matt.griffith

As of this morning I've officially lost 100 pounds in 8 1/2 months.

But another PhysicsDiet.com beat me to the 100 pound mark by several months. jm3000 lost 100 pounds in about 4 1/2 months.

I don't have a final goal weight in mind so I'm not sure what my next major weight milestone will be. I will probably drop below 200 pounds before I'm done. But for now I'm focused on getting my Body Fat below 15%. Once I do that I'll reevaluate where I am then I'll decide if I want to shoot for 10% Body Fat.

Lately I haven't been tracking the calories I'm consuming or the calories I'm burning from exercise. I've been using a combination of portion counting and weighing some foods. But I don't track the details anymore.

I spent several months doing different experiments trying to figure out whether I could optimize my diet by eating different ratios of macronutrients or varying the types of foods I ate. But in the end I found that it mostly doesn't matter what I eat as long as prefer healthier foods over non-healthy foods and control my calorie balance.

The key factors for me are:

• Eat 5-6 small meals a day
  This is a critical component of my success. At first I didn't think it mattered. But when I experimented with some of the ideas from Body for Life I learned that eating 6 small meals a day is the best way to control my appetite and my emotions. I'm much more even tempered now. And I'm never hungry now as long as I eat at least 1500 calories per day. I usually eat around 2000 calories per day though.
• Regular vigorous exercise
  For a long time I thought eating 6 small meals a day was the key to my improved mood. But recently I went about 2 weeks without doing much exercise. I've been under a lot of stress recently and I got a bit depressed. After one particularly bad weekend I jumped on my stationary bike for an hour. That's when I realized that I have to exercise to be happy. Without exercise I get much more stressed and I let little things bother me much more than they should. Exercise is the best way for me to deal with stress and relax. Exercise also helps me lose weight, but not as much as you'd think. Controlling your calorie intake is much more important if your goal is to lose weight. But exercise is critical to your health. You can't be healthy without exercise even if you control your weight. And now I know that I can't be happy without exercise.

If you're curious you can read more about my journey over on my PhysicsDiet.com Blog.

I lost 4.6 pounds last week and 20.9 pounds in January 2006.

If you are curious you can read more on the PhysicsDiet.com Blog.

For now on I will be posting my diet progress and other diet related posts on the PhysicsDiet.com Blog. You can see my latest progress report here: Diet Progress: I lost another 4.4 pounds last week

In October I read The Hacker's Diet. I first heard of The Hacker's Diet years ago but I thought it was a joke. Hackers live on pizza and Coke after all.

Two ideas in The Hacker's Diet really stuck with me. The first was using a moving average to track my weight loss. The second was the idea of using frozen dinners to control portion sizes and to count calories. The idea of counting calories never appealed to me because I couldn't imagine myself measuring and weighing all the food I eat. But I could definitely see myself eating just the controlled portions in a frozen dinner. Especially if the frozen dinners were good.

I bought a scale and started my diet on 10/28/2005. At that time I weighed 324 pounds. At a height of 6' 2" that put my Body Mass Index at 41.6. At the time I hadn't calculated my BMI so I didn't realize that I was officially morbidly obese. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing, that I was morbidly obese, or that I didn't realize that I was morbidly obese.

I started weighing myself and recoding my weights every day. At first I tried to use The Hacker's Diet Spreadsheets. But those spreadsheets haven't aged well and they don't work well in newer versions of Excel. So I created my own software to track my diet. It didn't take long for me to realize that the software I created for myself could be useful to a lot of people. So I started to tune the software so I could make it available to anyone who wants to use it. And that is why I'm posting about my today. I'm finally ready to make my software public.

If you'd like to lose a little or a lot of weight, I highly recommend The Hacker's Diet. And if you decide to give The Hacker's Diet a try, I invite you to use my new site PhysicsDiet.com to track your diet. PhysicsDiet.com is free now and I plan to keep it free forever. I plan to support it with income from non-intrusive advertising like Google Adsense and Amazon Associate links.

This morning I weighed 265 pounds. In just under 3 months I have lost 59 pounds. Below is what my current PhysicsDiet.com weight chart looks like.

I want to lose another 60 pounds or so in the next 3-4 months. I still have a lot work to do on PhysicsDiet.com, but I plan to do a lot of that work in the next 3-4 months too. As I lose the weight that I've gained over the last 8 years, I feel like I'm getting my life back. A few months ago I posted about Making Meaning. I think I finally found a way to do that through software.

I will post more about my diet and PhysicsDiet.com in the coming weeks and months.