Diet revolution, part III

It's a simple plan. It, like anything else in life, is not guaranteed. Here it is anyway.

• Count calories.

This is unglamorous, but it's physics. Fewer calories in and more calories out is all there is. Gather data, determine basic calorie needs to maintain current weight, then set a reasonable daily caloric target to achieve a reasonable pace of weight loss.

Never, ever, ever substitute marketing claims ("low fat!" "low carb!" "healthy whole grains!" "wholesome!" "vitamin-enriched!") for calorie count.

• Measure.

We got into this mess in part because our idea of portion sizes is so far out of line. We need to take our brains back from the restaurants and marketers and learn how to perceive the food correctly.

• Trust the math.

Realize, accept, and make peace with mathematically-determined portion sizes. That is the amount of food we need, even if our bad habits tell us otherwise.

Rely on the numbers and use them to learn new and better habits.

• Make conscious choices.

There are no "forbidden foods", only trade-offs we make to achieve our daily caloric target. Instead of feeling deprived and resentful, we are empowered to make these choices. We need to pay attention to the real consequences of each choice, and be aware of which decisions support our weight-loss goals and which ones sabotage us.

• Question "convenience".

Things marketed to us as convenience often aren't. The time it takes to stop at a restaurant or a drive-thru or to assemble a processed food from a kit often are not meaningful savings over the time it would take to put together our own real food at home.

• Be wary of processed and restaurant foods, even in small doses.

Make sure that the additives and artificial flavors aren't stimulating cravings or reinforcing bad habits.

• Learn to love whole, natural foods.

One of the scariest things about artificial marketed foods is that they teach us the wrong things about what food is "supposed" to taste like. We then reject reality because it doesn't taste fake enough.

Reclaim the flavors of grape, orange, cherry, cheese and meat! Say no to the Kool-Aid- and Cheeto-ization of our everyday diet!

• Learn, get angry, stay angry.

Practically everything about the American diet has been engineered by corporations. The urge to eat harmful foods, the gimmicky diets that don't work (and the deliberate undermining of confidence in simple calorie-counting), the reluctance to exercise, the frantic drive toward elusive convenience, the fallback onto artificial supplements for ourselves and our children, and much, much, much more, are all dreamed up in marketing departments and inflicted on us for nothing more, nothing less than profit... with our enthusiastic participation. Recognize it and reject it.