I have lost significant amounts of weight in my life in only two ways:

1. Low caloric intake and LOTS (2-3 hours per day) of exercise (this definitely works, but it also kinda sucks for the obvious reasons).

2. Low carbohydrate intake, with normal/moderate exercise. And everyone I know (I realize this is anecdotal, but I’ve got a link to scientific evidence below) who has changed to this type of eating has had outrageously good results.

So your advice here (to fat people [I can say that, since I’m fat], who really like to eat) is to “find a book on nutrition” (NOTE: there are THOUSANDS, many written by snake oil salesmen) to change WHAT you eat, and also change the AMOUNT you eat. Let me tell you, that advice SUCKS.

Here is the most recent article about low carb diets that I’ve read: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63

From a Fatty’s perspective (that’s what *I* like to call myself), this is a MUCH better approach, with MUCH better results. Now all I’ve got to do is restrict what I eat to one group that I already love (I can eat just about all the meat you put in front of me). I don’t have to change my psychology of eating very much at all: if I’m sad, I can binge to my heart’s content on protein and fat, AND THAT’S OK. I know that I’ll lose weight and get healthier over time.

Sorry about the rant. I have no affiliation with the NYT or anyone they interviewed. I just think this kind of post took absolutely no research, and that you’re really uninformed about the thoughts and feelings of the people who would be reading your blog.

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People that go from diet to diet never reach a stable weight, let alone a good shape. The reason is quite simple: diets are, by their very nature, temporary. You can’t expect to eat properly for two or three weeks and fix your weight problems for the rest of the year.

They might even work in the short term, but after a couple of months you will recover what you have lost.

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Diet is a general word and not a synonym of weight loss…diet is an eating habit with a certainly goal. (Maintenance, weight loss, health, blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, etc…)

Take for example the Mediterranean diet…it’s not a weight loss diet. It’s a lifetime healthy living diet.

I can agree with what you say if you’d wrote “Weight loss diet”.

Yes tip n°1 is right for fad diets like Low carbs, Atkins, South Beach and so on…

Other wise great article especially for the n°4 tip. I think it’s the basis of healthy living.

1. All diets are valid and all will help you lose weight IF you eat less calories than your body needs. It doesn’t matter if it’s Weight Watchers or Atkins or vegan or cabbage soup! As long as you eat less than your body burns each day, less than your basal metabolic weight (BMR), you will lose weight. BMR can be calculated here: http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php.

2. We don’t know what makes us healthy, so any diet advice around nutrition should be viewed with much skepticism. Just about every nurition study available has another study to contradict it. The truth is that we don’t know what makes us healthy and most of what we think we know about nutrition is likely bogus or overly generalized. Most people who try to eat “nutritiously” revert to their formal eating habits, so any nutrition-focused approach is likely to fail. Nutrition-focused dieting should NOT be followed. Your body is an omnivorous machine. You can use just about any mix of carbs, fats, and proteins. Eat what you want, just eat less than your body needs if you want to lose weight.

3. Exercise does not help people lose weight, although it could help them maintain weight loss. Most people who turn to exericise for weight loss when they’re not naturally inclined to it will fail, so while exercise might be recommended, it is not essential to dieting. The essential point is caloric deficency, or eating less than your body needs. Can you eat more if you burn more by exercising? Yes! And guess what: that’s exactly what you will do, gaining almost nothing from exercise.

4. Discipline and perserverence: both will cause people to quit. Instead, people need to learn how to respond to the adversities of dieting: how to eat on schedule, how to eat slowly, how to recover from failure, how to differentiate between hunger and cravings, knowing that hunger pains last 2 minutes, not 20, etc. The Beck Diet, which is a psychological approach to dieting, does this. I highly recommended it. It’s not one of those diets that chirp the usual nutrition, exercise, perserverence nonsense. These diets always fail. Beck helps you understand why you fail and how to self-correct.

Eat less than your body needs until you lose the weight you need to loss, then eat as much as your body needs to maintain it. Eat whatever you want. The get Beck to help you master self-defeating psychological behaviors.