Friday, January 05, 2007

The Hacker's Diet

I've been looking over John Walker's Hacker's Diet in the last few days. What's interesting about this isn't the diet, but the approach to measuring weight.

The stuff on the website is a little mathematical - but don't let that put you off.

Traditional advice is to weigh yourself once a week, at the same time on the same day. But for many people, this doesn't give enough feedback. But your weight can vary hugely during a day as the amount of water and food (in all it's stages!) in your body varies, and weekday/weekend changes in routine have an effect too.

So John's approach it to create a table:







DateWeightTrend
1/1/07273273
2/2/07271272.8
3/2/07268272.5
4/2/07270272.2


The important thing is that the trend figure will match your real weight movement over time.

So how do you calculate it?

On day 1, it's the same as your weight figure. On each subsequent day:

  1. Difference = Today's Weight - Yesterday's Trend
  2. Divide the Difference by 10, and round to one decimal place.
  3. Add this to the trend.


So, for my example above, the difference between the 1st and 2nd is -2, divide by 10 is 0.2, and add to the trend above is 272.8. (273 + (-0.2) = 273 - 0.2 = 272.8). Do it on the calculator if you need to.

I've been weighing myself daily for the last few days, and it will be interesting to see how much the weekly figures (1lb down, 39 to go) compare with the trend average. Let's see.

Since getting weighed, the rest of the day went downhill. How many points in a slice of pizza, anyone?

2 comments:

mick129 said...

"how many points in a slice of pizza?"

Weight Watcher's points? About 6.

Brandon said...

Google has a cool tool that does this automatically for you--The Google 15--that you can embed on your Google homepage.