-{ redgeek.net }-

Note: I am not a nutritionist, so this may not be exactly accurate, nor is it intended to be scientifically rigorous. Just what’s worked for me.

I’ve always been a firm believer that no matter what diet you start on, you will, ultimately fail. Defeatist? No, I believe the concept of “going on a diet” entails creating a mindset of temporary change, all the while expecting permanent results. To “go on” a diet implies, at some point, you’ll be “going off” it. At that point, your old eating habits resume, and you pop up to whatever meta-stasis results from those eating habits. So you can’t go on a diet, but you can change your diet. The mindset here is that you’re something about yourself, permanently. The concept of diet changes from that which you are forcing yourself to do right now to that which comprise your natural, everyday eating habits, not some temporary mandibular lock-out. So, you can’t “go on a diet” and succeed, but you can “change your diet” and succeed.

That said, I decided back in October I need to lose some body fat – I could really care less about weight, I’m more concerning about body fat percentage. I have one of those body-fat percentage measuring scales, which, incidentally, suck. Totally inaccurate. I’ve had it fluctuate up to 4% in a given day, depending on time of day, how much salt you consumed that day (salt affects the conductivity of water in your system), how hydrated you are, and apparently, what celestial house your rising star is in. I’ve verified the total suckiness of this scale by asking nutritionist friends what they thought of them (thumbs down) and by having a semi-accurate caliper test done (the calipers said I was at 20% body fat of 205 lbs, scale was over by 2%).[1] I got this scale years ago, so perhaps there’s better technology out by now, but I don’t want to spend money on a new one, nor do I want to pay to get water displacement body fat tests done, which are really the only way to get an accurate reading. (Ask at your local gym about caliper tests – accuracy between that of the scales and water displacement, but frequently they’ll do them for free.)

So I decided to take a cue from the The Hacker’s Diet and reverse engineer the process (or, in ninjitsu terms, turn the world upside down.) According to the first law of thermodynamics, you cannot create mass from nothing, so if you take in less calories than you expend in a given time period, you must lose weight. Duh. Sounds simple. So, the apparent solution is to count calories. Well, counting calories is boring, time-consuming, and error-prone, so let’s figure out a better way. Well, the better way is thus: instead of measuring the input of the function (calories, or more accurately, Calories), measure the output (weight, which more accurately, should be mass. Crazy Americans.) From the output you can use basic math to figure out the input. If, over the course of a week, you’ve gained one pound, then you’ve ingested an extra 3500 calories (3500 C == 1 lb). So you ate, on average, and extra 500 calories per day.

Since your weight can vary by several pounds each day, the way to track it is to plot it out and apply an exponentially smoothed weighted averaging routine over the data. Don’t worry about what that entails, just go download the excel spreadsheets or palm pilot application that’ll do it for you, from the above site.[2] Now I know the trend my eating habits take me on, and I’m re-training my stomach to talk to me more – what I consider “full” is now a substantially smaller quantity of food. The little “don’t need any more mass” trigger goes off earlier. And I’m losing weight, and I’m not hungry. Took time, but it’s working.

Wait, wait, you’re talking about weight again, what about body fat percentage? Well, my line of thinking goes, if I maintain my already very active lifestyle (10-20 of martial arts per week + some gym time), and eating less calories than I consume, the calorie deficit that’s being burned should be coming predominantly from fat. Since I’m not starving myself, just eating healthier and a little less, my body isn’t in starvation mode. Starvation mode is when you’re body starts burning easily-convertible muscle mass to fuel itself instead of the hard-to-convert fat, since you’ve cued your body that it’s not getting regular food, it needs to conserve it’s valuable fat stores. To the contrary, I’m building muscle mass from my workouts.

So, if I weight less, and I’m burning mostly fat, my body fat percentage must be going down. I don’t know what the number is, but it must be less than 20%. The prompting for this post? This morning when I weighed myself: 189.5. Holy crap! I haven’t weighed less than 190 since Junior year of high school (I’m second from the left), when I was doing 20 hours of tennis and 10 of martial arts every week. And I was two inches shorter.

This time, I reminded myself something. I’m in control of myself. That’s cool. Oh, and I need new pants, my 34’s are way too big. That’s cool too.

[1] 2% doesn’t seem like much, but when you’re not expecting your body fat percentage to change more than 5%, that’s a lot. Read the note below for details.

[2] Yes, I know I could use exponential smoothing weighted averages to smooth out body fat percentage readouts, but consider this: +/- 2 pounds comprises about 13% of a realistically attainable 30 pound weight range (180-210) for myself, while +/- 2% body fat comprises about 80% of a realistically attainable 5% body fat range (15-20%). So, I don’t think it’s worth measuring with the scale.