The Hacker's Diet is something I've enjoyed reading, and have referenced to a few people who also became interested in reading it. You can find it here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/So what is it exactly? I think the author puts it best:
Quoted Text
The absurdity of my situation finally struck home in 1987. “Look,” I said to myself, “you founded one of the five biggest software companies in the world, Autodesk. You wrote large pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided design. You've made in excess of fifty million dollars without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail. You've succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you can't control your flippin' weight?”
Through all the years of struggling with my weight, the fad diets, the tedious and depressing history most fat people share, I had never, even once, approached controlling my weight the way I'd work on any other problem: a malfunctioning circuit, a buggy program, an ineffective department in my company.
As an engineer, I was trained to solve problems. As a software developer, I designed tools to help others solve their problems. As a businessman I survived and succeeded by managing problems. And yet, all that time, I hadn't looked at my own health as something to be investigated, managed, and eventually solved in the same way. I decided to do just that.
I quite enjoy his analogies to real-world systems, and observations that just make sense. He distills everything down to simple elements then builds up from there. For example, The Eat Watch. Everyone's got one. It tells them when it's time to eat! For a lot of overweight people, their watch is broken. His book goes into how it can be broken, and how to fix it. |