The Rock Diet

[dreev]

(I’ve mentioned this in the forum before but it was buried in a thread about Girl Genius. It came up in the #weightloss channel of the community Discord so I thought I’d get it here in the forum for posterity.)

The idea of The Rock Diet (no relation to Dwayne Johnson) is to count calories with an abacus bracelet or jelly bracelets that you move from wrist to wrist or a counter ring. Originally we conceived of it as starting with a pocketful of rocks or pebbles that you move from one pocket to another as you consume/burn calories.

I recommend that each bead/tick/rock be 150 calories. Eat that much and it ticks up. Burn that much and it ticks back down. You budget 10 or however many net servings per day. Adjust that number until your weight is very gradually moving in the right direction.

PS, funny story: The clasp on my abacus bracelet used to break periodically so, some years ago, I had @bee sew it to my wrist and it’s been rock solid ever since.

[are]

Clever! And I think it gets around the common problem of dieting, which is that counting calories is hard. Better to just make your best underestimate for a 150 calorie serving and give yourself a rock back for every significant chunk of exercise (e.g. for me, a 170 pound man, a mile of running is a little less than 150 calories).

Also the fact that you’re doing this with an abacus bracelet is about as close as you can get to the Eat Watch from the Hacker’s Diet without spending $600 on a smartwatch and writing a custom app.