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https://github.com/jnrowe/org-diet

Forked from cwebber's org-diet on gitorious - https://gitorious.org/org-diet/org-diet
https://github.com/jnrowe/org-diet

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Forked from cwebber's org-diet on gitorious - https://gitorious.org/org-diet/org-diet

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README 

        
Org-diet



* About



** A disclaimer



I'm not a health professional and this isn't medical advice.  Talk to

your doctor.  Seriously, from a medical standpoint especially, I want

to introduce a non-warranty here.  Talk to your doctor.  Furthermore,

dietary methods are highly, highly disputed in the medical world, and

I'm not from the medical world.



That said this worked for me, and I think probably will work for you.

It isn't based on anything too drastic, just calorie tracking.



** About org-diet specifically



org-diet is a methodology and collection of tools for using orgmode

for dieting purposes.  It works, and I know it works, because at the

time of writing I've lost approximately 65 pounds by it, and am still

losing weight.



At the base level, there's almost nothing at all to org-diet.  It's

just calorie tracking.  That's it.  Just calorie and day to day weight

tracking.  Everything on top of it is just a bunch of nice tools to

make sure you can meet your goals from there.



Like org-mode, org-diet does a great job of scaling both up and down.

At the most minimal level, you can simply weigh in every day and graph

that and just enter your calorie information every day in tables.

Eventually if you want to add graphing, you can use the graphing

tools.  Eventually if you want to calculate your BMI, you can do that.

Want to add habits?  Add habits.  Whatever.  But you could keep it

really simple, and for a long time daily weigh-ins and calorie

tracking was all I had (I hadn't written the other tools yet), and it

worked good enough for me, good enough to lose the first 35 pounds of

my journey in 5 months before our wedding.



At the time of writing I still have a bit to go, but I've lost enough

weight to go from a BMI that said I was slightly above "morbid

obesity" (what a scary phrase) past "obesity" down to simply

"overweight".  By my calculations, in a few months I'll finally hit

"normal weight".  If I could do it, you can do it.  I promise.  (Well,

I promise socially.  No warranty of course. :])  Everything past this

point is just careful planning.



** Theory



To be fair, much of the approach and reasoning I've taken for org-diet

is based off of reading [[gnus:nnml:Inbox#[email protected]][The Hacker's Diet]], which is a wonderful book

for approaching dieting by taking an engineering approach to it.  If

you are having problems with your weight, I recommend reading this

book; I think it does a great job of taking the whole problem of

dieting and making it make sense.



The main thing you need to know about dieting via calorie counting is

this: the amount of weight you gain / lose over a period of time is

pretty simple math.  Here's how it works.



 - There's 3500 calories in a pound.

 - Your metabolism is the amount of calories you burn every day not

   including exercise calories.  Just the calories of you living.

 - Exercise will burn a certain amount of calories also.

 - Every day, you eat.  The amount of calories you eat add up.

 - Yes, your metabolism is probably affected by the quality of food

   you're eating and your regular activity level, but it isn't

   affected by that much.



So every day you have calories in (what you eat) and calories out

(what you burn through metabolism and exercise).  Figuring out the

"difference" can tell you whether you'll lose or gain weight.  The

equation is pretty simple:



: calorie_diff = cals_eaten - daily_metabolism - exercise



You can calculate your metabolism either by taking a best guess; there

are a lot of "metabolism calculators" on the web which might figure

out your daily calorie burn... it's probably sufficient to run a

number of these and average them and you'll probably get a pretty

decent guess of what your metabolism is (presuming you don't have some

sort of serious genetic offsets).  Or you can reverse engineer it by

keeping track of your diet for a while, seeing how much you lose /

gain relative to the calories you take in for a while and then you'll

know.  I did this once, it turned out to be pretty close to what the

metabolism calculators online give.  Might as well just start with

those and adjust later, I guess.



So presumably, if you want to burn a pound a week, the math is pretty

simple: 3500 calories in a pound, 3500 / 7 is 500, you need to consume

500 calories less a day than you take in.  (Conversely, if you took in

500 more than you burn per day, you'll gain a pound per week.)  It's

that simple.  So if your metabolism is roughly 2100 calories per day,

you just need to keep yourself at or below 1600 calories per day and

you'll meet your goal if you stick with it.



I used to shoot for 1200 calories a day (but generally hit more like

1400 per day) when I started my diet, and I lost a lot of weight

really fast.  I'm now shooting for about 1300-1600 calories per day

(more on that in the [[* Habits][Habits]] section) and I'm losing weight a little

bit slower (5-7 pounds per month instead of about 9) but it's still

going rather well.  You can figure out what works for you.  You can

even just set a goal and see how fast you lose weight, and if it's not

fast enough, you can adjust later.



So one major difference from the way /The Hacker's Diet/ does things.

John Walker, the author of that book, recommends that you don't bother

to track your calories every day and he shows some good techniques

to do things without a detailed tracking like this.  If that works for

you, great; you could even adjust org-diet to take a path closer to

his, but personally I find that if I don't track every calorie

obsessively, I completely blow away my diet.  YMMV.  I suggest you try

my way of doing things... if you're reading this, you're already an

orgmode user, which means you're used to obsessive tracking anyway.

How much harder could it be to add calorie tracking to all the other

crazy things you do in org-mode? ;)



Nonetheless, I seriously, seriously recommend reading

/The Hacker's Diet/ if you or someone you know has a problem with

your/their weight.



You don't need to buy into expensive or fads pushed by the diet

industry.  Screw that.  Calorie tracking is basic math, and it works.



PS: don't take the progress of your first 3 weeks as indication of

anything.  You might not see much progress, or more likely, you'll see

a *TON* of progress that won't keep up.



Enough ranting!  Let's get started.



* Using



** Simple weigh-in and calorie counting



Here's what to use for capturing (you can remove CAL-IN if you don't

want to do calorie clocking):



#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp

(setq org-remember-templates

        '(("Weigh-in" ?w "* CAL-IN Diet for day %t

%^{Weight}p

| Food / Exercise | Calories | Quantity | Total |

|-----------------+----------+----------+-------|

| %?%&                |          |          |       |

|-----------------+----------+----------+-------|

| Total           |          |          |       |

#+TBLFM: $4=$2*$3::$LR4=vsum(@2$4..@-I$4)



" "~/org/diet.org" "Daily Logs")))



; Optional, bind org-capture to "C-c o r"... or whatever.

(define-key global-map "\C-cor" 'org-capture)

#+END_SRC



** Graphing

** Calorie clock-out



#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp

; Or add to list, whatever

(setq org-todo-keyword-faces

      '(("CAL-CANCEL" . (:foreground "orange" :weight bold))))

#+END_SRC



** Habits

** BMI & other tools