Fifteen pounds. Twelve weeks of the work.

The bet behind notch is that frequency beats accuracy. Counting calories works; the gram-level precision people obsess over does not. As long as the broad trend is right and the logging is daily, the number is enough.

I built notch because no app on my phone matched that thesis. They wanted me to pick a brand of bread, a cooking method, a portion to the nearest gram. I wanted to tap a button and move on. So I built that button.

Now I'm going to use it on myself for twelve weeks and write it up.

The starting line

My Hacker's Diet Online trend on the starting Sunday reads 169.4 lb. The target is 154 lb, which is fifteen pounds away.

My daily target is 2,000 kcal — roughly a 500 kcal deficit against maintenance, which pencils out to about a pound a week. At that pace, fifteen pounds takes around fifteen weeks. The log runs for twelve, by when I should have a solid view of whether this is generally working.

No diet plan. No exercise programme. No food restrictions. The only intervention is the log itself — one tap per meal, the daily total visible on the home screen, a weekly report at the end of each Sunday.

What gets published

Each week for the next twelve, one post:

• The numbers — weight, kcal average, trend.
• The notch weekly report — full screen, no crop.
• The Hacker's Diet Online trend chart — weight smoothed with the EWMA filter the Hacker's Diet is built around.
• A short note on how I think it is going against what the data is doing.