Introduction to this article series

Open a newspaper on any day of the week, and the leading articles in the Health section are likely to be about an “epidemic” of obesity or a review of the latest fad diet. There's little doubt: weight issues are on a lot of people's minds, and there's few clear answers. A search for the word 'diet' on Google returns over 50 million hits. A quick glance through the first page of results shows all sorts of websites. Some of those websites provide helpful, sensible advice on how to lose weight. Others are trying to sell you weight loss pills, personalized diet plans, or expensive exercise equipment. Along with the Google search results, there are a number of advertisers who pay big bucks for their ads. I run Google ads on this website, and some of those advertisements are probably displayed next to this article right now! A lot of people are making a lot of money from others' desire to lose a few pounds. The total size of the weight-loss industry is closing in on $50 billion dollars a year, and the articles in the newspaper about increasing waistlines don't seem to be decreasing.

It's hard to tell the good advice from the bad. Making sense of all this is the main reason why I'm writing these articles. In the past year, I've personally lost 25 pounds, kept it off, and my expectation is that I will be able to maintain my weight for the rest of my life. There is no magic formula to follow, and I would be dishonest if I said that losing weight is easy. It actually takes a good bit of work, but the changes are manageable. I'm not special in any way. To use a cliché, if I can do it, then anyone can.

In 1990, I weighed 140 pounds. I am 5 feet, 8 inches tall, so that meant that my BMI (Body Mass Index) was 21.3. I paid absolutely no attention to my weight, and ate what I pleased, whether I was hungry or not. Of course, I started gaining pounds. Nobody, no matter what their natural disposition towards heaviness or thinness, is immune to gaining weight. Like many people, my job requires me to sit at a desk all day, and over the years the natural effects of aging, reduction in activity level, and my continued inattention to watching what I ate caught up with me. I gained more than a pound a year on average, so by 1994 I was 25 pounds heavier than I had been in college.

Despite that, most people wouldn't have considered me overweight. I weighed 165 pounds, and my BMI was 25.1. In the future, I'll write a more detailed article about BMI, but for now the important part is that the normal values for that measurement range from 18.5 – 24.9. The numbers don't lie, I was overweight – barely – and the writing was on the wall. If I didn't change anything, I was going to keep gaining weight. So, I resolved to learn about nutrition and weight loss, and to come up with a plan for myself that would succeed.

The first thing I did was to fire up my web browser and perform some searches on Google. Of course, it returned a vast number of links to sift through, so I started at the top and started reading. It quickly became clear that some of the information was quite good, some was really awful, and distinguishing between good and bad could be hard. The worst sites are just marketing vehicles for diet pills, shakes, and low-carb products. Their goal is to sell you something. The best sites were filled with factual information and sensible eating advice.

By far, the most plentiful sites pushed some kind of low-fat diets, low-carb diets, high-protein diets, crash diets, raw diets, vegetarian diets, sugar-free diets, salad diets, soup diets, citrus diets, milkshake diets, and on and on. The guidance offered was technically true, but too general to be useful. A common piece of advice given was “Eat nutritious foods in moderation, and exercise daily. Eat only when you are hungry. Be on guard against 'fat'.” The critical bit of information missing was exactly how that vague advice translates to actions. When you sit down to eat dinner, you need to have some some idea of how the advice to “eat in moderation” actually translates to a decision to eat one pork chop or two.

This series of articles is just beginning, and I aim to outline in nitty-gritty detail how I put all the good advice I found on the Internet into practice in my life and lost 25 pounds, and why I have confidence that the weight will stay off permanently. There is a rule that is used by scientists and engineers that calls for them to use the simplest solution to a problem, and avoid unnecessary complication. Albert Einstein said “A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It's now known as the Einstein Principle, and it's a rule that I will follow here. A lot of weight-loss advice is just too complex to follow on a daily basis, as a habit. On the other hand, there are things that you have to know to lose weight, and the lifelong commitment to changing habits is not easy. Simple is seldom the same thing as easy.