| Beep, beep, beep … “What is that beeping?” I thought. I was at work and a strange beeping sound filled the office. I walked around to investigate. It was the defibrillator box. It was beeping because someone had removed the device. I asked a co-worker what was happening and he said, “John passed out in the bathroom.”
The next day they announced that John passed away. He was a little older than I was, had a pot belly like me. It could have been me. I got some medical tests for work and it said I was overweight and at risk for a number of diseases. At age 18 my waist was 32 inches and I weighed 150 pounds. I noticed my waistline had crept up to 38 inches and my weight over 185. When I looked in the reflection of a store window, I would see my belt hanging low below my belly. My clothes were tight. My joints ached. I felt tired and had low energy. If there’s fat on my belly why wouldn’t there be fat inside my veins and arteries? I tried to lose weight many times. I lost weight and gained it back doing the “Slow carb diet” which was introduced to me in Timothy Ferriss’ 4 Hour Body. I tried a number of diets, all worked initially but I would gain the weight back. My goal was to weigh below 170 pounds. I would write on many to-do lists “W<170.” On November 21st I decided to try again. I weighed myself and my scale said I was 182 pounds. I would try a method from a book called Total Fitness. The basics are to chart your weight and try to lose one pound a week until you reach your goal. I used Microsoft Excel to help track the weight, what I ate, how much I exercised and chart my progress. I tried this method two times before and it failed. I wasn’t confident that anything would change. I was ready to give up and started to have the thought, “It’s impossible to lose weight and keep it off.” I started at a bad time as Thanksgiving was coming up. After the big meal, my weight went up another 4.5 pounds. A little depressed, I thought another failure was at hand. But the convergence of a number of events caused a shift in the time-space continuum. The death of a co-worker, bad medical numbers and maybe some dumb luck, this time I was determined to do whatever it took to reach the goal of losing one pound a week. Instead of focusing on reaching my goal of weighing less than 170 pounds. I focused on getting back to the goal line of losing one pound per week. I ate less and exercised more and closely watched what I ate. It was tough but after nine days I caught the goal line and got below it. I continued weighing myself each day and tracked my weight against a daily goal. I adjusted my diet and exercise. It was working this time. I reached my goal to weigh less than 170 pounds after 85 days (12 pounds in 12 weeks) on the diet. I decided to set a new goal of 165 and then 160, which I reached after 22 weeks. As I write this, I’ve maintained my weight below 160 for 177 days. I’ve set a new goal of 155 pounds. It is estimated that 95% of the people on a diet gain the weight back. This happened to me in the past but won’t again. With the method I’ve developed, it is easy to keep the weight off. On December 15th while looking for some domain names for a diet, I was able to get the domain http://ExcelDiet.com. I started blogging and creating a website to help with the weight loss. I knew that losing weight wasn’t that hard, I had done it before. But I failed to keep it off. So I worked on the problem of keeping it off. This book gives you a simple solution to keeping the weight off. I’m a software developer and an Excel expert. I solve problems for a living. I also developed a number of tools in Excel for beating the stock market, managing hedge funds and other tools for some of the biggest finance companies in the world. This knowledge helped me develop the Excel Diet. I share these techniques with you in this book. One of the reasons I’m writing this book is to help others lose weight and keep it off. I’ve found a method that works. Uses common sense and anyone can do, including you. I’ve played and coached hockey for many years and developed a method that studies situations and how to react to them. By breaking the game into situations and determining the best action to take. I developed a strategy that helped my teams win championships. I’ve done the same for the Excel Diet. I’ve identified the situations, processes, habits, and obstacles that can make or break a diet. One other reason I’m writing this book is that there are many diet scams out there and I want to help you identify the scams from the real deal. The contents of the book are from years of trying to lose weight and failing and much self-experimenting, tracking and studying what works and what doesn’t. This book is different from other diets in that it works and focuses on the keeping it off part and doesn’t use costly devices, meals, memberships, exercise equipment or pills. I believe that the reason you’re overweight is that you haven’t found the right method. This book will do this for you. Al Berg |