The Hacker's Diet is made of awesome - it's the diet that I've been (approximately) following since about July, with the result that I've lost nearly two stone. It's actually more of a metadiet, because it's based on the idea that it doesn't much matter what you eat provided the calorific content is low enough. The actual meal planning and decisions are left up to you, giving you the freedom to design a diet that fits the way you eat and which you have a chance of sticking to. The book provides the tools you'll need to do this, to fine-tune your plan once it's underway and you start to gather data, and provides some advice on retaining motivation and sticking to the diet. It's very grown-up: if you want that piece of chocolate cake, then have it, but you'll have to pay for it either by slower rate of weight loss or by making up the calories elsewhere.
The book (free, online, linked above) is very good and well worth reading, but I've also written a summary which you might find useful.
A word of warning: if you tell people you're on a diet, they will immediately chime in with their opinion, which is reasonably likely to be totally idiotic and completely unsupported by any evidence. Pure calorie-counting diets seem to attract particular ire. If I've learned anything from the last four months, it's to remain calm in the face of the opinions of others and stick to my guns.
Thanks! I really like the approach Walker gives in his intro: taking losing weight as an engineering problem! There was a period when I was in high school when I lost some weight pretty successfully but I then promptly put the weight back on again, slowly, and I've not managed since. People keep telling me of the joys of exercise, and the only exercise I've managed to stick to in the recent past is my current 35-minute walk to work (getting harder to stick to in the utterly miserable weather these days).
(It's entirely possible I'd start losing weight without even trying by the simple expedient of giving up Dr Pepper, but I'm not sure I want to -- and I quite like the "grown-up" way of treating it as a credit in the calorie column and accounting for it in other ways!)
Dr Pepper: it's possible that's all you'd need. On the other hand, maybe that would just be enough to stop you gaining more weight, but not enough for you to lose any of the weight you already have. I found that giving up alcohol was not enough for me to lose any weight on its own, but it is pretty much essential for any serious weight-loss to occur - not only is alcohol calorific, it makes you hungrier and less likely to care about the diet.
Some people find it easier to exercise than diet. I'm not one of them, and it sounds like you aren't either. But bear in mind that losing weight will make exercising significantly easier and more fun :-)
The book (free, online, linked above) is very good and well worth reading, but I've also written a summary which you might find useful.
A word of warning: if you tell people you're on a diet, they will immediately chime in with their opinion, which is reasonably likely to be totally idiotic and completely unsupported by any evidence. Pure calorie-counting diets seem to attract particular ire. If I've learned anything from the last four months, it's to remain calm in the face of the opinions of others and stick to my guns.
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(It's entirely possible I'd start losing weight without even trying by the simple expedient of giving up Dr Pepper, but I'm not sure I want to -- and I quite like the "grown-up" way of treating it as a credit in the calorie column and accounting for it in other ways!)
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Dr Pepper: it's possible that's all you'd need. On the other hand, maybe that would just be enough to stop you gaining more weight, but not enough for you to lose any of the weight you already have. I found that giving up alcohol was not enough for me to lose any weight on its own, but it is pretty much essential for any serious weight-loss to occur - not only is alcohol calorific, it makes you hungrier and less likely to care about the diet.
Some people find it easier to exercise than diet. I'm not one of them, and it sounds like you aren't either. But bear in mind that losing weight will make exercising significantly easier and more fun :-)
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