Vlorbik's Diet Tips
I suppose everyone is familiar with the claim that "diets don't work", one of the stupidest lies of all time. Dieting is the only thing that works. If you want to lose weight, you have to diet, period. Indeed, dieting is one of the few things in life that works in the sense that the amount of your payoff is determined by your own effort and not by how rich or lucky or well-connected you happen to be.
"Diets don't work" is an example of logocide, an ancient mind-control technique that works by redefining common words as technical terms with meanings incompatable with their everyday uses. Thus, "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" (1984, of course); thus "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Phillipians 1:21). The victim is kept confused as to whether the plain meaning or the technical one is meant in any particular instance and can only decide how to act by consulting some authority figure, such as Big Brother, their priest, or a "women's" magazine.
Of course, one does hear of a lot of really silly gimmicks. If you start a diet that requires you to eat six kumquats with every meal, you're probably going to get tired of eating kumquats (never mind obtaining 'em) long before you reach your goal. The magazines keep changing their story; if they ever just once printed the simple truth, why then, you'd never have to buy the next issue for more bad dieting advice.
Well, I'm only going to do this once, so go ahead and trust me. Here it is. You have to eat much less than you want. You have to keep doing it for a long time. That's pretty much it.
In my experience, one side effect of the process is that you'll be obsessed with food. That's OK, just don't eat. Thinking about eating all the time is perfectly all right. You'll have to train yourself to react to faintness and hunger pangs not with "Oh, gee, I'm really hungry. I'd better get something to eat." but rather with "Oh, gee, I'm really hungry. Good! Let's keep it that way!".
Standing on the bathroom scale several times daily is optional. The scale may go up and down by a couple pounds either way in the course of a normal day. But when you see it hit some low figure you haven't seen in years, that can encourage you to stay away from the kitchen for a little longer. You knew progress would be slow when you started out. It can be discouraging to see just how slow, but you will see progress. If you don't, you're eating too much.
You may become irritable. Well, do you want to get along with your friends and family or do you want to lose weight? You may not sleep as well as you're used to. We're talking commitment here, folks. This isn't for lightweights.
Obviously, when you do eat, you should eat nutritious food. Calorie counting is optional; it doesn't take much study to determine what the high-fat foods are. If that's how your obsession manifests itself, go with it. I've never paid any attention to calorie counts myself; I just eat as little as I can stand and let it go at that. But I've known other successful dieters to write down everything they eat and when. This is as harmless as the bathroom scale ritual.
And just as obviously, exercise helps. I've always done a certain amount of weightlifting along with my diets. I suppose if you were originally fairly active it would be possible to gain weight even while cutting back on your eating if you were to simultaneously become completely sedentary. By the same token, you could lose weight without cutting back on your eating if you were to become much more active. Training for a marathon, for example.
But barring these even more severe lifestyle changes, the basic principle holds. Don't eat that food.