The Geek Diet

WIRED features The Geek Diet

2008-08-19T14:17:00.001-07:00

Traffic has really spiked to the geek diet today following another mention on the WIRED GeekDad blog as part of a roundup of various geek friendly means to get into shape.

Read the whole thing here: http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/08/httpzenhabitsne.html

OK, OK - so this blog needs to get into shape- the summer is over and time to stop eating Dorset cream teas (guess where I went on summer vacation) and in case you were wondering, piling strawberry jam on top of your clotted cream scone does not count as 50% fruit....

From the same author

2008-07-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

If you like the Geek Diet, why not try The Blight Byte Review - an English take on the world of gadgets...

Reader Feedback

2008-05-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

I've been really encourage by some recent reader feedback, including:

there's definitely been a positive impact on my energy levels. It's also brought some eating habits to my attention like the increasing plate/portion size, and watching TV whilst mindlessly putting food in my mouth. I now think about which plate to serve food in before each meal. Also really enjoyed reading the rules as simple formulas, made it much easier to remember!

I really think it’s great, and most people will find it incredibly useful!

Does the Geek Diet work for Girls?

2008-03-24T23:32:00.001-07:00

Special offer for readers of iVillage - 10 free copies of the Geek Diet e-book to the first 10 female volunteers who drop me an email.

Just one catch - please send me your thoughts of the book once finished at let me know how it helped you on your diet!

You can email me using this address markfaithfull[at]googlemail[dot]com

The Diet Plate Diet

2008-03-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

Let PLATE = PLATE * 0.8

One of the key rules of The Geek Diet is to reduce the size of your plate and portion size - we eat too much most of the time and all that food goes to waste- I mean waist.

Here is a great tool I've just discovered- the Diet Plate - its a plate that is sized and marked out with portion sizes just the right size for a healthy dinner - and what a great companion to The Geek Diet!

Here is a picture of one of the plates.

Meet Geek Man

2008-01-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

Here he is, in all his glory - the Geek Man from Happyworker.com - you can buy geek man and all his friends.

Notice the poor diet of Geek Man? He needs the Geek Diet!

LifeHacker loves The Geek Diet down under!

2008-01-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

Sarah Stokely of the Australian edition of Lifehacker has written a great review of The Geek Diet which can be read here.

It's great to see the Geek Diet gaining momentum around the world! Geeks of the world unite - and loose weight!

Happy Workers love the Geek Diet

2008-01-16T10:25:00.000-08:00

Heidi Bedore of happyworker.com has written an excellent article about The Geek Diet and even come up with some excellent new Geek Diet style formulas for dieting geeks to try out, including:

LET SERVING = .2 * BAG OF CHIPS

and

TANGO ≠ FRUIT SERVING

Brilliant!

Happy Worker make a range of toy figures for the 21st century including Super Mom, Boss Man and of course: Geek Man.

This is how they describe Geek Man:

With oodles of brain power he authors code, battles tech holy wars and moves nerdom to new heights...

A geek superhero and light-hearted take on techy types, GeekMan's a 6-inch tall plastic geek action figure that can be posed in lots of nerdy positions. GeekMan comes equipped with 5 'weapons' of Wisdom and Tech Gadgetry: Visual Input Device (removable glasses), PDA (handheld computer), Cerebral I/O and Trusty Sidekick (laptop), Geek Battery Charger (coffee mug), and Wristwatch.

Feliz Año Nuevo

2008-01-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from the south coast of Spain, where the Geek is spending New Year with Mrs Geek's parents in Almunecar, Granada.

Here in southern Spain, it' not just the expected festive feasting that poses a challenge to the Geek's diet- here is another problem - where did all the vegetables go??!!??

It's proving harder than expected to consume half a plate of vegetables for dinner when no vegetables are offered. There's lots of cheese (Manchego- made from sheep milk) and Ham (Jamon, made from the salted flesh of raw pork kept in a pit on a mountain side for a year- or so I'm told...) but nary a stick of Broccoli, carrot or bean to be seen on the home stove. It's not just the domestic cooking either, in the restaurants it is very much the same story.

Now I am being a little disingenuous, as there is lots of Salad to be had... but this geek is not a fan of most salad and while the rain is noisily flooding the cobble streets outside (it is the middle of winter after all!) I want hot food not chilled.

Oh well, not to worry - next week I'll be back in good ole Blighty and able to over-compensate on the veg-front for a few days to make up for it.

Pass the tapas... and a Satsuma please!

GeekDad reviews The Geek Diet

2007-12-01T15:26:00.000-08:00

Ken Denmead of the Geek Dad blog at WiReD.com has written a great review for the Geek Diet - you can read the whole here.

In Ken's own words:

No silly point-based formulae, just straight-forward rules that, if stuck to, change the balance of the equation. It's a $5 download or a $10 Lulu.com printing, it'll take you 15 minutes to read, and it might just change everything.

You said...

2007-11-30T12:38:00.001-08:00

After some fairly consistent feedback about the front cover being hard to read, I've changed it to be a darker shade of green - more of a 'matrix' feel don't you think?

Here is the old (light ) and new (dark) side by side for comparison:

Why Most Diets Dont Work

2007-11-26T07:08:00.001-08:00

A study by UCLA discovered that almost all diets don’t work. The main reasons for this are:

• Deprivation diets are counter productive

• Sustained weight loss requires a permanent change in eating habits not a temporary change

• Strict and restrictive menu diets will not produce long term results as you can’t stay on them forever

But the main reason why the majority of diets fail is simply this: most diets focus on changing the food input to your body for a period of time to cause a biological change i.e. weight loss – but effective long term weight loss is about psychology not biology – we lose weight with our minds not our mouths.

The Geek Diet works by giving your mind control over your eating – simple rules that you can apply in any situation – at home, at work, at a restaurant and crucially: at the shelf edge while shopping– to make good choices about what you eat in order to meet your weight loss goals and maintain your target weight.

Who Are You

2007-11-26T05:35:00.000-08:00

So I went to a conference the other week and bumped into a colleague that I had not seen for about three months - "I almost didn't recognise you" he said - "You've lost weight!"

The Geek Diet works boys and girls!

The Geek Diet Now Published!

2007-11-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Geek Diet is now available to buy in print or as an e-book download from www.lulu.com; amazon et al will be selling it in the not too distant future. For now you can buy it using the links on the right of the blog. It will make an ideal Christmas gift! Hope you enjoy it!

Introduction to The Geek Diet

2007-11-15T06:18:00.000-08:00

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.

Welcome to the Geek Diet

2007-11-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

Thank you for visiting the Geek Diet blog - the online partner of the book The Geek Diet published in Winter 2007 and available from www.thegeekdiet.co.uk. I'll be putting some snippets up here and using this area to promote discussion and debate.