How to Lose Weight

Here is a distillation of my own experience & observations on how to drop pounds.  I make no more claims than that this has generally worked for me.

• Get over the hump on exercise.  When you haven't been exercising, it's painful and hateful and heinous.  But, after you do it steadily for awhile (a week or two perhaps) you "get over the hump" and suddenly one day you find that if you skip your workout, you miss it and crave it.  That starts off a virtuous circle whereby you enjoy exercise and therefore do it regularly and therefore enjoy it, etc.
  
• Figure out an exercise routine that is convenient.  The key is for it to be convenient enough that you'll actually do it regularly so that you *do* get over that hump.  If it's too sporadic, it will remain unpleasant.  By far the easiest thing to do is open your front door and go running out it, turn around however many miles later, and run back home.  Or bike to work, or find a pool or gym that's convenient enough that you can actually fit it into your daily routine.  But the more logistical baloney you have to go through to get going (getting in car, driving to gym, etc), the less you'll do it, especially in the period before you get over the hump. 
• Find a rich source of exercise.  Don't let it just be exercise alone for no other purpose but exercise.  Make it a social occasion, or a beautiful run in the outdoors that you find renewing and enjoyable, or something competitive that inspires you -- figure out something that has multiple positive dimensions that make it a rich and enjoyable part of your life and not a joyless chore. 
• Exercise without expectations.  Once you begin exercising regularly, you may well find to your amazement that despite all your hard work you do *not* automatically start shedding pounds.  Don't be discouraged or surprised; you are in this for the long haul and you should begin your new exercise habit without expectations.  The point now is to learn to enjoy the exercise and get good at it (and of course, you will be doing yourself a lot of good that isn't reflected by the reading on the scale yet).
• Eat low carbs for a few weeks.   After you've been exercising for a while, try cutting out most carbs from your diet for a couple weeks.  Personally I don't usually go much longer than that, but when I do it typically bumps my weight down by 5-8 pounds -- and then, thanks to my continuing exercise, it usually stays there. There's big debate over the low-carb approach but the anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness is overwhelming, and my own experience backs that up.  By cutting carbs and getting your calories from fat instead you can lose more pounds with less suffering than you might expect. 
  
  • The secret is that fat calories make you feel much fuller than the same amount of carb calories, which actually make you feel *more* hungry often for reasons that some theorize have to do with insulin cycles and the like. 
  • Kind of like with exercise, once you get over an initial "hump" of unpleasantness you will be amazed how you cease to crave a lot of foods. 
• Keep food out of your visual field.  Eating is an animal function and we are of course at root animals.  I find that when food enters my visual field, I (pretty much automatically and unstoppably) eat it.  So, when I get to work I put my apple behind my monitor until lunch so it doesn't call out to me constantly as I work.

Now that I've expanded my writing into the diet field, I may have to tackle romance novels next. . .