Slimming down (part 1)

So I've lived the typical North American lifestyle for just a little too long. Or rather, I was living. For those outside the phenomenon, that means that I was overweight and in debt.

The debt thing was annoying... but at least my net worth was definitely in the plus. My weight however was really over the top.

When I was 18 I weighed in at slender 140 lbs (63.5kg), 5'8" (1.73m). Now at the time I was really thin, so I've pretty much absolved myself of ever getting back to that weight. But since my slender high school days, I had ballooned up to 205 lbs (93kg) right around my 26th birthday! The electronic scale had me at about 30% body fat and, well heck here's a pic of me.



Now to be honest, balloon may be the incorrect word. My growth was more like incremental. I could still run long distances and I still had some muscle mass: solid abs, rock hard legs it was all just wrapped in a healthy layer of fat. The fat part just kind of snuck up on me over time.

Of course, this is a success story, I dropped a bunch of the weight right down 175 (80 kg). Obviously, I'm on the successful end of the journey, but I'm definitely not done. My body fat rates at 24% and I'd really like to be at 12% long term. (A little math reveals that 30% of 205 = 61.5 lbs of fat and 24% of 175 = 42 lbs of fat, which means that I went from 143 to 133 of "lean" mass, it also means that my target of 15% puts me at about 160lbs).



As it turns out, 160 was my original goal, so I'm not quite done yet. But I just recently moved cities and this whole weight loss thing involves some planning. It's not really tough to maintain, but losing takes some planning.

Here's me now, post laser-eye surgery and accompanied by my wonderful fiance.




So yeah, down to the whole point. I hit a couple of blogs today that talked about people losing weight and I came to two sober conclusions.

1. I've been talking for months about how loss of weight and recovering from debt are very similar (hence the generic slimming down title). Overweight and in debt seem to carry many of the same mental characteristics and the anecdotal evidence seems to support this.
2. Lots of people know very little about weight loss. This is why crap like South Beach and Zone and Atkins all become so popular. They basically prey on people not knowing enough to see that they could do this stuff without silly diets.

Point #1 needs exploration another time, but Point #2 needs some attention.

So here it is, the point of my article: How I lost my weight for free with minimal emotional stress and no following of some silly "diet".

So first, here's the most important link: The Hacker's Diet. This was my secret. It was assembled by John Walker after he'd made his millions and lost 90 lbs in one year. He's publishing this book for free and he's letting people download it for free! I want to say that again, the guy who wrote this book has NO vested interest in making money off it. He's a millionaire programmer, he's offering the book for free, so that should all tell you something, he's not lying to you!

Of course, he's a programmer and the book is written for people with an engineering mindset, so it can be tough to read. So thusly, I'm embarking on a big journey, I'm going to write this for everyone else :)

So check in soon... this should be good.