Basic Pursuits

We know this to be true: we are overweight because of bad eating habits. Therefore the solution is to change the habits.

NOT go on a diet. Change the eating habits.

Here's a strategy for doing it.

First, let me tell you what I think about exercise. I love it and work hard to keep it enjoyable. I think that it makes me feel better. I think that it makes others feel better. I've asked. Once I polled nearly 50 exercisers and asked them why they exercised. Well over nine out of 10 said that it made them feel better.

Zen Habits offers 14 "Stress-Free Ways to Kick Weight Loss in the Butt."

The article has a lot of great tips about losing weight, like focus on a gradual loss and focus on nutrition. Indeed, if you get the nutrition right, the weight loss will pretty much take care of itself.

Which brings me to Way #8 You gotta log.

One of the most formidable enemies of weight loss and nutrition is the idea of "diet." "Going on a diet;" "diet secret of the stars;" "eat what you want diet;" frankly any diet that is meant to fix a weight problem is a sham. For most it is the entry to a merry-go-round of fools, almost all of whom end up fatter than when they began. And the ride is full of frustration, guilt and shame.

Here's five reasons why diets make you fatter.

How do they do it? Those French guiltlessly dine on endless dishes smothered in rich, butter-based sauces. They never fail to eat dessert. Yet they don't get fat. Their obesity rate is a third of that of the U.S. The bastards!

Americans first deduced, with their penchant for seeking solutions to all problems in a single pill, that it was the red wine that keeps the French so thin. U.S. sales of pinot noir soared. So did our obesity rates.

The National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse lists the following as common risk factors for type 2 diabetes:

Here's a great post from Zen Habits entitled Hassle-free Weight Loss: The Zen Habits Meal Plan.

The writer uses a term that I like and am going to adopt: logging meals. By logging I'm going to mean paying attention not only to the calories in food, but also the nutritional content.

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recently published a study that found that eating a low-glycemic-index diet and a high-glycemic-index diet made no difference in body weight decrease.

Lifehacker, one of my favorite reads, recently referenced a blog that enjoins us to set specific goals like, "I will lose 10 lbs." rather that vague goals like "I'm going to lose some weight."