you must have been spending before you started tracking your purchases. It works much the same way with tracking food and calories. Keeping a food log will dramatically improve your weight control with very little effort.

Keeping a food diary is easy with a free cronometer.com account.
Just type in what you ate, cronometer will tell you the nutrition you got. Cromometer will also tell you if you made your daily requirements or not

http://www.cronometer.com

Lose no more than 1 – 2 pounds a week.
If you lose weight no quicker than at this rate you will lose less muscle and have less loose skin when you finish losing weight. Instead of looking like a flabby raisin you will look tight(er) and good. Losing weight at this moderate rate will also make it more comfortable to eat less, since you will only be eating slightly less. Expect to lose about 5 lbs your first 1 – 2 weeks from a water weight loss.

Exercise
Aside from every other reason you have heard to do it, exercising during weight loss minimizes the amount of muscle lost and it minimizes the amount of loose skin you will have when you are done.

I am one of those people who gains weight easily. All of the things listed above worked for me and worked for me near painlessly. It is all based on long known boiler plate science. No gimmicks and once you buy a good scale you can do what I did at no cost.

Good Luck! 🙂

Better than corn: native grass

Picture of a switch grass garden

From an article in Scientific American: Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does:

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass–a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally–and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

The bolding was mine. Growing native plants to help solve the energy and pollution problem. That has potential for good things in so many ways. However, we live on planet Earth. The Department Of Energy is still talking about using a GMO variety of switch grass and using petroleum based fertilizers:

But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. “To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization,” he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. “Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber.”

Even so, I think it is important to remember that most of use are blind in our daily lives to the costs of our current system. This is a step up politically from buying foreign oil. Highly GMO corn is already grown on that land and with petroleum based fertilizers. Instead we can have something much closer to the native fauna, with more energy than corn can produce for the same amount of fertilizer. If managed right it can also mean lower carbon emissions.

I wonder how switch grass compares to algae?

I read that Malaysia and Austrailia are cutting down woodlands for land to build algae ponds on. That sucks. I’m not an expert but I have the impression algae ponds can be built on waste lands, put on roof tops, or that algae can even be grown in tanks. I guess there are other factors involved, probably monetary for doing things in a more destructive way.

The key thoughts of the day are “if managed properly” and “an improvement on the current system”.

It is time for people who care to be more vigilant than ever now. The end of the domination of oil for energy is a crisis and as the old Chinese saying goes a crisis is a time of opportunity. We can use the crisis to get a better, new way of doing things or if we ignore what is going on we can get a sucky new way of doing things.