How to Lose Weight and Get in Shape

On the Tuesday after the Super Bowl last year, I started exercising regularly and monitoring my diet. Approximately one year later, I weigh 40 pounds less (I went from 197 lbs. to 157 lbs.) and I'm in much better shape (increased cardiovascular endurance and more muscle). I think this qualifies me to give advice on how to lose weight and get in shape. Not all of this will be applicable to or work for everyone, but it worked for me.

1. Burn more calories than you consume. If you want to lose weight, ignore stupid fad diets like Atkins, South Beach, or pretty much any other diet that has been promoted in the last 30 years. It's really simple: you lose weight by burning more calories than you consume. You can accomplish this by either burning more calories or consuming fewer calories. Most people will want to do some of both.

2. Be analytical. When you start out, you need to slow things down and think about everything you eat and how many calories you are consuming. You also need to keep track of how many calories you are burning. This is the only way you're going to know if you're burning more calories than you consume. You should also keep a log of your weight, as a check of your calculations. It doesn't matter how you keep track of this information. Use a piece of paper, or a spreadsheet, or whatever you like. I use a program called Calorie King that runs on my Treo, which makes this simple and lets me enter data no matter where I am.

3. Make it routine. Many people claim that motivation and willpower are a key part of losing weight and getting in shape. These people are wrong. The most important thing is routine. I didn't suddenly become super-motivated to lose weight one year ago. What happened is I moved to a new city and a new job, so I had no established routine. I used this opportunity to make going to the gym part of my daily routine. Now, I go to the gym after work out of habit.

   People like to spend a lot of time talking about the downsides of habit and routine, but they can just as easily be used to accomplish something great. I find it easier to form new routines when I change a bunch of things at once, so if you have been thinking of making changes to your schedule other than working out regularly, just make all of the changes at once, and within a few weeks going to the gym will be a habit and you won't have to think about it.

4. Drink lots of water. If you think you are hungry, drink a glass of water and wait a few minutes. If you are still hungry after that, then eat. It's very easy to confuse being thirsty/dehydrated and being hungry.

5. Live alone. This has dual benefits. First, you aren't obligated to eat on any sort of schedule. When you are hungry, you eat, and when you're not, you don't. Second, it means that you control all of the food coming into your household. You won't be tempted by foods that other people happen to be eating.

I'm probably forgetting a few things, but this is the core of my fitness program. It's pretty simple and mostly common sense. If this post becomes popular, then maybe I will get a fake Ph.D. and write a book that has phrases on the cover like, "Dr. Hunter's revolutionary weight loss program!" Until then, you can email me for free advice.

Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator

Carnegie Library 's email notification system leaves much to be desired. It only notifies you after an item is overdue, giving you no chance to return the item on time. Also, when you request an item, you don't receive an email notification that the item is available until a few days after it is ready. However, your account information web page updates immediately after the item is ready.

To solve these problems, I've been working on a Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator for the past few months. It works by screen-scraping your account information web page. By doing this, it can add entries to your feed a few days before a checked out item is due and immediately after a requested item is available.

This feed generator was mainly written for my personal use, but since some other people might also useful, I'm pleased to make it publicly available. If you decide to use it, please send me feedback and suggestions, so that I can improve it in the future.

(Sidenote: The feed generator was also an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails . Ruby and Rails are both fun to work with. As a desktop application developer, I used to loathe web apps due to the prevalence of spaghetti code. Rails makes it very easy to create a cleanly factored Model-View-Controller application, so I plan to use it for all of my future web development needs.)

A Farewell to Cable

I decided to drop down to basic cable last month. I decided that I was wasting too much time on frivolous TV watching, and that there was plenty of content available through Netflix for my video entertainment needs. I'll let other people serve as my filter for what is and isn't worth watching, and then I'll rent the DVDs of the shows worth watching. By doing this, I'm saving about $40/month on my cable bill + $10/month on my ReplayTV service. So I'm going to save about $600/year. Not bad.

I also cancelled my membership at the JCC . I don't need it anymore, because I can now use the fitness facilities at Carnegie Mellon (one of the perks of Apple moving into a building on CMU's campus). That's going to save me another $600/year.

Combined, I'll be saving about $1,200/year, or, as Mark Cuban likes to think about it , I'll be earning the equivalent of a 12% return on a $10,000 investment. That's pretty hard to beat.

3rd Birthday

Today's the 3rd birthday of this blog. This is post number 384.

I'd write more, but I'm too busy rocking out to Generic Crunk Rap .