Introduction to The Geek Diet

The Geek Diet is an easy to install, geek friendly methodology for losing weight and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Let me share a little of its backstory.

As a thirty-seven year old geek-dad, my life does not lend itself to much exercise; my fingers do get a good workout on the laptop and my thumbs are skinny due to their regular fitness regime on the Blackberry wheel and PlayStation controller. But, the overall physique was left somewhat wanting. My wife and kids were commenting on my ever-increasing waistline, my clothes were shrinking and the pressure to get into shape was growing as fast as my belly. I had tried to diet in the past with my wife; she did really well with schemes like Slimming World (Count your sins! Is it a red day or a green day?) but they had never worked for me. The reality of modern life-on-the-run: eating from work canteens or high-street sandwich bars and trying to break free from cravings for caramel shortcake cake at home just meant that I’d never found an effective way to lose weight. I couldn’t stick to a diet for long enough to see a result. Nothing seemed to work for me. How many sins were in that chicken sandwich on the store shelf and was I really supposed to weigh how much cereal I put in my bowl each morning to calculate the calories? Life is too short!

Then one morning on the train on my way to work, revelation came through my iPod. I was listening to the Scientific American podcast and there was a fascinating series of interviews on diet and eating habits including one with Brian Wansink discussing his research and book: Mindless Eating. So much of what he said rang true for me so I decided to combine some of his research with other current scientific findings and try to develop a diet plan that I could use to lose weight and keep it off.

Five weeks later I had lost 16lbs and was happily sticking to the diet. My wife started asking how I was achieving such noticeable results. I explained the ethos and formula to this simple diet and she was impressed. It took another few weeks for me to admit to the full truth that I had invented the diet she was now telling other people about. Not only was she amazed that it worked but she suggested I find a way to share it. So here we are. Full kudos to the über-geeks such as Brian Wansink who have done all the hard lifting in the research – I’m just putting the lego-blocks together in a useful, geek friendly way.