I'm too large, time for a diet, but which one?
I have made the big decission today, to lose weight.
That means I need to go on a diet, but which one? There are millions of them out there.
I have never done a diet before and have no idea where to start, so I turned to my usual first point of entry on a subject and opened the Wikipedia diet page. It says that there isn't much difference in results whether you chose a calorie controlled diet, detox diet or start counting carbs. So I thought I'd look through the diets and see which one appealed to me the most.
I decided that my requirements were that the maths should be simple, and the foods readily available at supermarkets. Other than that I didn't really know what I was looking for.
The page also has an interesting section on the psychology of weight loss. It basically says don't beat yourself up too much about dieting and I filed this away for future reference. It also recommends keeping a food diary, so I went looking for Ubuntu software to help with this task too (I'm looking at Chronometre, a calorie tracker, at the moment but I can't get it to install (a common problem with Linux apps that aren't in the Ubuntu repository)).
The low carb route seemed to be the most documented after a few minutes reading, and for that reason alone I went to the relevant Wikipedia carb counting page to do more reading. I'm flirting with vegetarianism, so I was hoping all the popular jokes about eating lots of red meat turned out not to be true when carb counting. I then went to the list of specific diets, which is depressingly long. And started dipping into them more or less at random. The Hacker's Diet looks very interesting, but is more advice and monitoring tricks than an actual diet. But perhaps if I combine it with a calorie counter...
And I found some Open Office versions of the sheets used with the book.
That means I need to go on a diet, but which one? There are millions of them out there.
I have never done a diet before and have no idea where to start, so I turned to my usual first point of entry on a subject and opened the Wikipedia diet page. It says that there isn't much difference in results whether you chose a calorie controlled diet, detox diet or start counting carbs. So I thought I'd look through the diets and see which one appealed to me the most.
I decided that my requirements were that the maths should be simple, and the foods readily available at supermarkets. Other than that I didn't really know what I was looking for.
The page also has an interesting section on the psychology of weight loss. It basically says don't beat yourself up too much about dieting and I filed this away for future reference. It also recommends keeping a food diary, so I went looking for Ubuntu software to help with this task too (I'm looking at Chronometre, a calorie tracker, at the moment but I can't get it to install (a common problem with Linux apps that aren't in the Ubuntu repository)).
The low carb route seemed to be the most documented after a few minutes reading, and for that reason alone I went to the relevant Wikipedia carb counting page to do more reading. I'm flirting with vegetarianism, so I was hoping all the popular jokes about eating lots of red meat turned out not to be true when carb counting. I then went to the list of specific diets, which is depressingly long. And started dipping into them more or less at random. The Hacker's Diet looks very interesting, but is more advice and monitoring tricks than an actual diet. But perhaps if I combine it with a calorie counter...
And I found some Open Office versions of the sheets used with the book.
Comments
Post a Comment