Establishing a routine

First thing you need to do is establish a routine for weighing yourself. Get an accurate scale. 100 gram intervals are a must, and they aren't all that expensive. Weigh yourself at pretty much the same time every day. For me, I'm going with morning, after I've been to the lavatory. When you do it isn't as important as the consistency of it. Mornings are easy to adjust, and a weigh-in is only another 20 seconds.

My weight change from yesterday sounds like a dramatic weight loss. 1.3 kg since yesterday. Wow! It's really not. A lot of weight is gained and lost through liquid. These just attribute to noise. The trick to not getting all psyched up when you lose a kg in a day and then super depressed when you gain two kg the next day is knowing how the maths work. I don't have enough sampling points to show how the maths work, so I'll get into that when I do (in about two weeks).

A long time ago I stumbled across something called The Hacker's Diet. What this very detailed book (it's free of charge as a website) does is layout the basic biomechanics and maths of losing weight. It really boils down to energy management.

I'm 194 cm tall, average build, so I need somewhere between 2300 and 2900 kcal/day. If I take in less energy (food and drink) I will lose weight, as my body will use its energy storage (fat and muscles) to compensate. If I take in more energy, I will gain weight.

There are two ways of changing the energy balance - diet and exercise. If I exercise I will increase my energy requirements. The trouble with exercise is that there is not much energy being spent compared to what we eat. If you go for a healthy walk for an hour you will burn about 300 kcal. Swimming is about 400 kcal. Compared to my 2300 - 2900 kcal/day that's pretty decent, but compared to a single Mars bar (240 kcal) it isn't. That tiny 40 gram candy bar requires you to swim for 36 minutes. Or walk for 48.

While exercise is healthy, it's a lot more efficient to just not eat the Mars bar. For one thing it'll save 30+ minutes of time. Same with coke. It's easy to think "well, I've just done a really tough work-out - I deserve a coke now". Trouble is that non-diet coke (and soft-drinks) contain a lot of energy. A half litre bottle of coke is 210 kcal.

My point isn't "don't exercise", my point is to change what you put in your body. Skip the soft drinks and do water instead. I'm not going to recommend diet drinks for two reasons: 1) I hate the taste 2) Water is cheaper. At least around here, where tap water is just as good at the bottled kind. And if you're worried that you'll lose status by not drinking bottled water, just buy a couple of bottles, reuse them and then get over yourself.