An even blunter instrument that I’ve found very useful for weight and health is “mass in, mass out”.
That is, in a First Law sense, you can’t gain more than the mass of what you eat & drink, and you will always lose a certain amount of mass each day through breathing (metabolism, exercise) and excreting (waste, sweat).
So for example I lose 1–2 pounds a day with my metabolism, activity level, and diet, so I eat a bit more than that per day and try to make sure that those foods are healthy most of the time. For me, “healthy” means mostly plant-based, high in fiber, balanced in nutrients, and so on. I joke that my diet consists of vegan food and cheeseburgers, but it’s pretty close to the truth.
I think this should be the first step that most people take toward changing their dietary habits, because it’s dead simple: look at the weight on the package of the stuff you’re putting in your face, and get a cheap kitchen scale if you want to be particular about it. Then incorporate calories as you begin to get an intuitive sense of how caloric density affects the answer to “How much of this can I eat if I want to maintain/lose/gain weight?” and then incorporate other details like macronutrients.
Even before all this, the zeroth step is to document your habits by just writing them down. It might just be how my mind works, but if I want to fix something about what I’m doing—eating, sleeping, taking drugs—then it’s way easier to think about it in terms of adjusting a graph than all the details of the actual problem at hand.
That is, in a First Law sense, you can’t gain more than the mass of what you eat & drink, and you will always lose a certain amount of mass each day through breathing (metabolism, exercise) and excreting (waste, sweat).
So for example I lose 1–2 pounds a day with my metabolism, activity level, and diet, so I eat a bit more than that per day and try to make sure that those foods are healthy most of the time. For me, “healthy” means mostly plant-based, high in fiber, balanced in nutrients, and so on. I joke that my diet consists of vegan food and cheeseburgers, but it’s pretty close to the truth.
I think this should be the first step that most people take toward changing their dietary habits, because it’s dead simple: look at the weight on the package of the stuff you’re putting in your face, and get a cheap kitchen scale if you want to be particular about it. Then incorporate calories as you begin to get an intuitive sense of how caloric density affects the answer to “How much of this can I eat if I want to maintain/lose/gain weight?” and then incorporate other details like macronutrients.
Even before all this, the zeroth step is to document your habits by just writing them down. It might just be how my mind works, but if I want to fix something about what I’m doing—eating, sleeping, taking drugs—then it’s way easier to think about it in terms of adjusting a graph than all the details of the actual problem at hand.