how I lost 90 pounds

Surprisingly, few people have noticed, but I lost 90 pounds in the last 7 years. Right around the time that I was working on the Mac OS X team and we shipped the first version in March of 2001, I weighed in at 225. My weight had generally been in the 165 area for most of my adult life, so it was a combination of stress, long-hours, eating poorly, not exercising, and abundant free crappy food everywhere at the office that led me down that path.

I didn't go on a diet in the traditional sense, but here's what I did do gradually over the last 7 years:

• I stopped drinking soft drinks
• I stopped drinking fruit juice unless it was made from real fruit and had no added sugar
• I phased out processed foods entirely
• I started eating more fruit and vegetables (from the farmers market)
• I stopped eating any free food provided at the office
• I stopped eating between meals
• I gradually became more vegetarian year-by-year
• I switched to eating as much organic and locally grown food as possible
• I just ate less food and tried to pay more attention to not overdoing it
  

I didn't go on any low-carb diets or any fad diets where I went crazy eating one particular class of food or completely avoided another. To sum it up, I just ate real food and tried to eat it in moderation. I didn't stop eating fat or carbs or give up eating or drinking anything that were difficult to give up.

The last 50 pounds came with the help of The Hacker's Diet, which isn't so much a diet as a different way of looking at losing weight. The short version is that, instead of counting calories, you just weigh yourself every day, and track your progress using a weighted average. If you're gaining weight one month, cut back on something (it could be something simple like half a glass of milk at dinner instead of a full glass). If you're losing too much, introduce something new into your diet (start having a piece of toast at breakfast). If your weight stays the same, you know that you're getting the calories you need.

The only times that people have actually noticed I've lost weight are:

• When they haven't seen me in a really long time
• When I buy new clothes and they are smaller than the clothes they are replacing

For fun, I put up a chart of my weight over the past 7 years, marking specific events (usually work-related).