Question

The fundamental equation of weight loss/gain is:

weight_change = convert_to_weight_diff(calories_consumed - calories_burnt); 

I’m going on a health kick, and like a good nerd I thought I’d start keeping track of these things and write some software to process my data. I’m not attentive and disciplined enough to count calories in food, so I thought I’d work backwards:

• I can weigh myself every day
• I can calculate my BMR and hence how many calories I burn doing nothing all day
• I can use my heart-rate monitor to figure out how many calories I burn doing exercise

That way I can generate an approximate ‘calories consumed’ graph based on my exercise and weight records, and use that to motivate myself when I’m tempted to have a donut.

The thing I’m stuck on is the function:

int convert_to_weight_diff(int calorie_diff); 

Anybody know the pseudo-code for that function? If you’ve got some details, make sure you specify if we’re talking calories, Calories, kilojoules, pounds, kilograms, etc.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Look at The Hacker’s Diet and physicsdiet.com – this wheel has already been invented.