Re: particular capture method for a diet .. ?

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Stinky Wizzleteet <wizzleteet@hotmail.com> writes:

> I cap the caloric deficit at a 500 kcal deficit per day, because for me 
> and my genetic background of overweight family this is probably
> not a diet but a lifestyle and I understood that at higher deficits ones
> metabolism is trying to adapt, trying to defeat the dieting
> purpose. (citation needed) -I cannot provide proof nor reference to this statement-  

I've heard a lot about this, and when I started my diet I was at about
2600 calories on metabolism and set myself to approximately 1250
calories / day.  A bunch of people told me that my body would go into
starvation mode and it would count against me and it simply didn't
happen.  Advice: just don't overworry about it.

I think if you're at approximately 45% of your metabolism or more for
your daily caloric needs, it'll be fine.  I wouldn't recommend anyone
going lower than 1200 calories per day though.

Anyway, I'm at 1300-1600 calories / day now, it's not quite as super
fast of weight loss (about 7 pounds / month, still not bad!), but still
quite a bit of weight loss.  I think if you have a lot of weight to lose
you probably don't need to worry about it too much.

Also note that I barely exercised at all during my diet... when I did
exercise, I lost weight a little bit faster, but I simply don't believe
it's necessary for weight loss.  If you want to do it, great, but it's
simply easier to figure out how to eat the right amount of foods to feel
satisfied while having a serious calorie deficit.

> Your approach is *exactly* what I was meaning to eventually throw together.
> I would love to take a look at your code, as a total noob I may be able
> to hack a workable system for myself -eventually, but help maintaining will be
> possible only on the long term. Once I've mastered lisp and org.
>
> However, as I am not the only one interested in your system you might
> want to consider dumping it loosely unorganized on github. but mailing
> us a tar package would be cool too.

https://gitorious.org/org-diet/org-diet

I've gone and done it.  I haven't finished writing README.org but I've
added a base org-diet file to start with, the capture template in the
orgmode file, etc.

I've even checked in my whole embarassing diet.org file for you to see.
You'll notice that a few months into the thing I became a vegetarian,
but that was for ethical, not dietary reasons. :)

Once I am completely not a fat guy, I will upload the final diet.org.

As for how to find out how many calories things are I usually took three
approaches:

 - I used the program Food File, to which I made a couple of patches to
   make it run on GNU/Linux... I guess I should make those available
   soon.  It *was* released as free software under the GPL, not sure if
   the version online is still released as such.
 - Reading the back of packages
 - Looking at pre-existing data in my orgmode file.  Usually I'd split
   the file vertically and in one pane have my current daily diet table
   at point, in the other I'd be isearching for things I've already
   eaten... usually while dieting I tend to eat the same types of things
   a lot, but I've collected a vast amount of caloric information in
   there... maybe you can find how to eat a satisfying daily amount of
   calories by looking at some of my example days with successful
   CAL-OUT "clocking"
 - I just googled for things I didn't know.

Hope this is helpful to people!  I'll add more docs later.

(PS: the elisp is hacky, don't say I didn't warn you.)

-- 
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