John Walker wrote an amazing book, The Hacker’s Diet. Supported by his deep analysis of why fat people are fat, he’s come up with a way for us to control that urge to overeat. The concepts in The Hacker’s Diet are important to me and my struggle to control obesity. And I’d like to focus on it this week.

The Eat Watch

Walker says that regular people — people who don’t struggle with their weigh — just naturally eat only when they are hungry and (equally naturally) feel full when they’ve eaten enough. And, feeling full, stop eating.

He calls that process The Eat Watch and says that for some of us, our Eat Watch is broken. We eat whether we’re hungry or not. And we don’t necessarily recognize that we’re full. So we don’t know when to stop eating.

He says:

Notwithstanding our complexity, and regardless of our aspirations, at the most fundamental biological level we’re not all that different from a rubber bag. Every day we take in some food and water, burn some amount of energy to sustain us, and dispose of the waste that’s produced in the process. If we take in more than we burn and dispose of, the rubber bag expands: we get fat. If we burn and dispose of more than we take in, the rubber bag contracts: we lose weight.

From an engineering standpoint this is a simple system. We have virtually no control of what comes out; that’s just the waste products of the factory. We have little effective control over what we burn: in theory our bodies are at our command but the constraints of modern life sorely limit the extent we can exercise.

Consequently, the only real control we have is over what goes in: what, when, and how much we eat. Weight control can be reduced to a very simple matter of arithmetic. Total the number of calories in the food you eat per day, averaged over a period of time. Take the number of calories you burn per day, roughly the same for everybody of your sex, height, build, and level of activity. Subtracting the calories burned from the calories eaten gives excess calories per day. This number times thirty is excess calories per month. A pound of fat is equivalent to about 3500 calories. If you eat 3500 calories more in a month than you burn, you’ll gain a pound that month. If you burn 3500 calories more than you eat, you’ll lose a pound. All the weight you gain or lose is the consequence of these simple numbers.

Tomorrow — Eating on the Right Side of the Chart….

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