Calorie Stigma?

I am continuing to work on the Hacker's Diet and came across a livejournal log of someone who's used calorie counting to get down to about 128 lbs from 150ish. An interesting point they make is that they feel there's a stigma over calorie oriented diets, as opposed to the numerous "control what you eat" diets.

I found this really surprising and at the same time am realizing it might actually be true. Reactions to this (the latest of many weight control efforts on my part) has been less positive, and more focused on concern that it can't be done because of willpower requirements, or that it will lead to an unhealthy diet because there's no focus on what I eat. This makes no sense to me, because if normally I'm eating whatever I want (which I can assure you isn't all that healthy) and eating many more calories than I need, surely eating whatever I want but a reasonable number of calories is an improvement?

Looked at another way, the reason I'm so overweight is that my system is trying to be ready in case I should someday be starving. I have about 245,000 stored calories in my system - enough to support life on 2,000 calories per day for 122 days! So though it obviously wouldn't be good to starve for that long, the bottom line is that I could, in theory, not eat at all for four months and still survive!

The standard advice is to reduce your calorie intake by 500-1000 calories per day, depending on how obese you are. So for me, eating between 900 and 1500 calories per day is a completely reasonable approach. It's too early to say it is working, though the scale shows results, because it's the long-term outcome that matters. It's not to early to say, though, that eating less is probably required to lose weight and eating healthier and exercising is a good idea but probably not required to lose weight. So if you're struggling with recipes full of ingredients you've never heard of, trying foods you dislike, and reducing your calorie intake all at once ... it seems to me that you could do less, and get the result you're aiming for.

Kid Koding

So my daughter has decided she'd like to start programming (with a little encouragement from me of course). We haven't actually started yet, but she has already made an elaborate plan: she wants to create a game for her brother. "In the corner of the screen will be a clock counting down two minutes, and there'll be hedgehogs, and he has to click on as many as he can before the time is up." Why hedgehogs? Don't ask such silly questions.

Today she elaborated a little further "I know there'll be six animals" (I had already suggested that we use different animals, perhaps ones from an existing game, since doing our own graphics would be hard work on top of writing her first program). "Daddy, how long will it take to write the program? Once I'm done, do I have it forever?"

It's very interesting to study her motivations and thoughts; as a child I came to programming anxious to duplicate the arcade games of the day. For her, it's all about entertaining her three year old brother, which is undoubtedly one of the favourite passtimes of my seven year old. We'll see how programming goes!