The Hackers Diet I'm almost anti-diet, given the fantastic mass of rubbish that gets written on the topic, only to be contradicted the next day. However, The Hacker's Diet is different:

1. It's free. The author gains no money tricking another set of people into even another fad.
2. The author, John Walker, is a successful individual in other areas. As a founder of Autodesk, he'd hardly have the motives to start a fad diet on purely ego motivation.
3. John Walker is an engineer. He talks about the human body as any other system, with a very nice high-level approach.

The result is a diet that, above all, makes sense. It's not that anything in the book is a breakthrough. It's just that it's already laid out and proven: Sensoring the weight; dealing with errors; PID controlling the input (food) against the output (weight). Nothing is new, but it all makes sense, in the realm of basic engineering. The model is very simple, and as such debatable. However, the results seem to prove the theories.

If I ever change my mind about diets, this is a good candidate.

Posted by Sergio Carvalho at April 13, 2003 02:43 PM | TrackBack