The Hacker's Diet is accompanied by computer tools which permit logging the progress of a diet and subsequent weight management, producing progress reports, analyses, and charts. Computer tools are available online, as spreadsheets and macros for Microsoft Excel, or as an application for the handheld Palm Computing Platform.
You don't need a computer to use The Hacker's Diet; easy-to-work paper and pencil methods are presented in the book. But if you have a computer with Web access or Excel, or a PalmPilot, the companion tools may save you time and provide more insight into the engineering underpinning of the methods described in the book, while producing an illustrated log of your progress.
The Hacker's Diet Online is a Web-based application hosted
at Fourmilab which allows you to maintain weight and exercise
logs, produce custom charts and trend analyses, and plan diets
from any computer with Internet access and a Web browser. Data may
be imported from or exported to other versions of the computer tools,
or exported in CSV or XML format for analysis by other programs.
Complete source code for the Web application is in the public domain
and available for downloading for those who wish to install it on
their own Web servers; it is a CGI application implemented in Perl.
A variety of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (or “workbooks”
in recent Microsoft-speak) are available which permit hands-on
experimentation with the techniques presented in the book, forecasting
diet plans, meal planning with automatic calorie counting, and a
system for logging the progress of a diet and subsequent weight
management which produces progress reports and charts.
In addition to the weight logging and analysis and meal planning packages, the feedback and trend fitting laboratories described in the book are included, as well as databases supporting the text.
Please visit the Excel Tools page
to download a version compatible with the release of Excel you're
using.
A handheld computer that's never far from your side is an
excellent tool for logging your daily weight and providing
real-time snapshots of the progress of your diet and
long term weight management. An implementation of the
Eat Watch, the central component of The
Hacker's Diet, for the Palm Computing Platform (PalmPilot,
Palm, etc.) puts this tool where it belongs—right in the
palm of your hand. There's no more need for paper logs,
spreadsheets, macros, or any Microsoft products whatsoever—just
write your daily weight into your Palm and you can view
weight logs, charts, trend analysis, and calorie balance
right on your handheld computer.
Every time you HotSync, your weight log is backed up to your
desktop machine, and a companion program (which runs on any
computer with a vaguely standard C compiler) permits you to
export your logs as illustrated HTML documents viewable with
any Web browser and CSV files which can be imported into other
applications.