Pod(non)fic
26/12/10 22:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkemeraldsI'm getting so much out of John Walker's The Hacker's Diet that I decided to record it.
Though the book is available freely online, it is copyright, and not with a Creative Commons license, so my pod(non)fic of it iscompletely illegal strictly for my personal use. I'd be glad to share it on a personal basis with anyone interested.
The "diet" is just the basic one: eat less than you burn. No recipes or food plans, nothing like that. Instead, Walker spends his time in two areas: breaking down the entire problem of excess fatness from a systems engineering and management perspective, and introducing a lot of cool but complex quantifying tools for solving the problem rationally.
In reading the text aloud, I skipped all of the charts and graphs, mostly because in the post-Web world, they're entirely unnecessary: there's an app for it. In fact, I've found about ten apps and websites that simplify the main data-tracking job The Hacker's Diet calls for.
What I was interested in recording for re-listening were Walker's rational, scientific explanations of weight control as a system, which I personally found really inspiring. (He applied his methods to himself, lost 70 lbs in 1988, and appears from photos online to have kept it off ever since.)
A handful of excerpts:
Confidence, founded in understanding and confirmed by success, makes maintaining an ideal weight far more likely.
This book is about one simple, humble thing: getting control of your weight and health. By circumventing the limitations that made you overweight in the first place and keep you that way, you’re hacking the most complicated and subtle system in the world: your own human body. Weight control—what a hack! Once you realise you can hack your weight, who can imagine what you will turn to next?
..when it comes to gaining and losing weight, the human body is remarkably akin to a rubber bag.
People who have trouble with their weight are different from those who don’t. That doesn’t mean
they’re defective or inferior, any more than people who need eyeglasses to see clearly are lesser humans than those born with 20/20 vision.
Though the book is available freely online, it is copyright, and not with a Creative Commons license, so my pod(non)fic of it is
The "diet" is just the basic one: eat less than you burn. No recipes or food plans, nothing like that. Instead, Walker spends his time in two areas: breaking down the entire problem of excess fatness from a systems engineering and management perspective, and introducing a lot of cool but complex quantifying tools for solving the problem rationally.
In reading the text aloud, I skipped all of the charts and graphs, mostly because in the post-Web world, they're entirely unnecessary: there's an app for it. In fact, I've found about ten apps and websites that simplify the main data-tracking job The Hacker's Diet calls for.
What I was interested in recording for re-listening were Walker's rational, scientific explanations of weight control as a system, which I personally found really inspiring. (He applied his methods to himself, lost 70 lbs in 1988, and appears from photos online to have kept it off ever since.)
A handful of excerpts:
Confidence, founded in understanding and confirmed by success, makes maintaining an ideal weight far more likely.
This book is about one simple, humble thing: getting control of your weight and health. By circumventing the limitations that made you overweight in the first place and keep you that way, you’re hacking the most complicated and subtle system in the world: your own human body. Weight control—what a hack! Once you realise you can hack your weight, who can imagine what you will turn to next?
..when it comes to gaining and losing weight, the human body is remarkably akin to a rubber bag.
People who have trouble with their weight are different from those who don’t. That doesn’t mean
they’re defective or inferior, any more than people who need eyeglasses to see clearly are lesser humans than those born with 20/20 vision.
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