Although this site is primarily focused on losing weight with Medifast, I am always on the lookout for tools and ideas that I can add to my arsenal. This is one of those.
Thanks to a recent article by Philip Greenspun, a very simple diet has been getting a lot of publicity. The diet was conceived by an MIT professor named Steve Ward, back in the 1980’s. It’s now known as the Steve Ward diet or the Bang Bang Diet. The concept is based on treating your body like a robot or a piece of machinery that requires fuel. It is simple enough to be described in a single paragraph:
All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.
The result would look like the chart you see at the top of this post. If graph paper is too old school, there is even a new iPhone app that lets you chart your progress and gives you feedback on how you are doing.
I think this is a great concept for people who don’t have a significant amount of weight to lose. It breaks weight loss down to its most basic level: Consume less calories than you burn and you will lose weight.
