Day 19: Fat geek

I've just discovered The Hacker's Diet, a book by the founder of Autodesk, who by 40 had achieved everything desirable - great marriage, great company, wealth, happiness - but also a lot of excess weight that he just couldn't shift.  As an engineer and manager, he thought - why not approach this the way I've approached the things where I've succeeded?  The result was the book.

Not me - but I'll have some data soon

He studied weight in humans (this would have been in the 1980s - a lot of this is common knowledge now and hence the first half of the book is pretty boring), and concluded that weight operates like any sort of feedback system.   He describes different sorts of feedback systems (representing different people with different histories), and one of these certainly resonated with me.  He had one character who was always gaining weight.  I weighed 125 pounds in high school when I first attained my current height and stopped growing.  At my heaviest, after three decades and intermittent dieting and exercise, I weighed 168 pounds.  However, that hasn't come on all at once.  Every five years or so I would realise that I had a "new normal" weight, higher than before.  If I dieted, I always went back to the new normal.

The Hacker Diet doesn't recommend a specific miracle food or exercise regime (though it does recommend exercise - but only for longevity, not for weight loss).  Instead its advice boils down to this: track your weight using a long term rolling average chart so you can visualise your underlying weight, without the daily "noise" produced by the amount of water you're carrying or the "solids" in your digestive tract.  The idea is that you will feel less defeated by high points that are just "noise", and you'll have clear information about whether whatever you're doing is making your "new normal" lower, higher, or the same.  That it takes him over 100 pages to say this much indicates that the book was written by a professional engineer rather than a professional writer.

At any rate, my inner geek has suffered degrees of frustration - yesterday's technology disaster has been followed by success, but only after much gnashing of teeth.  Fresh batteries?  Check.  Consistent readings?  Not a bit of it.  Googled for solutions?  Check.  Does it give consistent readings now that it's off the (flat) carpet and on the lino?  Check - and at last I can get at my data.

The result is that I know know how much of my body is fat - and it's a lot.  Really that much?  44% apparently.  Now, I do find that a little hard to believe.  I mean, yes, I'm overweight, and I realise there's fat all over the place - under the skin, surrounding every organ, and of course in the blood and stored in muscle and so on.  But close to half?

Well, I will keep measuring each day and see whether it maintains the same or similar ratio of fat.  If so, I'll just have to accept that I'm a whole lot fatter than I thought.  And if I do have this information, I can act on it with repeated experiments and measurements - Excel spreadsheets here we come.