The Hacker’s Diet

No, it’s not a joke. It’s an e-book that actually makes a lot of sense.

John Walker (no, not that John Walker) is the founder of a highly successful company called Autodesk, which is best known for its flagship computer-aided design product, AutoCAD. He’s rich, but he was also overweight during most of his life.

After packing on the pounds while building an international company from scratch, Walker had a startling realization:

The absurdity of my situation finally struck home in 1987. “Look,” I said to myself, “you founded one of the five biggest software companies in the world, Autodesk. You wrote large pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided design. You’ve made in excess of fifty million dollars without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail. You’ve succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you can’t control your flippin’ weight?”

(He makes it sound so easy rolling eyes.)

The book is written in a way that will make the most sense to the logical, detail-oriented types. His central thesis is that weight control is just another kind of engineering problem – analyze the data and develop a systematic approach, and the problem can be easily solved.

You can read the complete book online here. I intend to look into it as I have free moments.