How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)

Couldn't agree more. I tried losing weight without keeping track of my daily weight, and got nowhere. Then I happened upon Jeremy Zawodny's spreadsheet (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html).

Maintaining a daily record of my calorie intake as well as my weight has really helped me keep my eating in check. It has also helped me get motivated to keep going to the gym - everytime I see that graph flat lining, I kick it up a notch.

Very similar to "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker, author of AutoCAD. He wrote a book about how he lost a bunch of weight using an engineering mindset. He also includes some very cool tools (Palm, Excel, and web-based).

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Pretty much exactly how I lost 18 pounds in 24 weeks. Budget 400 calories (technical kCal) for each of three meals, allow 400 kCal for snacks, fruit, biscuits in meetings, etc., and allow a blowout every week.

Works for me.

Sneaking the weight back on - three weeks visiting the folks back home will down that, but getting back on the plan again and looking forward to seeing the progress again.

Ack, sorry. I'm in the process of moving to Dreamhost and my home DSL isn't very good at being a webhost... Sorry, this was bad timing. :)

Fat is a storage device for lots of stuff. For example, THC (marijuana) builds up in fat cells. Losing weight releases some of that stored up junk. It's not out of the question that some of it would cause you to stink up a storm.