[Fudge Armadillo]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Well, nothing beats the thrill of surgery, but if you want an alternative to having staples in your pyloric valve or whatever:

The absolute number one worst way to lose weight is to cut back on calories and not exercise. The body's metabolism thinks you're still a small furry mammal living through bad times back when that big old meteor hit and changed the earth's climate and got rid of all those nasty dinosaurs. Your metabolism will slow down and go into survival mode, and you'll remain plump on one slice of bread per day.

This statement is not entirely correct; your metabolism will slow down if you make a dramatic cut to your average caloric intake, but in order for this to happen, you need to reduce it to well below what you burn every day (an average person would burn around 1700 calories a day with no exercise). To slow your metabolism down a significant amount, you’d probably have to cut your caloric intake to ~1200 calories. If you cut it to 600, you can really slow it down, but it’s hard to get any reasonable nutrition at that level.

Originally Posted by marichiko

If you drink, stop. There are SO many empty calories in a single glass of wine or a shot of Jack!

Wine has far fewer calories that most other beverages. It is far better to drink wine than beer or soda (or even juices, if you are concentrating only on calories).

http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-001-02s02yv.html

Originally Posted by marichiko

Avoid dairy products as much as possible - they all come from the milk of a cow. Do you know what cow's milk is supposed to produce? An eight hundred pound animal, minimum.

Whole milk is fairly high in calories, but reduced fat (and skim, for that matter) milk really isn’t. A cup of 1% milkfat milk has about 100 calories. Dairy products are in general fairly high in fat (which is a better reason to avoid them than for caloric levels).

Originally Posted by marichiko

The human metabolism has evolved to support a diet of lean meat, whole grains and fruit and plenty of time spent on the move searching for food and avoiding predators. This means avoid McDonalds, avoid processed foods, and refined sugars, and start spending more time at the gym or even just walking.

Humans have likely not evolved their metabolisms at all over recorded history. People can subsist on rather bland and homogeneous diets quite well; the only survival advantage to eating high on the food chain is that you can get more caloric density. Humans do not need to eat meat, whole grains, or fruit to survive.

Originally Posted by marichiko

You need to jump start your metabolism again. Walk every day, if its physical do it. Take up gardening, sign up for a line dancing class, park your car at the farthest spot rather than the nearest.

In order to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than you expend. Exercising and burning an extra 200 calories per day does you no good if you eat an extra 200 calories per day. It is harder than most people think to burn calories by exercising. I spend around 30 minutes a day on my spinner bike running my heart rate at around 190 and I’ll burn only around 350 calories each session (it takes about 3500 calories to make a pound). Most people can’t run their heart rates that high for nearly that long and will burn calories much slower. You will never be able to lose weight until you get your diet under control.