The Method

People are always looking for "the secret of weight loss".  The secret is that there is no secret.  If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight.  If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight.  This is just simple math. 

Why I started with diet instead of exercise is that it is easier to not consume calories than it is to burn them off.  For instance, I looked up the calories in a popular cookie, and found that I would have to walk approximately a mile to burn them off.  I could do that, eat the cookie, walk a mile and it would have no impact, or I could just not eat the cookie. 

Aside from being blitheringly simple, there are two problems with the "I'll burn this off in the gym" method.  First, the miles you have to walk stack up quick.  Eat three cookies, and we're talking a 5K to burn them off.  Add a large soda to that and you can double that.  I looked up the calories for a fast food combo meal that I used to eat for lunch, and to burn off those calories, I would almost have to walk a half-marathon.

The second problem with this method is that after I eat these things, I never feel like going to the gym.  These foods not only do not give me the energy to complete a workout, they rob me of any motivation I have to exercise.

The Pareto principle states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort, and 20% of your results will come from 80% of your effort.  Since I know that most of my results are going to come from diet, I'm focusing about 90% of what my effort on what I eat, and 10% on exercise.