How to Lose Fat Quickly and Easily

You want to know how to lose fat quickly. Don't we all?

Most other websites out there that talk about weight-loss / fat-loss, especially if they say "quick and easy", are sales pages that want to sell you:

• fabulous supplements that are guaranteed to make you shed pounds - and don't work worth a damn
• somebody's fabulous exercise program on DVD or in a book, guaranteed to reveal the "secrets" of fat-busting ninja exercises
• somebody's fabulous diet program on DVD or in a book, guaranteed to have you shedding pounds and keeping them off, using the amazing secret techniques (or foods) hitherto unrevealed anywhere

Look, instead of a long, intense page of high-pressure selling, with a "sales-close" and a link to a shopping basket every three paragraphs, to sell you the amazing straight dope on how to lose fat quickly and easily, why don't we just use this page to TELL you the straight dope for free?

No, really.

The keys are simple and we'll say 'em quick, then spend the rest of the page filling out some details.

Here's the simplest statement of how to lose fat quickly, and you've heard it before:

AVOID PROCESSED FOODS

It doesn't get more simple than that

Literally, if you eat only freshly prepared foods that you make yourself, from fresh or frozen ingredients, you will become slimmer and healthier with little additional effort.

Really.

That wasn't glamorous enough

No, it wasn't, was it?

You want something that sounds like a magic trick?

AVOID "WHITE" FOODS

What have you got against white?

Nothing, really. But you wanted a magic trick, and that's one that works, if you really want to know how to lose fat quickly.

White food magically makes you fat?

It's not "magic" and it's nothing to do with the color white, per se. It just happens that most refined carbohydrates, starches, tend to be white. Think of sugar. Think of flour. Think of cornstarch. Think of potato-anything (well that's not particularly refined, but 'taters are in a class by themselves... ok, not quite alone... they share a spot with bananas).

The worst thing for you is pretty much anything that combines sugar, flour, and fat. So, we've just described pretty much anything that comes out of a bakery.

And that describes pretty much anything that the processed-food biz throws at you. Come to think of it, even potato chips are not far off that description. The starches in cooked potatoes are very easy to digest, half a notch above sugar, having started simple and then gotten simpler by the cooking. If the cooking process adds fat, you are doomed.

So no more fries and chips/crisps - but you were talking about flour, sugar...?

Indeed. That was short-hand. Certainly, wheat flour is a constituent of many, many things put out by the processed-food industry. Flour and sugars of various sorts are used to put texture back into "foods" that have had the life processed out of them. For example, what business does flour have in soup?

How about sugar? If your Momma or Gramma made soup, did they add sugar? Didn't think so. Did it still taste good? Thought so.

So if it says "flour" or "sugar" on the label, don't buy it?

Also, don't eat it.

But some of the worst things that the food industry will do to you are not explicitly labelled "flour" or "sugar". Perhaps the worst sugar you can put in your face comes from corn, not from cane or beets. If the label mentions corn syrup or corn syrup solids or just corn/maize in any form, put it down and back away. That's as far as you can get from how to lose fat quickly. In fact, that's how to pack it ON quickly.

Corn starch, corn sugar, corn syrup, modified corn syrup, corn solids, modified corn solids, corn gluten... and those are just the ingredients where they admit it's corn. There's a much longer list of chemicals that are based on corn but don't have the actual word "corn" in the name.

"Corn" by any other name

By the way, for you Brits and Aussies (and let's not forget New Zealanders) when we North Americans say "corn", we refer to what you call maize.

Any French guys reading this? We're talking about "mais" and "des grains de mais" and derivatives thereof.

Spanish guys? You've probably figured out that we're talking about "maiz".

Germans? Just like the French, only you capitalize it "Mais". Dutch/Nederlanders? "maïs" hope the diacritical above the "i" comes out properly in your browser...

Danes and Swedes call it "majs ". Finns write it as "maissi".

Oh, heck, you guys can run the Google translator as well as we can.

It's industrial corn, and it has a lot of uses in thousands of processed foods, and it's been modified to the point that many humans react badly to it in even small quantities. But we don't react by obvious allergy or food-sensitivity symptoms. Instead, we react by having our hormones go even wonkier than they do with processed cane and beet sugars.

Some people think that's accidental and unintentional on the part of Monsanto and the other conglomerates that developed modern industrial field and feed corn. The less trusting of us admit that it might have been an accidental development, but it's no longer unintentional (if it ever was). This is the biggest point in how to lose fat quickly.

Is there a reason for this, or is MHT just down on food companies?

Both.

If you want to keep yourself slim and healthy (ok, if you are reading this, you probably want to get to be slim and healthy, first...) then the only sections you should visit in the supermarket are:

• Produce
• Meat and fish
• Dairy (selected portions of cheese and eggs sections)
• Frozen (produce)

And, not every part of those sections either.

So, if you are paying attention, then that means you should avoid most of the store, including:

• Bakery
• Frozen processed stuff - desserts, "instant" frozen meals, and frozen french-fries, etc.
• The entire middle of the store where everything is in packages and foil-and-plastic bags and has lists of ingredients that are mostly unpronounceable

That was the quick summary of how to lose fat quickly.

That will make me thin?

No, not "thin" like skinny. More like slim and strong. (Remember, this is how to lose fat quickly, not how to lose muscle.)

Why?

Because your body was not designed last week. Oh drat! We said "designed". We need to clarify before the holy war starts.

If you subscribe to so-called "Intelligent Design", then your god literally designed your body just a few thousand years ago, but even so there were no food factories in those days. Man has added all such embellishments to the food chain in the intervening years since your creator submitted the final design for his own approval.

If you subscribe to the evolutionist view, then "design" is not meant literally; we mean that the body you have today is the result of millennia of evolution, and virtually all of that evolution took place before there were food companies, in fact lo-o-o-o-ong before there were even farms.

So, despite how helpful a bunch of agri-biz companies want to be, to sell you their nicely packaged formulations, those aren't good for you. Your body doesn't know how to react properly to modern "food" concoctions, assuming that there's any right way to react.

When humans were becoming human, everything that we (our ancestors) ate was fresh. There was no processing more complicated than drying or cooking, and even cooking (the taming of fire) came rather late in the whole process.

We've learned many things since then, and developed amazing technologies, but the ways that our bodies work today are pretty much the way human bodies worked 50,000+ years ago.

That simple realization has a lot to do with how to lose fat quickly and easily.

So, all processing is bad?

Heck no! We'll have our animals cooked, thank you very much. And many (most?) plants need cooking to make them soft enough to eat or digest.

You can get nasty diseases from both animal and plant material, so it makes sense to clean it really well and/or to cook it.

But don't overdo the cooking.

A Scottish friend of ours goes for tartar (raw) meat and such, but even he admits that's an over-reaction to his mother's old-country raised-in-war-time habit of boiling or baking everything to death. He says he didn't discover that food had actual flavor until he moved away from home. Still, there's got to be a happy medium between "pot-roast" boiled until it's grey, and chopped raw beef... though we'll take the beef tartar before the overcooked stuff any day.

On the other hand, never, ever accept an offer of pork tartar. :-)

Anyway, it's the additional processing that much of the food industry throws at their ingredients before they get to the grocer's shelf that we want to avoid. We want to avoid processed, boxed stuff if we're interested in how to lose fat quickly, and how to keep it off easily.

Take canning, for instance.

Canning was a fine idea for preserving foods and for lugging them with you on long treks across the prairie. It was a big improvement over salting everything that had to last more than two days. But that was before refrigeration came along.

Just as you don't see many sedan-chairs and travois any more, in an age of much better forms of transportation, there's also rarely a time that canned food is preferable to fresh or frozen. Even freeze-dried food retains more food value than does most canned food.

We don't actually eat much canned stuff at our house...

Nor do we. That was just an example.

Most of the food processing that goes on these days is considerably more complicated than canning, and most of it was developed long after canning, so the newer methods are "new and improved"... always a selling point. But here's the deal. While the food industry is selling you on how "convenient" their stuff is, their real motivation for most of the processing and additives is their own convenience.

If you've been alive more than a couple of years, you'll recall that most labels on most packaged foods used to read like fairly advanced chemistry books (and many still do). And not a single one of all those polysyllabic testaments to food technology was intended for your health and well-being.

It was preservatives, stabilizers, binders, thickeners, thinners, colors, bleaches, and so on. Most were probably not going to give you cancer or make your liver go funny - when ingested in the quantities found in the particular package. Of course, most people don't eat just one box/bag/can of chemistry-set food. There were all the other packages you were opening and pouring down your gullet, with all their doses of chemicals-you-don't-need, piling up, cumulatively.

But if you've checked the shelves lately, many canned and packaged things have been appearing with the "health-conscious" shopper in mind. Look at one of the new Campbell soup cans and compare the label with the older product line. You might think of Hilton (Campbell employee in their TV ad) wearing a hair net and white clothes and standing in a room filled with 9-million teaspoons of salt. In many cases, it's not just salt that they've been reducing or eliminating....

... which leads one to wonder why, if they can make soups today with just a few relatively wholesome ingredients, why did their soup labels read like the contents of a chemistry set for the past several decades?

Why pick on Campbell?

Sheesh! It was just an example.

Look, we've been around the block - and had the odd university-level organic and inorganic chemistry courses - so we are aware that everything in the world is "chemicals". We ain't hicks. What gives us pause is the totally artificial nature of industrial food processing.

We just think it's wrong to eat something that's been run through a process and a production plant that's almost indistinguishable from what happens to wood in a pulp-mill, and then has to have color added to make it stop being grey, and "flavor" added to make it stop tasting and smelling like... poop.

There are some forms of processing that add real value to raw ingredients. Hell, some forms of processing add art ! Think of little old Italian gents brewing up small batches of real Balsamic vinegars, the kind that end up costing $40 a bottle and are worth it. Think of wine or beer - now there's some processing that adds value, no?

Now think of another kind of processing that adds value. Remember the last time you were at a good restaurant, and the chef took the freshest of ingredients and subjected them to the minimum of whatever technique or procedure was needed to produce a masterful result? It looked, smelled, and tasted wonderful, and almost every ingredient was bought that morning at a farmer's market in your town.

HANDS UP IF YOU WATCH THE FOOD CHANNEL!

Iron Chef?

Any of the TV chefs, if you watch them, is going to talk about "the freshest" ingredients. They know a thing or two.

So there's the secret? Fresh food?

Um, yes and no. Remember, you are looking for tips on how to lose fat quickly.

You have to eat.

You might as well eat what your body needs and can best use. You also might as well eat things that won't make you crave what makes you fat.

Oh-ho! THAT sounds more like the secret!

Yes and no. It's the basic thing that works, but it's not secret.

Really simple:

a) avoid starchy stuff and anything with flour or sugar added

b) eat produce that's fresh if it's local, or frozen if it would have had to travel far to reach your table

c) if your blood type is O or B, consider eating low-carb style while you lose weight, then add back only non-refined carbs when you've reached your goal - so lots of meat and fish and low-carb veggies while you lose weight quickly and easily, then bring back the fruits and some starchier veggies, but no baked goodies;

d) if your blood type is A or AB, consider more fish and less red meat than we recommend for those other guys (above), and you can probably do tofu if that turns your crank, but otherwise do similar to the meat eaters during your fat-loss period, then add in non-refined carbs after you've hit goal.

You make it sound so simple and easy

It is.

It's simple to say and do. Most people stumble where it's supposed to beeasy, as well as simple. It's easy to do, in the sense of not requiring struggle and will-power... or perhaps "won't-power", if you just do what you are being told.

The "easy" part is where you are strict with yourself for just a few days, until you get past the cravings hump, and then it literally gets easier to stay on that style of eating.

Unlike many other types of diet, one that eliminates the starchy and processed stuff also eliminates the cravings for desserts or chips or [fill in your particular diet-downfall here].

Is it magic?

Damn near!

But it's not secret magic.

It's been known for years. It's been widely talked up, for years.

Then why isn't everybody doing it?

C'mon. You already know the answer.

Think about it for a minute.

There are still dozens and hundreds of diet books and plans and systems and supplements and .... and... .... and what do they have in common?

The ones that shout the loudest are the ones that require you to keep sending them money.

How much money is there to be made from telling you in a few short paragraphs to avoid sugar, flour, and starch and processed foods, and that's how to lose fat quickly?

Pretty much none.

You mean there's not a sales pitch coming?

Not for weight loss. There might be low-key sales efforts on a few of our other pages about other topics, because there are products or services that we believe in for this-or-that condition or need... or just to somehow make your life better. But here, no.

There's no magic to weight loss, and no product we could sell you. We know that hurts to hear. Magic seems so much .... much... niftier. We've seen people embrace "magic" solutions that actually demand far more work and deprivation than just the simple "eat fresh-ish food and avoid starches and processing".

You know us, by now. We advocate doing things that:

a) are really easy, and not just pretend-easy

b) produce real effects, that last, not just short-term all-in-your-mind "feel-good" effects that evaporate quickly.

We don't like doing stuff the hard way, when there's a legitimately easier and more effective way. We don't like wasting our time - we're old enough that we treasure each fleeting moment - or our money - we treasure our hard-earned pennies, too.

Back to How to lose fat quickly...

There will continue to be refinements, of course, but really once

• Robert Atkins (Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution), and
• Michael and Mary Eades (Protein Power), and
• Rick Gallop (The GI Diet), and maybe
• Rachel and Richard Heller (The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet)

had published their books, there wasn't much major left to say.

You can buy any of their books - or just visit the library to read 'em for free. The books provide more detailed explanations and guidance, but you just had the important bits on this page.

The main advice - again - to just avoid starchy stuff is so simple, and easy to do. Easy in two ways:

• It's easy, in the sense that all you have to do is keep a few guidelines in mind, or read the occasional label to see if it's got a lot of carbs. But you just don't even bother to count calories.
• It's easy, in the sense that after a couple or three days of tough sledding (resisting urges), it suddenly begins to become almost effortless to ignore the bad "food".

So, no hard thinking and no hard resisting are needed.

You certainly don't get into micro-managing foolishness like the Zone diet, or like any of those mix-and-match diets (don't have this with that, always have that with this, never ever mix these and those... oy, our heads hurt just thinking about it... so we'll stop thinking about it, and so should you).

Go forth and have steak and salad or steak and mushrooms - but forego the 'taters. Or lamb and green beans (with lotsa butter)! But again, no potatoes and no mint jelly. Have eggs and bacon for breakfast, but skip the toast and jam or bagel. No OJ. And let us inject this right here: even if you aren't on a diet, avoid fruit juices as much as you avoid soda-pop and other flavored sugar-water. If you like oranges, eat oranges; don't drink the juice from a bottle. If you like apples, eat apples; don't drink apple juice. Even grapefruit is yummy when you peel it and pop juicy sections in your mouth - you don't need it in a bowl with sugar, and you don't need to drink the juice. Eating fruit is mostly lots better for you than drinking just the juice (see any text on hypoglycemia). Now back to our regularly scheduled what-to-eat-if-you're-a-carnivore.

Salmon and spinach (again, butter... spinach likes butter.... trust us...)

It'll seem a little tough for about three days. Then, it'll get rapidly easier, and you'll wonder why people at the office are flocking to the muffin and donut tray at break time. It just won't interest you.

How can this be?

Because it takes only a few days for your body to recognize proper eating and to stop bothering you with cravings for stuff that's bad for you.

Here's the "secret" (it's in any of those books we mentioned): the foods that are bad for you - and make you fat - are what make you crave more of the foods that are bad for you. Most of them just stimulate a lot of insulin, which converts all the extra carbs in your blood into fat and then goes looking for more - that's the craving.

Eliminate those foods for just the tough first few days, and they lose their power. The chemistry inside your body literally changes (for the better), and the processes that would have had you craving sweets or mashed potatoes, or breads and pastas, those processes are switched off.

Make a deliberate effort to stop putting them into your face for a few days, and thereafter it becomes easy to keep going. That's how to lose fat quickly and easily - people fall off the wagon because they see endless deprivation in their future; if you just avoid the starchy crap long enough for it to get out of your system, then eating real food stops feeling like deprivation. That's pretty much the same as saying cravings go away.

How quickly?

It's different for everybody. But, if you are going seriously low-carb in order to jump-start your fat-loss, then you'll drop at least five pounds the first week. Probably more like seven to ten if you are a big boy.

That sounds too good to be true

Well, as we keep saying... yes and no.

It's "too good to be true" because it doesn't last at that rate.

It's "not too good to be true" because we know why it happens. If you're a medium-sized guy ---- or would be if you weren't fat --- then the typical seven-plus pounds that you'll lose in the first week will be two or three pounds of fat and the rest just water.

Water?

Yep. Again, see any of those books that we mentioned. When you live the high-carb way, your body stores glucose (the form of sugar to which it eventually converts all incoming carbohydrates) in your muscles (and elsewhere) as glycogen.

Glycogen is glucose bound up with some water to make it easier to store as a local, easily-accessible fuel. ANY extra, beyond what can be stored as glycogen gets converted to fat.

When you go low-carb, your body uses that local fuel the same as you normally would. But the difference is that you have stopped importing new carbs to make replacement glycogen. The muscles and other tissues become depleted of glycogen as you switch over to fat-burning mode.

The water that is unbound from the glycogen - as it is taken out of storage and made into glucose and consumed - that water gets peed out or sweated out of you, and you lose that water weight from your body.

So it's not a sham - at least two or three pounds of fat goes away?

Yep. And if you are really strict about low-carb, it'll continue at that rate of a pound or two per week for many more weeks.

One of your authors here lost about 14 pounds in five weeks of not-very-strict low-carb - and that's just "so far" (when this was written). There's a story in "About Us" about a weight-loss challenge at his office, and he was going to owe money until he smartened up and went low-carb.

Following that success, he's remained not-very-strict, with a few days off here and there, and has since lost more weight without feeling deprived, and without doing a whole lot of exercise.

So he's gonna be skinny, soon?

Nope. Not on low-carb.

His muscles are not ginormous or anything, but they aren't shrinking, and some are even growing a little, without any real exercise.

THAT, friend, is the other beauty of low-carb eating. It promotes muscle, without half trying. You have to be lazy-ass slack to not accidentally put on muscle when you eat low-carb. Muscles like all that protein and fat, and they get lots of other necessary stuff from the salads and green veggies that you consume with the steaks and chops and slabs of fish....... excuse us, we're going to go raid the refrigerator ... sudden urge ... back in a bit.

OK, we're back. A couple of bites of hot Italian sausage and some MacLaren's Cold-pack cheddar kinda hit the spot.

Tomorrow morning's breakfast is a chunk of left-over steak, to go with a couple of over-easy eggs.

Yes, you can eat like that and lose weight. It just happens.

Then why doesn't everybody do it?

Well, many people are brainwashed and imagine that all that meat and fat is bad for them, when in truth it would only be bad if it was consumed along with starchy carbohydrate foods (bread, potatoes, pasta, rice).

Without those starches and sugars to call up insulin, the meat and fat gets used as it properly should ( as building/repair material and as fuel) and is no hazard at all. On a solidly low-carb diet, you consume huge amounts of cholesterol and your blood levels of cholesterol go down!

But if all you hear and read is that you must limit your intake of fat and cholesterol, etc., yadda-yadda, then you cower in fear at the thought of a healthy low-carbohydrate diet. Kinda cuts down the number of converts. Which is exactly the point of a lot of the propaganda out there.

What all the "meat is bad" and "fat is bad" propaganda doesn't mention is what's in the fine print... or what's missing from most of the studies that they [mis-]quote. Next time somebody tells you how you are killing yourself by eating eggs and steak and lamb and pork and duck, ask them to show you where it says that the study tested people who were not eating any starches.

Pretty much guaranteed, if you find a study that says eating meat and eggs raises your serum (in your bloodstream) cholesterol, and therefore your risk of deadly diseases, then the subjects/participants were also eating starchy food. They were eating mashed or baked or fried potatoes with their meat. They were eating toast or bagel or biscuit with their eggs, or drinking juice.

If you find studies where people ate meat and eggs and other terrible stuff like that and yet they obstinately failed to have increased blood cholesterol, it'll turn out that they ate nothing else, or they ate salad greens and green beans and spinach and broccoli, etc., and they had NO bread or pasta, no juice and sugar, no potatoes or rice.

Also, remember that bell curve that we talk about on so many of our pages? The population distribution for weight-loss is subject to the normal distribution, too.

For at least half the population, the meat-heavy version of low-carb eating is not all that effective. If you happen to have blood-type A or AB, you'll probably tend to tolerate carbs better than us Os and Bs, and if you do low-carb anyway, you'll much prefer chicken, fish, tofu, and to get your fat from vegetable sources like olive and nut oils.

Any other reason that people aren't doing low-carb?

Spouses and girl-friends. :-)

Guys will do a lot of stupid things to impress a girl, or to keep peace with somebody they're living with. Somebody who's a natural carnivore will try to turn himself into a vegetarian, for example.

Then, after some months (or longer) he'll wonder why he's just not thriving, why life seems hard, why he doesn't have the pep he once did, and why his muscles have shrunk. His sex life will suffer too, partly because (see above, he's not thriving) and possibly because he's growing to resent his girlfriend.

Really, if you have been a burgers-and-fries guy (and beer with that, sir?) for years, and are wearing the hefty paunch to prove it, your S.O. is already critical of your diet - unless she's even bigger and sloppier than you are. More likely, since women are socialized to rely on appearance more than men do, she'll have kept herself in better shape and be holding that over you. She'll also have been resenting YOU because:

a) you didn't seem to care and let yourself go

b) she's been in a constant state of (angry?) self-deprivation for years, trying to keep herself slim and attractive (whether she actually succeeded or not).

So, now you decide that you are going to cut out just the carb-ish parts of your slob diet and keep all the meat and cheese and eggs and seafood... and she's going to be all primed to sabotage you at every turn.

Imagine how affronted she'll be if, after years of depriving herself while watching you turn into a jelly-roll consuming huge piles of junk, she has to watch you trim-down, muscle up, gain vigor and joy in life again, AND keep forking into your face all these foods she's been told are evil, nasty... unhealthy!

If she doesn't go off in your face about it, she'll be constantly wheedling and putting you into situations where "just a little bread isn't going to hurt".

Or worse, she'll hit you right where you live. "Honey, I haven't enjoyed a beer in a while, and you haven't touched any since you started this low-carb thing. What do you say to just one little evening at the pub with [names of friends]?" And the killer: "... I'm buying. You coming?"

It'll be even worse if you two are at different ends of the spectrum and she's really (not just in her mind, but really-for-real) one of those people for whom high-carb works and low-carb is just a misery that does them no good.

She might not care that you've found how to lose fat quickly and comfortably, if she's convinced that you are deluded and are killing yourself.

There are all kinds of reasons why your success might be actively opposed by people close to you.

Yeah, that gang at the office...

Yep. Some will just cajole you to come along and have some brewskis and not be a soda-water-drinking party-poop. Others, once they see you being successful, will publicly question your manhood or otherwise try quite hard to subvert your success.

We suggest just one bit of exercise while you are low-carbing. Not that we discourage any other exercise - hell, do as much as you want, as much as you can stand. But if you prefer not, then do just one. Get one of those spring-grip hand exercisers, or a squeezable ball. Squeeze it. A lot.

The high-protein, low-carb diet will ensure that your grip becomes quite impressively strong in a few weeks.

Then, when one of the bozos tries to humiliate you into conforming, paste a big smile on your face and say something like: "Oh, I know you didn't mean to say something as insulting as that. We really ought to behave like adults and gentlemen, don't you think?" And reach to shake his hand.

Yes. You see this coming. Keep the smile on your face and keep the nicely-nicely "civilized gentlemen" patter going while you crush his hand to a pulp.

Um. One thing. If the guy is a semi-pro rock-climber and built like a stack of steel cables, that won't work. A few weeks of squeeze-toy won't get your grip-strength anywhere near his. We think you're smart enough to spend those weeks doing a little detective work to not get caught out like that. Instead, just key his car. :-)

Time to sum up

The Atkins website has online carb-counter tables for most common foods. Any of the books we mentioned can fill in more details and expand on the explanations - basically, low-carb tames the insulin, and you start to heal, which means your weight and proportion of fat start to normalize.

It's handier to have your own copies of such informative books at home, but it's cheaper to borrow from the library. Your choice.

Once you get past the first few days of strangeness, the very fact of keeping the starchy carbs out of your face makes it easier to keep them out of your face, and the major obstacle becomes social... other people. Manage that, and you'll be lean and strong and happy in just a few easy months.

Even if you are an alcoholic, if you eat low-carb for a while - and that means not drinking alcohol either, in case you missed that connection - then the alcohol craving will also diminish. Unfortunately, it won't go away, but many alcoholics do report that staying off the sauce is much easier if they keep all carbs out of their faces.

If you are not alcoholic, then once you remove the chemically-induced craving (by eliminating carb-ish food and drink), your only real inducement to drink beer/wine/booze is social. People in your circle will very quickly line up in two camps - those who support and applaud your effort, and those who will do everything they can to drag you off the wagon. From that latter bunch, you'll suddenly get more invitations out to lunch or the pub than you ever got before you found out how to lose fat quickly. Guess which of those two groups are your real friends?

Wait, wait, wait - what about cost? Meat is more expensive than lentils and potatoes.

True. Very true. Your food bill might increase a bit.

On the other hand, you probably didn't get fat because you ate lentils and potatoes. You got fat because you ate a lot of meals at burger joints and fake-Mexican fast-food joints, and/or because you bought lots of pizzas or ready-made shove-it-in-the-nuker packaged meals, and/or you drank a lot of beer (or, like us, you never met a chocolate-fudge brownie that you didn't like). Not saying those are necessarily true, just the most likely culprits.

You eliminate all those carb-rich "goodies", and you've just freed up the money to buy a lot of steaks and thick, juicy lamb-chops and lobsters and scallops... oooohooo, we might need to raid the fridge again.

Also, think of all the money you've saved on diet gimmicks that wouldn't have worked anyway.

So there you have it: how to lose fat quickly and easily.

Go forth and shrink!

Epilog

Weight-Watchers and Jenny Craig, and many other programs that seem to attract a lot of women, sorta work for women. They don't really work all that well, especially not in the long term .

Sure they have hundreds of testimonials - gushing, or tearfully-grateful, by turns - but that's always a snapshot (from the moment when each woman had just achieved a goal), and it's a select sample from millions of customers, so take with grain-of-salt.

We had a woman at our office a few years ago who started the L.A. Weight-Loss program. She was diligent and was seeing tremendous results. The L.A. Weight-Loss people actually sent her for a photo-shoot and featured her 70-pound loss story in some of their advertising. But...

Between the time of the photo-shoot and the time that the woman's pictures and story actually went to publication, she had put back half of that weight. A few months later, while that ad was still in circulation, she was back to looking like the "before" picture. But nobody who was reading about the fabulous success of L.A. Weight-Loss would ever see that part of her story. She was back to her pre-plan weight, and she's even gained additional poundage since then.

We have nothing but admiration for that woman. It was no fault of hers that she couldn't stay with that plan. We're amazed that anybody could do it as "successfully" as she did, for the time that she did. We know she didn't lack for will-power, and we also know she is not lacking in intelligence, because she put herself through engineering school with high marks, and was one of the nicest, most effective, most helpful, and most sought-after go-to persons at the company. Nevertheless, with all that going for her, she couldn't defeat biology. Nor can most people.

But women's psychology keeps 'em trying. After all, that's the same psychology that has some women marrying convicts and addicts [you somehow have to say this one with an over-dramatized southern-belle accent] -- all together now -- "Ah can chayunge heeyum. Ah jes' know he'll turn himself around foah me."

For those who aren't deluded, but who still stay with the weight-loss programs for years, well it's a social club. They keep losing the same six pounds over and over and cooing encouragingly at each other about it (the equivalent of Tupperware parties, candle parties, etc.; there's even a homepartyplannetwork.com site).

Guys mostly don't have those sorts of quirks. We have our own quirks... that the ladies will be happy to discuss... at length... in detail. :-)

If you are going to eliminate starches and carb-ish nasties from your life, and regain the body you always thought you should have (and that your wife/partner thinks you should have), then the single best help to achieve that - in addition to knowledge - is a wife/partner who is genuinely supportive. Nothing will make it easier for the longer term.

If she's also one who thrives on low-carb - and knows it - then you, friend, have got it made.

What comes after Epilog?

Just this:

We mentioned on another page that losing weight is a matter of taking in fewer calories than you burn in a given period. Thirty-five-hundred calories per pound that you want to lose.

You can either cut back intake by that much, or increase how many you consume, or do a bit of both.

If you want to do some exercise, you could visit a site like http://www.drgily.com/exercise-calorie-counter.php that lets you:

• Pick an exercise (including the degree of intensity, for some exercises)
• Enter the duration of that exercise
• Enter your current weight

And it will calculate how many calories you probably burned with that much effort for that amount of time.

Um... cheating doesn't help you. By that we mean, "estimating" a faster or more vigorous intensity for your cycling, walking, running, cross-country skiing, or swimming, than what you actually did (or would/could do), isn't going to make those calories burn any quicker. For other activities, they don't include multiple intensity options, so the only cheating you could do is to exaggerate how long you performed the exercise ("Yeah, I shovelled the snow off my front walk, then I shovelled down the sidewalk for a couple of blocks..." no, you didn't).

Another site, www.gmaps-pedometer.com will let you map out the route you take for outdoors running or cycling, and based on your current weight, will tell you how many calories you burn by walking or running that route. Prepare to be disappointed. It's less than you think.

Either of those sites, or many others can help you get a feel for how much effort you need to expend in order to:

a) burn off a pound of flab

b) burn off that pizza you just ate, so it doesn't pack some more fat onto your already-chubby girth.

At the same time, there are umpteen sites that will tell you how many calories you can expect in servings of many kinds of food... just be sure that you make a note of the portion size that a given site is using for a given kind of food. If anything, we'd check with a few different sites and average out their numbers.

HINT: If two sites give exactly identical calorie counts (or glycemic index counts, or carb counts, or... whatever), for several foods, then it's likely that those two sites are using the same engine or the same database to answer your queries, so try to find a comparison site that comes from a different place, to help keep your research as honest as possible.

OK, your head is full. You can go now.