STOP!!! ------- If you can't be bothered reading more than the first sentence, then BUY A CALORIE BOOK for about US$5 and COUNT CALORIES. That is incredibly cheap, and the one thought that I want to make sure is firmly in your mind. You do not need to buy anything more, or pay anyone for services. There is a whole industry associated with weight loss, most of it trying to make it sound like it's incredibly complex to lose weight, and that you are in desperate need of their services. You don't need it. All the info you require is right here. So here's the basic rule. There is something called "The First Law of Thermodynamics", which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed. What this means, is that if the energy you spend (be it exercising or merely breathing) is MORE than the energy you take in (from eating) then you have a "problem"! The energy cannot and does not come from thin air, or mysterious as yet undiscovered forces. There is only one place for the energy to come from, and that is your body. Normally from the fat stores, but it can also come from the muscle. When the fat and muscle runs out, you die. And in that process, you go from being fat, to being average, to being slim, to looking like a concentration camp inhabitant, to being dead as a doornail. It's an immutable sequence of events, there are no special cases that stay fat even in a concentration camp. Everyone gets skinny and dies. EVERYONE. And now for the really wonderful news. Your body uses up a LOT of energy, just pumping blood around and breathing etc. You will spend far more energy in a week just lying in bed than you are likely to do exercising in that same week. And more wonderful news. It also doesn't matter what the source of the energy is. It can be chocolate or vegetables. The ONLY thing that matters is the total amount of energy that goes into your mouth. Compared to the total amount of energy your body used. Doesn't matter if it's high in fat, high in salt, high in sugar, weight loss simply doesn't care. These things DO matter if you're worried about cholesterol and getting sufficient vitamins so that you don't get scurvy and other health problems, but do NOT matter for weight loss. No need to eat rabbit food! The energy that you expend just breathing etc is called the "Basal Metabolic Rate" (BMR). You can get an ESTIMATE of this for yourself at: http://www.runnersweb.com/running/bmr.html You will find that exercise is pretty hard slog, and you'll be lucky to do 400 calories for an hour at the gym. So even if you did an hour every day, if your BMR is 2000, you can see that exercise is going to be a nice topup, but excruciatingly difficult. So don't rely on exercise to lose weight. Exercise is important for other health reasons, but once again, vastly overrated for weight loss. Now get out your calorie book, or go to: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl or download from: http://www.ars.usda.gov/nutrientdata And have a look at what a glass of orange juice is. About 90 calories for 200ml. You should get a day pass to the local gym and go on the treadmill and find out just how much effort is required to expend 90 calories. For me, that's about 15 minutes. Also hop on the cycle and the rowing machine, and see how long it takes you to burn 90 calories. When you can actually appreciate what 90 calories is, you will never look at a glass of orange juice the same way again. Don't just read the above and say "yeah, I'm sure that's true". Actually get in your car, drive to the gym, pay the US$8 or whatever to get a day pass, go in, and hop on all those machines. It will be an interesting experience in your life. If you want, ring up the gym before you go, and make sure their treadmills have a display of how many calories have been used. Another thing you should get from the gym or your doctor, is a caliper test, to find out how much body fat (in kg) you are carrying. Or if you're lazy, you can just get an estimate of your ideal body weight from here: http://www.indoorclimbing.com/Protein_Requirement.html and subtract that from your current weight. From the same site, get your daily protein requirements as well, for use later. Let's say you estimate that you are 20kg overweight. That is 20 000g. Each gram of fat has 9 calories of energy in it. So that means you have 180 000 calories of stored energy. If your BMR was 2000, and you didn't eat anything at all, and didn't exercise, it would take 90 days to use this up, and then you'd be on the verge of starvation. However, you can't do things like this without serious health implications, like death, so this is not the way to lose weight. The most extreme you should even imagine doing, is a liquid protein diet, with multivitamin supplement, under doctor supervision. That's the sort of thing that Oprah Winfrey was on. But, as you can tell by Oprah's failure to keep the weight off, that is not the way to diet successfully. To do it successfully, you need to find something you can live with in the long term. And that MAY be easier than you think - it comes down to an individual taste. In my case, I went from 78kg to 103.5kg in the space of 10 years. 10 years is 3650 days. I put on 25.5kg. Or 25 500g. Or 229 500 calories. Or 63 calories per day. Or 2/3 of a glass of orange juice. That's right, if I had cut out just 2/3 of a glass of orange juice, or 1.5 squares of white chocolate, or simply switched from normal Coke to Diet Coke, I wouldn't have got fat in the first place. Incredible. (The maths is a bit more complicated than that, since the calorie requirements go up as you put on weight, but that's reasonably close for the figures under discussion). But in order to LOSE weight, I had to do a bit more than that. E.g. if I cut out 4/3 glasses of orange juice, then over the next 10 years my weight would have gone back to what it used to be. A switch to diet softdrink (which is virtually 0 calories), may well be a small, insignificant change to your lifestyle. The more insignificant it is, the more likely you are to keep to the diet. And the more likely you are to keep the weight off after you're back to your old weight. Diets have an approximately 95% failure rate. Because as soon as the diet ends, people go back to their old habits. And the old habits were what got you fat in the first place! And are guaranteed to take you back there. Because if you eat just 9 calories more than you use, in a day, then you are going to put on 1 gram of fat. And over time, that 1 gram adds up to be very significant indeed. So here's what you need to do: 1. Calculate your BMR. 2. Keep a diary of what you eat (and DON'T change your diet), and add up how many calories you eat each day. 3. Assuming (2) is greater than (1), the difference, divided by 9 (or 7, depending), is the estimate of how many grams you put on each day. 4. You should be able to verify this by seeing how much you have put on in the last year, and see how closely the numbers match. Because of inherent inaccuracies in all the figures, don't expect it to match exactly, but it should put you in the ballpark. 5. Find the minimum change to your lifestyle to get a deficit of about 500 calories per day. A 500 calorie deficit is a good deficit to have, as you will lose weight at a rate of 0.5 kg/week. BUT, you will have to be careful of one thing. Even in a single day, your body weight may go up and down by 2kg! This is mostly due to water retention, which comes and goes of it's own accord. Therefore, at this rate, you will not see instant daily results, but instead see it by the end of the month. And if a 500 calorie deficit is too difficult for you to achieve, then 200 calories would see you having to measure it over a 3 month period. Small women have a particular problem. Their BMR is so low that a 500 calorie deficit is too big a change to their lifestyle to ask for. So instead you'll have to live with the fact that change will come slowly (but sustainably), or switch to a temporary diet (or temporary exercise). Big men are far luckier! We can just lie in bed and let the food deficit do all the hard work. In fact, the more overweight you are, the bigger the losses will be. Because even fat requires energy to maintain! I lost weight at a rapid rate in this manner. I ate a lot of chicken fillet. I even ate significant amounts of chocolate, like 100g in a sitting, when I wasn't even hungry. But in all cases I counted calories, and made sure I had that 500 calorie deficit, or at least had that as an average. I ended up experimenting to see how large I could make the deficit, so ended up losing even more. A lot of food has "energy/nutrition information" on the pack. You should use this instead of the calorie book you bought from your local newsagent/pharmacy. Sometimes the information is only given in kJ. To convert this into calories, divide the figure by 4.18. If you do weight lifting, you get two gains simultaneously. It is a reasonably good form of exercise, so burns calories. But best of all, it adds muscle, and muscle requires energy to maintain. So even if the muscle isn't being used, it still burns calories. What a deal! Now let's talk about some mythology. There are a huge number of different diets people recommend. Here is a realistic one, that attempted to make a major change to someone's lifestyle... http://members.tripod.com/~tassiedevil/dieting.htm People recommend low-fat, low-carbohydrate, 6 meals a day, 3 meals a day, balanced diet, vegetarian, vegan etc etc. There is nothing necessarily wrong with these diets. So long as they have a caloric deficit, they will indeed work! But why not just create your own that you can keep with you for the rest of your life, rather than resort to eating rabbit food with the inevitable consequences of abandonment and a return to calorie surplus? There are other myths, e.g. a "fat burning zone" when exercising. While it is true that there is a zone where a maximum percentage of fat is used as the fuel of choice for your body, that is completely irrelevant to weight loss! You get an even higher percentage when you're sleeping! Besides some minor quibbles, the only thing that matters is how much energy you burn, not what energy store was used to provide that energy in the short term. If you use 200 calories from food in your stomach instead of 200 calories from fat in your thighs, who cares? You've lost 200 calories of food. Now the next time your body needs to breathe and pump blood, it will have to go to that 200 calories in your thighs, since the food in your stomach has disappeared. It's exactly the same effect! Like I said, there are minor quibbles, such as a little extra energy will be consumed by inefficiencies in making your body convert the carbohydrates to fat, then back to energy. But please base your diet on the major principles, don't get obsessed with minor quibbles. Another problem is that people want to lose fat from a particular area such as the stomach and think that concentrating on stomach crunches will reduce fat in that particular area of the body. No such luck I'm afraid. While you can certainly build muscles in a particular area, the fat will come off in the reverse order that it went on in the first place, and short of emergency liposuction, there's nothing you can do about that. Another myth is that people either put on or lose weight in the presence of stress/emotion. If only it were that easy! Most of these claims revolve around a misinterpretation of data. With water retention causing huge swings even within a single day, you can pretty much use bad science to "prove" anything you want about weight loss. Real loss of fat, as opposed to daily fluctuations of water, need to be measured over a long period specifically to get around the problem of large daily fluctuations. Also when you start dieting you shed a lot of that water immediately, so you get an apparently big loss. A loss which returns when you stop dieting. Also, water contains no calories. So you can drink as much, or as little as you like. Don't listen to the ridiculous 8 glasses per day required. Drink when you're thirsty (although it's harmless to drink that much if you have nothing better to do). Another myth is about drinking cold water, so that energy is consumed to heat it up. Although it is true that it will be heated up, which requires energy, it is WASTE HEAT that will be used to heat it up! Just like exercising in cold weather, it doesn't make any difference, unless you are shivering. If you are shivering your muscles are moving, a form of exercise. You'll probably find the treadmill just as effective and far more comfortable than shivering! Just follow the simple formula: BMR + exercise - food = calorie deficit Just make sure that calorie deficit is something reasonable, like 500, and you will lose weight, as surely as the sun rises. A minor quibble, if you have thyroid problems (rare) then although you will lose fat, you will retain more water, so your weight won't drop. You can ask your doctor about this, and I can tell you already he's going to say you don't have this problem, your only problem is you are eating more than you are burning. So this has now given you all the information you require. You do not need me. There's even a site that can help you with the task of keeping track of calories, http://www.fitday.com Finally, for those of you who are impatient to see results and insist that they just want to see fast results and realise that it's not sustainable long term, and are willing to live with that and just go on periodic diets, well, here's what's possible. On 2008-12-27 I weighed 99.1kg. On 2009-02-15 I weighed 87.8kg. I lost 11.3kg in about 7 weeks, which is a loss of about 1.6kg/week. With no exercise. My BMR started at about 2050 calories/day. I covered my vitamins with a vitamin tablet. That left a protein requirement of 38-67 grams/day. I took the extreme end of that and sought out low-calorie food to give 67g of protein. I sorted the nutritional data on the above US government website by calories/protein and looked for low calorie, protein-rich food. Plus other research. The three foods I found most attractive were chicken breast, egg-white and kangaroo. Ideally I would have had the following as my daily menu: breakfast - chicken breast - 22.1g/132 lunch - 6 egg whites - 25.2g/120 dinner - kangaroo steak - 22g/98 total = 69.3g/350 calories. deficit = 2050-350 = 1700 calories/day = 1700 grams/week (this is a convenient way of remembering things - however many calories you have a deficit of per day is how many grams of fat you will lose in a week). My loss of 1.6kg per week is close to the ideal 1.7kg, but actually my diet was more varied than that. I was too lazy to cook kangaroo steak, and that pretty much applied to the eggs too. The chicken only needed 2.5 minutes in the microwave and it was done. So many days I would eat 3 meal a day of chicken breast. Also with such a large deficit, I could afford to let my hair down on occasion and would eat breakfast cereal or some other food. But I didn't stray too far from that "base diet". But surely you will be hungry? Actually, given how low calorie the chicken breast and egg whites are, you can basically put as many of them down your throat as you want per day and you're unlikely to get a calorie surplus. You may die of monotony, but not hunger. And you will probably find that that food is sufficient to stave off hunger anyway. Especially if you can do it for the first couple of days to allow your body to get used to it. If you like vegetables, then you're in luck, because those are so low calorie too that you can add almost as many as you want. E.g. you could eat 1 kg of peas and only get 612 calories, almost certainly within your budget (assuming 350 calories for the protein above). Just count it to be sure. NOTE - I am not a doctor etc. If you wish to take action based no these suggestions, you may want to run it by your doctor first. Don't send me emails complaining you died of scurvy or something. Of course, your doctor is just going to cover himself by telling you the standard line about exercise and doing things in moderation.