Feel­ing a lit­tle over­weight? Hav­ing trou­ble under­stand­ing all that fit­ness and health lingo? Want some sim­ple advice, writ­ten for the geek inside you? You need The Hacker’s Diet.

Con­ceived by John Walker (co-founder of Autodesk), it’s a diet that approaches weight loss “as both an engi­neer­ing and a man­age­ment prob­lem.” The Wikipedia entry is also quite enlightening.

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?”

Through all the years of strug­gling with my weight, the fad diets, the tedious and depress­ing his­tory most fat peo­ple share, I had never, even once, approached con­trol­ling my weight the way I’d work on any other prob­lem: a mal­func­tion­ing cir­cuit, a buggy pro­gram, an inef­fec­tive depart­ment in my company.

via Life­hacker