3 Ways to Keep a Hacker's Diet Journal

1. Keep a Desktop Computer Journal

Using the Excel worksheets you download from John Walker's eBook can serve as an excellent journal for your weight loss. By faithfully logging your daily data into the appropriate application, you can, after a period of 2 weeks or more, begin generating graphs that show your weight loss trend. These charts are essential for providing the feedback you need to either increase, decrease or maintain the rate at which you are losing. It is most helpful to look at a month's trend at a time before adjusting your caloric intake rather than a daily or weekly monitoring. Too much attention to short intervals can border on obsession and is counterproductive to the Hacker's Diet's goal of making weight loss as simple as possible.

2. Journal in Your Hacker's Notebook

If you are a paper-and-pen type of person, you can track the trends in your weight loss just as accurately as with a computer. It is, however, more time consuming as it requires doing the math yourself and hand graphing your charts. You will need to manually find your trend numbers. On the first day of your diet, record your weight in pounds in the weight column and the trend column. For every day afterward, you will subtract the trend number from the day before from the current day's weight to obtain a new trend number. If the result is negative, do not forget to put a minus sign in front of it. Then move the decimal one place to the left. This number should then be rounded to a single decimal (round up if over 5 and down if less than 5).

Finally, add the resulting number to the trend number from the day before and enter it in the column for today's trend. Plotting your trend numbers after you have a couple of weeks' worth of data will reveal a pattern. If you are maintaining, the line will be nearly even, falling within a range of a couple of pounds. If you are losing, the line will show a downward slope. If you see an upward ascent, you are gaining weight.

3. Use Your Palm Pilot

John Walker updated his Hacker's Diet to include a method of tracking using a Palm Pilot, which can be helpful for busy people. Walker's Palm Pilot applications let you track all of your weight loss information on your handheld gadget, while his eBook contains information for accessing feedback charts and time-saving tips for using this device.