Hacking the Human Body

Going way out of the box!

Lets put the human body in perspective here, mainly in computer and financial terms. A computer is designed to do automated tasks quickly, right? say I would like to update the email address of 500 people in my marketing database. there are many ways to do it, but one would be to open each entry and enter the email address of each person from a list. this would be corporate America's solution, complete with hiring contractors to assess the situation, followed by temp workers to do the job, and possibly a manager position to oversee the 20 hour a week temp employee. Or, we could take the list, upload it by writing a cute little script in Perl, and be done with it in 20 minutes.

now consider your daily routine: awake, eat, go to work, eat, come home, eat, go to bed. possibly collect a pay check every once in a while. see the theme here? if you said eat, you get a gold star. go ahead and head to office depot, i will wait.....

okay. now you have your star. lets skip ahead. calories are basically fuel for the body. you require differing levels of calories for your body type compared to LaDanian Tomlinson or Kate Beckinsale. Your caloric intake is what allows you to write scripts for your body, automating your daily routine. Most people take corp America's version of caloric intake: bloated, over budget, under worked, in debt. The solution? Spin off a business unit. hey, it works for Wall Street, why can't it work for you?

it takes approximately 3500 kcalories to make up a pound of body weight. this means in order to lose one pound, you have to burn 3500 kcalories. Your BMR or basic metabolic rate will help determine this number to a finer degree based on your age, gender, fitness and genes (not Levi's here), but we will use the average. (yeah, the downer is that the more fit you get, the harder it is to lose the weight, but you can always use the extra caloric burn of beating the opposite sex off with a stick thanks to the abs you find tucked under the 'ole gut) so how do we hack this? simple!

diet. yeah, those cold shivers running down your spine are natural. however, you are on a diet right now. no, i don't mean the South Beach, Atkins, or the mostly-true-magnetic-North-eat-the-buffet-but-not-the-celery diet. your diet consists of whatever you had for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack, and the peices of food still stuck in your teeth from yesterday. lets hack that diet to provide for high quality C++ code in your body, optimizing your analog runtimes to work with your lifestyle. (and no, don't worry, we will get to exercise! yeah, the other cold shiver)

instead of eating out 5 times a week, cut it back to 2 and spend the extra money on an mp3 player. or for goodness sake, your kids, spouse, stock market or house payment. (yeah, i agree, the mp3 player is far more important. course that depends on the NASDAQ) when you go to "Large Fast Food Chain" you are getting about 3000% of your daily intake of crap (yeah, thats an official diet term) and -3000% of your actual needs. however, if you run ultra marathons like I do, you can eat the "Large Fast Food Chain Super Extra Quadruple Cheese Side of Cow Fit For A Small 3rd World Country" if you so choose every other quarter. If I did this though in my current fitness condition, my stomach would actually stage a small riot and you had better watch your toes as I head in the general direction of the restroom or nearest stationary object. (talk about tear gas) honestly though, once you ease into the healthy lifestyle, those types of things don't even appeal anymore. Remember that old food pyramid thing? yeah, me either. just thought I would ask. however, they (the FDA) requires every packaged item to have the relevant dietary information for a 2000 calorie lifestyle. The standard small meal at "Large Fast Food Chain" contains about 4 times that.

it takes 1 mile of running to burn 100 calories. no typo. 100. if you are over 150 lbs, you get more burn benefit, under, less, but it is a baseline. (and yeah, your body gets more efficient, so it declines as you get fit) so, eating that meal at "the Chain" requires you to run for 80 miles to work off the one meal. no biggie right, you can do that in under 24 hours. oh wait. you can't? well get cracking! but wait sp00ky, doesn't my body burn calories while i sit at my desk? yes, it does. about 80/60 (men/women) an hour to keep the ticker ticking, the lungs breathing, the hand on the mouse. so, in order to lose a pound of weight without eating, you would have to be alive for just under 2 days. Wait there Ghandi, this isn't the solution! most girls do exactly this though, stop eating. bad idea. you CAN lose weight by not eating, but where is the fun in that? you have to eat to fuel that miraculous body of yours.... however, modification is the key. instead of eating that handful of M&M's (about 120 calories, or 1.2 miles running), eat a handful of carrots (15 good calories). natural fiber makes you feel more full, where the M&M's just give you chocolate breath and an extra chin.

mix diet and exercise and you can easily do the math here: run for 10 miles a week, burn 1000 calories. take in 2000 calories a day and you are already at your bodies burn rate (as a man, 1500 for a woman), so the extra 1000 calories burnt by running allow you to lose a pound in 2.5 weeks. notice this plan doesn't get you in the size 4 by <#insert date here#>, but it will get you there eventually, and not only that, it will stay off. ever seen the knockout high school homecoming queens' 10 year high school reunion picture? yeah, she probably didn't eat for 2 weeks before it, and still can't fit into her jeans bought for the occasion because she didn't start exercising / continue exercising. and no, New Years Resolution kiddies, those don't work either. you have to stick with it. you want to upgrade the caloric burn per week to lose 5 lbs in 2 weeks? run 25 miles a week. don't say i didn't warn you about the shin splints......start slow, walk! and increase by 10% exertion per week, and don't start eating more because "you earned it". it takes patience.

yes, we moved away from the hacking lingo. however, i consider this hacking, because i have taken the approach of looking at food as fuel, not a cream filled smorgasbord of delight. hacking can be defined as using the least amount of elegantly performed work to get the maximum effect. (don't let CNN fool you, we aren't bad guys. just geeks) i will give you an example here of my former self:

i kid of course, i really didn't eat that much candy, and the cat was always too fast. i have always been active, but now i want to run 100 miles in less than 24 hours (linky), which is different than biking in Moab twice a summer and lifting weights. at one time i was 235 with 10% body fat and trying out for the Arena football league, but then i stopped lifting 2 hours a day and kept the diet. 235 and 10% is much sexier than 235 and 35% on a 6'3" frame. once i started running habitually, i had to modify my fuel intake in order to hack the required kernel code bloat from my nethers. Here is an example of the current fuel i ingest on a daily basis:

now you expect me to say i did it all in 3 weeks, and went from 235 to my 185 by eating steak and bacon.... nope. it took me 6 months to get into good running shape, and another 3 months to nail the diet down. i ran off about 35 lbs, but couldn't get the rest off. it took me taking a food diary and writing every single peice of consumed food down. yeah, hyperbole, right? true enough, but it works. trust me. i am not fast when i run, averaging 8 minute miles, but i can run 5 miles without sweating now. however, it truly took the food diary to track my caloric intake so i could hack my 6 pack. think of it as a checkbook for your butt.

notice the lack of refined sugars in the fuel chart. yeah, that was tough. i love gobstoppers. avoid labels on foods with High Fructose Corn Syrup, Refined / bleached flour, and sugar. (no, don't tear the label off and play keep away, avoid the food in the package) I have never come across anyone at work or play that could not hack their diet or body. you can do it! just start small, say avoiding the candy aisle at Target when grocery shopping. if it isn't in the cupboard, you can't ingest it. yes, i have gnawed on the wooden shelf before, tastes similar to oatmeal. i don't recommend that. but just read the label of what you are going to eat and calculate how many miles of running you would have to do in order to burn it off. that should easily help you deter from the "Only 125 calories per serving!!!!!" snack that has 65 servings per 3 oz. yeah, they are tricky. one can of soda has 200 calories in it. thats 2 miles per 12 oz.

in summary: aim for 2000 calories a day as a man, 1500 as a woman, eat natural foods that make you feel more full, and get your booty shaking. hacking has never been so fun! oh, and the money you save from not eating out? buy that mp3 player and load it up with Steven Hawking lectures. the miles just fly by!

</sp00ky>