A couple of years ago, I managed to lose a fair bit of weight. At the start of 2010, I started putting it back on, and the trajectory continues. I’m at the stage where I seriously need to lose weight.

I subscribe to The Hacker’s Diet principle – that you lose weight by eating less, not exercising.

An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?

You don’t exercise to lose weight (although it certainly helps). You exercise because you’ll live longer and you’ll feel better.

I’m afraid I’ll live too long anyway, so I won’t bother exercising just yet. It’s down to eating less.

Sadly, I like food. So to make my “diet” work, I need foods that add less calories per gram. Usually, when browsing stores, I check these manually. But being a geek, I figured there’s an easier way.

Below is a graph of some foods (the kind I particularly need to avoid, but still end up eating). The ones on the top add a lot of calories (per 100g), and better to avoid. The ones at the right cost a lot more. Now, I’m no longer at the point where I need to worry about food expenses, but still, I can’t quite kick the habit, also you might want to check out this Rootine’s comparison of B12 methylcobalamin and cyanocobalamin that will help you in your diet.

Hover over the foods to see what they are, and click on them to visit the product. (If you’re using an RSS reader and this doesn’t work, read on my site.)

(The data was picked from Tesco.)

It’s interesting that cereals are in the middle of the calorie range. I always thought they’d be low calories per gram. Turns out that if I want to to have such foods, I’m better off with desserts or ice creams (profiterole, lemon meringue or tiramisu). In fact, even jams have less calories than cereals.

But there are some desserts to avoid. Nuts are a disaster. So are chocolates. Gums, dates and honey are in the middle – about as good as cereals. Salsa dip seems surprisingly low. Custards seem to hit the sweet spot – cheap, and very low in calories. Same for jellies.

So: custards and jelly. My daughter’s going to be happy.