The Line System
Sara's post reminded me of Duncan's post which reminded me that I wanted to blog on my own New Years resolution. Yes, the weight thing.
I thought about all the popular diets out there or joining a health club but I have a very busy life and an exercise program which involved me driving a significant distance or causing me to regularly get home even later in the day then I currently do will not do. I have to exercise at home. Also, I have a boat load of kids (actually 2 boat loads) and they are running to activities so significant meal planning in that chaos just isn't going to work (I've tried). Unfortunately we feed largely on convenience foods and I don't plan on taking activities that my kids love away from them in order to cook to meet my particular dietary needs. So here is where I go with the Line System. BTW: I'm not a doctor and this was not created with any sort of sound nutritional knowledge.
The Line System: I taped a table on my bathroom wall. The X axis is the days from 1/1/04 to 6/1/04 (for the europeans reading this that is June 1, not Jan 6). The Y axis is weight. I then added a red line (this is The Line System) to the table from my rough weight on 1/1/04 (235 lbs) to my goal weight on 6/1/04 (190 lbs). I then plot my weight daily on this chart. So far I have been under the line (I've lost about 10 pounds already!). The idea is that if my weight starts approaching the line or goes over it, I start concentrating harder on eating less. If I'm well under the line, then I can go ahead and have dessert that day or basically not worry too much about the inevitable temptation that might pop up.
Sometime soon a regular exercise routine will enter the picture.
I've never had much of a problem losing weight (at least some weight). My problem is that I lose the focus at some point on sticking with the diet and I'm back up to that 230 pound level. I believe my line system will be the daily reminder I need. I'll let you know how it goes. If it goes well, I'll write a book and make millions. Of course my book will only have 1 page.
Comments
Anonymous
April 19, 2004
Matt,
Great idea but it's been done before. Check out this free online book "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker, the guy who founded Autodesk. There is even free software (spreadsheets and Palm software) around to replace the paper-on-the-wall technique. This approach to losing weight is very left-brain oriented and won't work as easily for all of us!
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.htmlAnonymous
May 26, 2009
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