Comment by adamgordonbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamgordonbell | Hacker News Reader

I lost weight thanks to trendweight and his 'The Hackers Diet' method of weight loss.

I had written him down as potential podcast guest, skimmed through some of his autodesk diaries and just never gotten around to reaching out to him.

Man, that sucks.

If you want to do his diet: get a smart scale and use TrendWeight. It doesn't tell you what to eat, but gives better data about whether you are on track or not then anything else I've seen. You weigh yourself daily, but only pay attention to a moving average and a future projection. That smooths out all noise in a scale measurement.

It uses an Exponential Moving Average, which I suspect is the real innovation. That smooths out the daily data with the longer term trends.

https://trendweight.com/

If you haven't heard of it, maybe give MacroFactor a look (not affiliated, just a happy user). It is the only food log and weight tracker that I've used with success. On the weight tracking side, it also requires daily weigh-ins and tracks your trend weight over time. Combining that with the calories you log, it determines your TDEE and adjusts your calories and macros from week to week depending on the goal you want to achieve.

https://macrofactorapp.com/

Very cool. I'll check it out.

The limitation, but also the real benefit of the Trend Weight is there is no tracking of food. Each day you can see if you are above or below the trend line and how many calories you are above or below where you need to be.

It's just the diff, basically.

That's interesting, I designed essentially the same system, which I have used several times to get my weight back in range. The 7-day moving average is what I pay attention to. It has fields for notes on food eaten, exercise, and alcohol. The idea is to let the feedback of the data influence my behavior, rather than being prescriptive.

I knew it couldn't possibly be completely original, but it's cool to hear whose thoughts mine shadowed.

Yeah, averages are super helpful.

I wish my smart scale could pull the data from trendweight and just say "above" or "below". With the Hackers Diet that is all that matters is whether you are above or below the trend line.

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