According to everybody, everybody is fat. And everybody who is somebody is saying that everybody is getting fatter.

So everybody wants everybody on a diet.

Who is kidding who? Everybody has been on a diet. Diets don't work; unless, of course, you are selling a diet plan.

Diets are big business. And the bigger the muffins and trailers on the American people, the bigger the business will be.

If you have not been on a diet, you have missed the joys of deprivation, not knowing if the thing is going to work for you and final failure. Even if you loose weight, in nothing flat you went back to being fat.

If you have been on a diet, or two or three, you probably are sick of them and have no intent of going back on one again until your doctor tells you that if you don't lose weight your are going to get all sorts of diseases, your body will fall apart and all those other things that doctors tell you.

Before that happens, you don't have to pay for some off the wall diet plan, "medically proven" with tons of testimonials, to stop gaining weight.

Notice I said "stop gaining weight." That is the critical first step. If you can just stop gaining weight, you can start losing weight without going on some ridiculous diet that will probably fail anyway.

Let's look at it.

If you consume 200 calories more per day than you burn up, you will store about 6000 calories more energy than you need. That means that you will gain about 1 ˝ pounds per month. That is like 18 pounds per year.

Just 200 calories is enough to do you in big time.

If you are now not gaining weight or gaining less than 1 ˝ pound per month, you are golden.

If you are maintaining your weight now, all that you have to do is get rid of 200 calories per day and you will lose 1 ˝ pounds per month.

So how to do that?

Elliptical exercise machines burn about 700 calories per hour. So 20 minutes per day on an elliptical exercise machine will do it.

Walking for an hour will do it.

Substituting water for two glasses of 2 glasses of your soft drink or a single beer should do it.

Trade a hamburger for two oranges and you will be surprised what happens.

It is very simple. You just have to make sure that the amount of calories you put in equals the amount of calories that you burn.

But as simple as it is, it is very difficult to do because all that calorie counting is a pain. It is all a shot in the dark, you don't have any idea about what you are doing and it is just plain frustrating.

So how did I solve my own problem?

First I did exactly what I said above. I started walking an hour per day and moved to water from soft drinks.

Bingo. My weight started down.

Then I decided to get serious. Having been frustrated with calorie counting before, I looked for a simple way to keep track of my calories on my computer. I found this thing called the

Not only don't I have to look for calories per serving in a book or on the web, I have a complete record of what is going on with my daily, weekly and monthly calorie intake and expenditure. It tells me exactly where I stand for a day and how much exercise I need to make up for those things that I ate that I should not have eaten.

Now I eat almost 2000 calories per day and lose weight. I eat more now than when I was gaining weight.

How do I do it? I found that my basic calorie burn rate is about 1620 calories per day. So as long as I don't exceed 1620 calories intake per day, I can sit at the computer and not gain weight.

If I want to lose weight, I can walk and burn about 250 calories per hour. So since I enjoy the time away from the computer, I do walk. Sometimes I walk for an hour and sometimes I break it up into 15 or 20 minute walks. I burn about 250 calories per day walking.

But then I looked for something that would give me exercise while I watched the daily news. That would be time efficient for me since I would better use my "couch potato time". I chose an elliptical exercise machine because it is low impact and burns over 700 calories per hour.

Now let's add it up. I start with 1620 calories, add to it 250 for walking and 700 for an ˝ hour session for the morning news and a ˝ hour session for the evening news. That is a banging 2570 calories that I can eat.

Now, for my personal situation, if I eat 2000 calories per day, I lose about 12 pounds per month. I adjust my exercise schedule to my weight loss / weight gain requirements. I have my cherry pie, my beer, my wine, my ice cream and all those things that diets schmietes and other pfiffle say I can't. And my muscles have developed.

I owe it first to the Balance Log that opened my eyes and made things easy. Once I could monitor what was happening with my body, I was stimulated and could set a goal. My goal was to eat and enjoy life and lose weight without the deprivations of a diet. That lead me to look at various exercise machines. I chose the elliptical trainer.

Balance log has a free 2 week trial version that you can use on your PDA and or computer. And it can be used for all the members of your family or company. (Each gets its own password.) If nothing else, looking at what it tells you will allow you to set up your own unique approach to maintaining your own unique body. You can get more information about it at Balance Log

So forget the diets, schmiets and other pfiffle. Just step back and look at what is going in and out. It only takes as little as 200 calories a day change.
About the Author

Gary Granai is a publisher of the Eastern European Review Blog and several web sites that are related to Eastern Europe. His site is at Master Page