Oxryly

Too hard.

Same stuff could be said of professional athletes.

True dat. Although now you need to get someone to weigh in where the process backfired on them. Volunteers?

Imagine a Clif bar the size of your fist. Even if you vary the taste from bar to bar (I'm not sure how you'd vary the consistency meaningfully), wouldn't you get sick of eating such large globs of undifferentiated foodstuff?

Awesome!

Its like a real girl who doesn't take hygiene all that seriously...

You'd get sick of them right quick... the human digestive system craves variety too much for this to be viable.

In any case there are a lot of meal replacement bars out there already. To give you 1/3 of your requirements it has to be a huge bar...

Add in graphic novels and I'm in. It would have to emphasize breadth and new releases to make it clearly superior to the local library.

While its a good idea to incorporate mentoring, tying your salary to someone else's performance does not sound like a good idea.

I think the key is to leave several levels at the top empty, open to advancement.

No... it has a different problem: you can use just a little and it'll work, but use too much and you may feel a little anxiety.

Reduce sugar & other carbs during lunch (replace with protein & fiber as much as possible.)

Instead of caffeine you could try Yerba Mate tea... more brain energy, less jitters.

This is what bankruptcy is for...

God forbid if they ever start reading L. Ron Hubbard.

All you iPhone developers out there, take note... you could probably sell a lot more copies on this thing (assuming a successful launch).

So he's on the the low end of the long tail. Where the vast majority of iPhone apps dwell....

Another reason why the Dow index history is meaningless. Not only does past performance not correlate to future performance, but past performance is a measurement of a completely different animal.

One thing to consider is if you go to bed hungry your blood sugar will drop during the night which will slow down your metabolism. Long term effects are that blood sugar will be harder to control in the future (not a good thing).

Not all calories are equal. Protein FTW. :)

You're probably talking about the Okinawa Diet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet). It contains 25% of the average Japanese intake of sugar and 75% of the average Japanese intake of grains in general. It is very low calorie.

To get the long lifespan, low obesity, and low heart disease of an Okinawan you'd have to truly live like an Okinawan... eating exactly the kinds of foods they eat and having little stress, similar sleep habits, and similar genetic dispositions. People have not been successful in replicating the approach elsewhere.

The approach I described is the way to eat to stoke your metabolism and keep your blood sugar low. It's good for fat loss, muscle building, high energy levels, and general good health. There's more to it than I described (such as eating 5 or more times a day), but those are the basics.

Your weight equilibrium is definitely not fixed. It depends almost entirely on your hormone levels. If they are brought in to balance, your weight equilibrium will fall somewhere in a healthy range of 14%-20%. The good thing is it will stay that way. You'll have to keep your blood sugar and other things like cortisol under control, but you won't have to count calories.

You don't need protein? That's an odd statement to make.

Can you see yourself doing that for the next 30-40+ years?

He's right about the fixing versus managing. Although for sanity's sake you really should think of it as permanent lifestyle changes, not "management." And also you should try to optimize for overall health with your lifestyle changes, not weight loss (which comes with improved health anyway).

One place this approach falls down is that it doesn't distinguish the effects of various types of calories. Just pursuing "variety" isn't going to cut it. You can eat a ton of fiber (with high caloric content) but you'll actually absorb very little of it. If you eat a ton of sugar you'll crash your metabolism, your insulin will skyrocket, and you'll put on pounds even if you started out burning more than you consume (plus you may induce diabetes).

Really, a hacker approach will acknowledge that what you're really trying to reduce is fat, not weight alone (is anyone here trying to lose muscle?) And calories input do not go directly to fat. There is a sophisticated set of hormone feedback systems that govern whether fat is stored or broken down for energy, and until you hack your hormone system you may well be chasing your tail.

The diet isn't really too complicated, it just puts the emphasis in the wrong areas. What you eat is actually slightly more important that how much you eat.

Your recommendations are a good start, but you should add that 50-70% of each meal should be protein. Protein is the fuel for your metabolic fire (long term), and will cause your calorie burning to outrun your caloric intake in general terms.

Part of why the veggies are such a good idea is that they can be mostly fiber, which are calories that are not absorbed at all, but help you absorb the other, more important nutrients (protein, minerals, vitamins).

And to maintain this you must view it as a lifestyle and the goal is overall health, not a certain weight. The right weight will happen as the result of being healthy.

It still complicated, though. For example, eat 1500 calories a day while your metabolism uses 1800 or so. Sounds foolproof? What if those 1500 calories are all sugar? There goes your metabolic rate and your body fat will go through the roof. What if you eat 60% protein, 30% fiber, 10% fat? You will probably wind up looking like a career athelete, even if you never exercise. The composition of the calories has a huge effect on their usage (through the mechanism of you hormone feedback systems). It may not be rocket science, but the body is complex to the point of being a black box for most people.

Tell that to a diabetic.

It's not that simple. For one, you want to lose fat weight, not muscle, bone, etc. weight. How does your body consume or store fat? It depends on available calories, the caloric composition, and your hormone feedback systems. Arguably, the hormones exert more control than anything else.

It gets more complicated from there: hormone's respond to what you eat. Eat more sugar, it raises your insulin (a hormone) which will stop the conversion of fat to energy, and indirectly will cause the conversion of blood sugar to fat. If your insulin is improperly regulated, you'll have difficult following the simple formula above. The same goes for thyroid hormones. They regulate your metabolism. Another hormone involved is cortisol which reponds to stress levels and can increase your blood sugar levels (cascading over into insulin, for example). Note that you can run into the non-intuitive case of over exercise increasing your cortisol causing excessive blood sugar causing fat storage. It's not easy, but it is possible.

One way to look at it simply is to eat foods that control your blood sugar, and manage your stress levels to avoid excessive cortisol. Excessive protein and fiber calories won't cause fat to build, going against the above formula. In fact, protein and fiber are excellent blood sugar regulating foods and are therefore good at controlling fat building.