The big lie--CaloriesDO count!

There is a big, big secret the diet people don't want you to know. They don't what you to know that the only way to loose weight is to burn off more calories than you absorb.

Everything you read about diets is simply a way to disguise that fact. Diets that want you to limit you intake of carbohydrates to ridiculously low levels are really trying to force a change in your metabolism that will make it harder for your body to use and store the food you eat. Diets that talk about balancing food groups in a complicated manner are attempting to displace calorie-dense foods (high in fats and processed sugars) with lower-calorie vegetables and lean proteins. High-fiber diets are trying to get you to fill up on fiber, which your body can't use or store, so you don't eat a lot of higher calorie foods.

But the long ans short of it is this: Of every meal you eat, you will be able to absorb a certain percentage of it. The rest, for whatever reason, will pass though your intestines and out of your body. Of that percentage of food absorbed, part or all of it will be used to maintain your body, and part of it will be used to power your muscles and brain and you go through your day. IF you absorb more than you need, the sugars (from fruit, vegetables, grains, and some dairy products, as well as sweets and snacks) and fats that you ate will get stored as fat, and the excess amino acids (from protein sources like meat, eggs, and so on) will be processed out of the body by the kidneys. If you absorb less than you need, your body will start converting fatty tissue, and to a lesser extent muscle, into glucose, which is the form of sugar used by the cells. Therefore, if you absorb more energy than you can use, you will store it as fat. Eat less, and that stored fat has to get used up to power the body.

(High-protein diets attempt to short-cut this process by only giving the body amino acids, which are very hard to convert into glucose, thus forcing the body to look into its fat stores sooner. This only works until the body catches on and starts getting good at making protein into glucose, which makes the whole high-protein thing pointless. It's also super-hard on the kidneys and by definition contains a lot of saturated fats, which is why I don't recommend it.)

The thing that helped me more than anything else, hands down, was to start keeping a food diary and counting calories. I resisted this for years, and then I could never understand why I could never loose weight. The food diary was a revelation. Some days I was amazed by how much I had eaten, and then some times I was horrified by how few calories I had consumed.

Now that you know which are the healthy foods to eat and which to avoid, the next thing is to find out how many calories you need and how many calories your food is providing.