Behold, The Hacker's Diet: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ Written sometime back in the 1990's, the author (creator of Aut

Behold, The Hacker's Diet: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ Written sometime back in the 1990's, the author (creator of Autocad) determined that weight gain and loss is simply a feedback and control problem. Most of us eat open loop. By counting calories in and calculating your weight trend[1], and adjusting calorie intake accordingly you can deliberately control your weight. Simple, right? :-) Iv'e tried it. It actually does work. Mostly. The cool thing about it is you don't even have to count every calorie you eat. Just eat normal and start the weight trend measurements. After a while you'll see what your trend is and his online tools will calculate how many calories of intake you should reduce (or increase) to give you your desired rate of weight loss (or gain). Finding a way to cut 200 calories a day, for example, is easier than counting every calorie. The downside is, I think, what this article gets at. Twice I've focused hard on using The Hacker's Diet and lost a good amount of weight, but as I dropped I started to get really hungry and fatigued all the time. It was weird. At first it felt really good to weigh less, but it became very hard to maintain. My best guess, and this article seems to support this, is that the composition of my calorie intake wasn't optimal (or even close to it). Both times I lost my will and gained the weight back. It's interesting to note that he mentions in the book that he's "weird" in that he eats all his calories for the day in one big meal in the middle of the day. "You don't have to do this," he assures. And now, 30 years later, there is a loud group of people who do exactly that in order to lose weight (see: Intermittent Fasting). This article also mentions eating 3 meals with no snacking in between is better than grazing all day. Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case anyone is interested. I have no easy answers. I'm not hugely overweight, the gains and losses I'm talking about here are on the order of 20 to 30 lbs over the course of a few years each time. Take all this as is. 1. weigh yourself everyday, calculate an exponentially smoothed moving average