by John Walker
The Hacker’s Diet
How to lose weight and hair
through stress and poor nutrition
JOHN WALKER
Also by John Walker
THE AUTODESK FILE
c
Copyright 1991–1993, John Walker
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
S
ECOND (ELECTRONIC) EDITION
This book was published in December of 1993.
Typeset with L
A
T
E
X.
Trademarks
The following trademarks are registered in the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office by Autodesk, Inc.: Au-
toCAD, Autodesk, AutoSketch, and AutoShade. The
following are trademarks of Autodesk, Inc.: Autodesk
Cyberspace and Cellular Automata Lab. The follow-
ing are trademarks of John Walker: The Hacker’s
Diet and Eat Watch.
Third-Party Trademarks

32
2
CONTENTS
3
3 THE RUBBER BAG 34
What goes in
35
What you burn
36
What comes out
39
Inside the rubber bag
39
Seizing control
41
Input/Output
53
Food fads
56
Summary
60
4 FOOD AND FEEDBACK 62
Measure the quantity
62
Determine the goal
63
Apply negative feedback
65
Avoid positive feedback
69

Climbing the ladder
136
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THE HACKER’S DIET
Introductory ladder 137
Lifetime ladder 140
How much is enough?
145
Progress and motivation 146
Details 151
II Management 156
7 WEIGHT MONITORING 158
Getting started
158
Every day 161
Every month 165
Every year
174
8 PLANNING MEALS 176
Why plan meals?
177
Calorie targets 178
How many meals, and when?
179
A regular schedule 181
Choose the chow
182
Eat watch in action 192
Summary 204
9 LOSING WEIGHT 206

Calculating moving averages 290
12 UNITS AND CONVERSION FACTORS 296
Units of Volume (Fluid Measure)
296
Units of Energy (Food value) 297
Units of Length 298
Units of Weight (Avoirdupois) 298
Units of Dry Volume 298
Abbreviations
299
The Weight of Water 300
13 CALORIES IN VARIOUS FOODS 301
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 332
6
THE HACKER’S DIET
INDEX 333
LIST OF TABLES
Daily calorie requirements, men 36
Daily calorie requirements, women
37
Calories consumed by exercise 131
Exercise ladder, introductory
138
Exercise ladder, lifetime
141
Weight log sheet, blank 162
Weight goals, typical men 254
Weight goals, typical women
255
Units of fluid volume

life fat.
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, Au-
todesk. 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
9
10
THE HACKER’S DIET
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 suc-
ceeded by managing problems. And yet, all that time, I
hadn’t looked at my own health as something to be in-
vestigated, managed, and eventually solved in the same
way. I decided to do just that.
This book is a compilation of what I learned. Six
months after I decided being fat was a problem to be
solved, not a burden to be endured, I was no longer
overweight. Since then, my weight hasn’t varied by

“How can I lose weight?” “Simple, eat less food than
your body burns.” “How can I learn to do that?” Read
this book.
11
12
THE HACKER’S DIET
About this book
This book is about.
How to. It’s a how-to book, but not a cookbook.
Everybody’s different, and no one diet is right for all.
This book will help you find a diet plan that works for
you.
. lose weight. Lose weight rapidly, and keep it off
permanently. Losing weight isn’t pleasant, and it’s far
better to get it over with quickly, and never have to do
it again.
. and hair . Just kidding. Actually, it seems to me
the life of a middle aged male is a race between hair
falling out of its own accord and getting ripped out over
stress and irritation. Women have it harder—they have
to rip it all out.
. through stress . Stress is an unavoidable conse-
quence of living in our fast-paced, high-tech culture,
yet few of us are willing to sacrifice its stimulation and
excitement to recapture the placid and serene life of sim-
pler times. Stress is a primary cause of overeating and
weight gain. You’ll learn how to break the cycle of
stress-induced eating and how to actually turn stress into
an ally in achieving your ideal weight.
. and poor nutrition. There is one, simple, unavoid-

and energy you make.
This is the very key to success in anything—to be
able defer immediate gratification in pursuit of a more
permanent and worthwhile future goal.
This is precisely what losing weight involves. If you’re
successful in the things that matter to you but over-
weight, all you need to lose that weight is to make ac-
complishing your weight and health goals matter just as
much, then approach weight loss and control just like
any other important project: by developing and carrying
14
THE HACKER’S DIET
out a rational plan for success based on an understanding
of what’s involved in achieving it.
This book isn’t written for people who are or wish to
become obsessed with their health. I consider weight
control and fitness like any other aspect of life that’s
important enough to do, but hardly my reason for be-
ing. It’s like balancing the checkbook, going grocery
shopping, or getting the car tuned up. The goal is to get
the job done, and done right, as quickly as possible and
with the minimum effort.
About me
I’ve been overweight most of my life.
In 1987, not yet forty years old, I achieved the material
goals I’d been working for all my life. The company
I founded, Autodesk, Inc., had achieved a command-
ing position in its industry, enriching me beyond the
bounds of even my perfervid imagination. I’d handed
the management over to willing and capable people and

day, and without any significant changes in the way I
choose to live my life.
What’s more, I came to understand the game of weight
control. Confidence, founded in understanding and con-
firmed by success, makes maintaining an ideal weight
far more likely. What I discovered was so simple, so
obvious, yet so profound and useful I decided to make
the tools that worked for me available to everybody. So
I wrote this book.
I lost weight recently enough to remember clearly what
dieting involves but long enough ago to be confident I
have a way to avoid gaining it back. I understand what
you’ve gone through trying to lose weight previously. I
know what lies ahead. I’ve been there. It’s worth it.
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THE HACKER’S DIET
About the computer tools
I’m a computer freak, so the first thing I did when
I started thinking about losing weight was develop a
bunch of computer-based tools to help me understand,
monitor, and control the process. Collecting the data,
analysing it with a computer, then applying the insights I
gained taught me more about losing and gaining weight,
and how the body works in general than a lifetime of
failed diets and a truckload of diet books. This book not
only explains what I’ve learned, it describes how to use
the tools to understand how your own body works.
The tools are all spreadsheets based on Microsoft Ex-
cel. Please refer to the README.DOC file which ac-
companies the tools for information about the hardware

U.S. readers and make the essential techniques in the
book less accessible. I apologise to readers in more en-
lightened areas of the world. I’ve also conformed to the
somewhat sloppy practice in most nutrition books of us-
ing “calorie” to mean what is more precisely termed
“kilogram calorie” or “kcal”—the energy required to
raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one de-
gree Celsius. The “gram calorie,” 1000 times smaller,
is cumbersome when discussing the energy content of
food. In Europe, food energy value is frequently given
in kilojoules (kJ), the metric unit of energy. To convert
kilojoules to kilogram calories (“food calories”), divide
by 4.184.
The Excel spreadsheets allow you to specify whether
weight is measured in pounds, kilograms, or stones; each
spreadsheet which uses weight measurements contains a
cell near the top which specifies the unit of weight. If set
to 1 (as supplied), weights are in pounds. If you change
the cell to 0, weights are in kilograms. If you set it to
1, weights are measured in stones. Also included is
UNITS.XLS, an Excel worksheet providing conversion
factors among all the odd English units encountered in
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THE HACKER’S DIET
connection with food (teaspoons per cup, for example),
plus their metric system equivalents.
About time!
Enough tedious preliminaries—let’s get on with it! The
sooner you start, the sooner you can put the overweight,
out of shape part of your life behind you.

You strap it on your wrist, set it for the weight you
want to be, then rely on it to tell you when to eat and
when to stop. Whenever it says EAT, just chow down
on anything you like until EAT goes out. Obviously the
EAT indicator will stay on longer if you’re munchin’
cabbage instead of chugging M
¨
unchen’s finest beer.
As long as you heeded the Eat Watch, you’d attain
and maintain whatever weight you set it to. If you ate
the wrong foods or had your meals on an odd schedule
you might be hungry, but you’d never be fat. And, with
the eat watch guiding you, you’d rapidly find a meal
schedule and makeup that banished hunger forever.
The eat watch wouldn’t control you any more than a
regular watch makes you get to work on time. You can
ignore either, if you wish. You decide, based on the
information from the watch, what to do.
Some people are born with a natural, built-in eat watch.
You and I either don’t have one, or else it’s busted. But
instead of moping about bemoaning our limitations, why
not get an eat watch and be done with it?
You can’t buy an eat watch in the store, at least not
yet. But you can make one that works every bit as well.
It isn’t a gadget you wear on your wrist; it’s a simple
technique you can work with pencil and paper or with a
personal computer. It tells you same thing: when to eat
and when to stop eating. The eat watch you’ll discover
in this book is simple to work, easy to use, and highly
effective in permanently controlling your weight.

information that tells how you’re doing—when to eat
and when to stop: the message of the eat watch.
I believe one of the main reasons some people have
trouble controlling their weight while others manage it
effortlessly is that there’s a broken feedback circuit in
those of us who tend to overweight. Our bodies don’t
tell us “enough already!”, while our slim and trim com-
rades, born with a built-in eat watch, always know when