If you’re losing, trying to lose, or think you need to lose weight, you’re probably just as sick as I am of those “quick and easy” diet tips that NEVER work.

The following tips are not quick or easy. They’re tough, uncomfortable, and demanding (but they work).

1. Don’t eat.

Permanently, that obviously doesn’t make sense unless you have a secret death wish. On a temporary basis, it is worth considering. Like the recovering alcoholic taking it one day at a time, not eating “just today” becomes doable, once in a while. If you can convince yourself that you can eat as much as you want tomorrow, not eating becomes a viable alternative for today. In the even shorter term, delaying a planned meal by a few hours can be helpful if you stick to what you had planned to eat and not gobble up everything in sight to “make up” for your temporary deprivation. A decrease in total caloric intake for the day, the week, the month, is the primary goal.

2. Get your body moving.

We all know that activity is necessary to burn our own fat. Exercise can be tedious, boring, and interferes with getting everything done in our time-hungry lives. Those who love to exercise, spend hours in the gym or train for marathons, don’t have a weight problem like the rest of the couch potatoes. So how do we find the time and the motivation to incorporate some physical movement into our lives? If we don’t have the time or opportunity for exercise sessions (work, commutes, kids, chores), we can sneak activity breaks into stolen moments of time throughout the day. Reset your alarm 15 minutes earlier and perform calisthenics (jumping jacks, killer exercises, crunches, jump rope) while your coffee brews. Sneak out for 5-10 minutes every few hours during the workday to walk around the building, do isometrics at your desk, or run up and down the stairs. Mini-workouts of 5 to 10 minutes scattered throughout your regular schedule can add up to an hour or two of bursts of activity per day, significantly upping the calorie versus calorie equation. calories leading to further weight loss.

3. Remove “Kick a little”.

While “BAM!” spicing up our food is pleasurable and fun, it also increases our calorie intake because our food is so good our taste buds are in a constant state of excitement. In order to lose weight consistently, we need to take as little interest in food as possible. Let’s face the fact that carrots and celery sticks will never make our mouths water; a cup of yogurt, cottage cheese, sauerkraut, or tuna is fine, but it will never lead to the pure delight of a divine bowl of jambalaya, pasta, a dripping cheeseburger, or sizzling pizza. We need to limit the excitement in our lives to activities other than eating and keep our food in the boring and tedious range so that we can limit our participation in, enjoyment of, and delight in eating. The less we wait for our meals, the less we will eat, which is our goal.

4. Practice positive visualization.

Wear accessories that help you “look” slim so that your weight loss goals become a tangible and vital part of your everyday life. Instead of the last “Who did it?” mystery novel, reading clothing catalogs before bed. The airbrushed perfection of Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic models may be hard for you to emulate, but they encourage you to dream of an attractive physical appearance. A mental vision of yourself as a skinny model is a technique for picking yourself up every time you’re faced with food throughout the day and reinforces your “no” power to turn down edibles you know you don’t need. This technique doesn’t work as well for men, but it encourages the man in his life to emulate his favorite sports figures. Watch movies and television not with a view to escaping yourself and your humdrum world, but as a glimpse into a world you intend to inhabit. Visualize yourself as the hero or heroine of your favorite shows: can you imagine a fat caped crusader, an overweight vampire, or an obese romantic lead? Maintain a clear vision of yourself as lean, sexy and fit and you’ll have something to help you get through the tempting, seductive and almost impossible to resist moments in your daily life. It’s that mental image of your future self that can encourage you to “just say no” to the immediate delights around you.

5. Eliminate snacks.

The traditional “three squares a day” eating pattern relied on breakfast, lunch, and dinner as the main meals of the day. Today, it’s not just our meals that have led to our national overweight, it’s our snacks between meals that have fueled the obesity epidemic. Have you noticed that there always seems to be food available? Everywhere we look, there’s something to eat: chips, nuts, cake, ice cream, tortillas, chicken wings, Doritos (Saddam’s favorite), and a myriad of salty, spicy, and salivation-inducing snacks that have nothing to do with it. with our need. eat to survive and everything that has to do with our overweight. If we can eliminate these between-meal spikes and focus on three (two is better) meals a day, we can begin to bring our weight in line with our goals. Our tendency is to nibble throughout the day: a pinch of this, a handful of that, and an eye-hand-mouth combination that results in our 24/7 ingesting something. Its charm is indisputable: the salty, spicy or sweet consequences of its ingestion persist for a long time in the tongue and memory (and even more so in the hips).