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work.

      It is very hard to do, but it won't hurt you (or anyone else). In the long run it probably will be healthy for you — if you succeed and stick with it, that is. Don't keep gaining and losing a lot of weight over and over; that's not good for you. So stay up or down, one or the other. You want to go down? Right.

      I don't want to bother with you unless you are serious about losing at least 20 pounds. If you want to lose 30, it will be even more fun. If you want to shed even more, I might get you down, but it would be awfully hard to keep you there. Let's be reasonable. Suppose you're a woman 5'3" tall, weighing in at 130 pounds, and you want to weigh 110 pounds. One hundred and ten pounds forever! Let's do it. (If you are a man, make the necessary changes in the example, mutatis mutandis, as we philosophers say.)

      How? Without mincing words: eat less. But that alone is not enough, for you also have to learn how to eat differently from the way you are eating now so you can stay at 110 when you get there. You must modify your eating behavior. You begin by reading inspirational literature. I'll provide my share in these pages, but I can't begin to provide enough. So the first thing you must do is go out to buy or borrow some books on dieting, calories, fat, salt, fiber, sugar, exercise, fasting, and natural foods. It does not matter which books you get — go for quantity not quality. And do go out. As you'll see, leaving the kitchen for exercise is part of the program. Lots of books. Put some in the bathroom, some by your bed, some in the kitchen, and a couple in your briefcase or backpack or purse, and some in your desk at home and some in your desk at work. You will read these books over and over again. It feels good to read them, even when you are off your diet. Inspirational literature assures you that somebody cares, that there is a way, and that you can be saved.

      Ready? Now you must face the primary truth of dieting. Losing weight means cutting down on the food you eat. Across the board. Food fad diets lead neither to health nor to permanent weight loss. Those nutty diets are fun to read about, and some of the craziest books are the best inspirational reading, but you certainly cannot live the rest of your life on grapefruit or steak. People who take weight off with crank diets may be highly visible dieters, that is, they do a lot of dieting in public, but they are not serious about taking weight off and keeping it off. To do that, you have to establish a balanced diet that you can maintain after you reach your desired weight. You can find out about the normal healthy balance of foods by reading almost any book on health and nutrition. I'm just going to assume that you know. Then you cut down, keeping the healthy nutritional balance, until you start to lose weight. I know you are in a hurry, so let's start with a 900-calorie diet. That's 900 calories a day, and it isn't much.

      Memorize the figures in one of your calorie counters (you need several of them, of course). This is not hard to do because you can lump the foods in categories and fairly soon learn that a large apple or orange or a medium banana is about 100 calories, most cheeses are about 100 calories an ounce, and so on. Just take your normal balanced diet and cut it down to 900 calories.You can look in any number of books that provide balanced 900-calorie diets of normal food. Step one is to get on a 900-calorie diet and stick to it.

      Parenthetically, let me now give a crucial instruction. Always count your calories. You will soon learn to keep track in your head, but if you tend to cheat unconsciously, write them down. You might as well get used to counting calories, because you will probably have to do it the rest of your life. Calories are additive from day to day, so if you eat 100 too many one day, cut off 100 the next day. Does that mean that if you fast for two days on a 900-calorie diet, you can gorge on 2700 calories the third day? I suppose, but that is not exactly what philosophers mean by either a balanced diet or a balanced life.

      It may take a long time for you to reach your desired weight, but when you do, here is step two. Go to a 1500-calorie diet. Try it for a week. If you continue to lose, increase it to 1800. You may have to juggle it back and forth, but at 5'3" for a woman, trying to hold firm, you might reach a maintenance diet of between 1800 and 2200 calories. For a 5'8" man, it might be between 2000 and 2400 calories.

      After you establish a maintenance diet for your desired weight, you are ready for permanent step three.

      You must always eat your maintenance diet to stay at your desired weight. Eating exactly the right amount to stay trim may be something rats and raccoons in the wild do instinctively, but we humans are domesticated animals, like pigs, and most of us will eat whatever is put in the trough until it's gone. You must continue to count the calories. Cut down on the morrow what you over-ate the day before. Keeping the faith is keeping count.

      Not so easy?

      I agree. The program I've outlined is too reasonable to be easy. It isn't radical enough. What's more, it won't work.

      It won't work because you are still eating all the stuff you like, the sort of food you have always eaten. Once you get down to your desired weight and ease off, you will start eating more and more of the same old things again, and whammo! you will soon be bloated again. It isn't radical enough to work because it does not change your eating habits in the right way. To lower your weight 20 pounds or more and keep that lower weight is to change your life. Anyone can go on a diet. Let's make a real change.

      What tastes best? What do we all crave? Sugar. During the last 100 years or so, the average American went from consuming about 12 pounds of processed sugar a year to consuming over 100 pounds a year. Because it was there. A healthy person needs absolutely none of that processed sugar. So cut it out. In effect, you must avoid almost all processed foods — foods that come sealed in bags, boxes, packages, cans, bottles, and jars. You think I'm kidding, don't you? Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. If you follow my advice you will eat better in two senses: first, fresh food is better for you, and second, it tastes better than processed foods. Here is why.

      Foods are processed so they can be preserved for storage and shipment. Although some of the chemicals used as preservatives may eventually cause cancer, so does the polluted air you breathe, and I'm not going to get off on that subject. The main problem with processed foods is that they contain enormous quantities of salt and sugar. These are added as preservatives and taste-enhancers. Also, meat, fruit, and vegetables on the verge of spoiling can be made quite palatable with salt and sugar. Salt makes you want to eat and drink more. Sugar is addicting. It is perfectly intelligent marketing practice, then, for manufacturers to shoot processed foods full of salt and sugar (and if both are put in at the same time, they counteract each other so even more can be put in). Is it surprising that manufacturers want you to eat more of their foodstuffs? Another addicting additive is caffeine. Add eight teaspoons of sugar, some flavor, and a bit of caffeine to eight ounces of carbonated water, and you have one of the best selling drinks in the world. At least knock off the sugar. If you need the caffeine, drink coffee, black. If you still crave the carbonation, you'd best go to seltzer water. From what I can make of all the reports, the artificial flavors, colorings, and sweetenings in diet drinks may be more harmful in the long run than the sugar-loaded originals.

      You need the sugar? There is plenty of sugar in fresh fruits and vegetables, and the carbohydrates in grains are converted to sugar in your stomach. Two medium-sized apples have about the same amount of sugar as a bottle of soda pop. And besides giving you lots of vitamins and minerals and roughage, two apples will probably cut down your total consumption in a way a bottle of soda pop will not.

      The worst processed food is, of course, sugar itself. Your body turns excess sugar into fat. Does eating a lot of sugar cause hypoglycemia or diabetes? Does smoking cause lung cancer? It seems likely that increased consumption of sugar during the last 100 years has had something to do with the great increase of these diseases during that time. Just because the exact sequence of causes and effects cannot always be determined is no reason to deny the probability. Eat lots of sugar if you like, but no one can help you lose weight and keep it off if you do.

      The other major processed food is white flour. Like sugar, it has been available to common folk for only about a hundred years, and it consists pretty much of pure starch. Processors take out the germ and take off the skin so you don't get the vitamins, minerals, and roughage. Of course, white bread is fortified. But the point I'm leading up to is that even if you avoided sugar but continued to eat processed white flour — something almost impossible to do unless you eat flour from a bag with a spoon because

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