The most useful weight loss guide you will ever find. Because I say so!

Before we begin, I feel I should warn you that I am not a doctor. Which shouldn't make my advice any less credible: merely having a doctorate, even a doctorate in medicine, doesn't mean you aren't a crackpot. I should also dispense with the standard diet book disclaimer, re, checking with a doctor blah-de-blah. Assuming you even have a doctor nowadays. As if anyone ever takes that advice anyway. It's just there to keep authors of diet books from getting sued, and I doubt it works, and I don't have anything worth taking anyway.

Now, to start with, most diet books are ninety percent rubbish, coated with ten percent common sense to get you to swallow it. They are rubbish because their primary goal is to sell you stuff, starting with the book. I am not trying to sell you anything. I am trying to undermine sales of diet books, so that you will never need to buy another diet-related item again, and instead you can spend the money on something really useful. Our band's new CD, for example. Or cocktails.

So, here it is, the secret, the key to weight loss for all time:

Eat less. Exercise more.

And that's it, really.

That is why diet books have to lie to you. Because they know you want to believe there's a trick to it, that there has to be more to weight loss than a simple energy in/energy out physics equation. It's about only eating carbohydrates on Tuesdays with a full moon, isn't it? Or starting each day with a pint of cabbage soup? Or never eating bacon, or eating only bacon? Or eating according to your blood type/astrological sign/biorythms? Or mysterious food allergies to common substances which cause you in a strange paradoxical fashion to crave them? Or industrial pollution causing cell walls to be lined with mucous which...

Whatever. No, there's no magic spell which will enable you to lose weight without...suffering. A bit, anyway. So, to lose weight you must learn to embrace suffering.

That's why nobody wants to tell you the truth. They know it's not what you want to hear. But I, as I have said, don't care.

The basics of weight loss are incredibly simple, and you already know them. The hard part is putting it into practice. There are a lot of reasons this is hard, the most difficult being -- your body does not want you to lose weight! Your body is kind of stupid, and thinks it is still the Middle Ages out there. It doesn't know about labor-saving devices, indoor heating, or Little Debbies. Your body thinks that calories are precious things and hard to come by. Therefore, it saves them up (in fat), assuming you will need them later. You don't. But your body doesn't know that. Deliberate weight loss is an ongoing argument with your body.

There are some myths about weight loss that we have to take care of right now. For example: you will not lose weight and suddenly look like a movie star. You will look like you. Only thinner.

Another thing to get out of your head is the idea that weight loss is some kind of magic key to health, love, happiness, promotions, television appearances, and beauty. While it is certainly true that fatter people are often socially punished, it doesn't follow at all that thinner people are correspondingly rewarded. And as for the alleged health benefits -- while cutting out junk food and getting more exercise will certainly improve your health, you can improve your health a lot and still be fatter than you'd like. Similarly, you can lose a lot of weight by swallowing a tapeworm, doing drugs, or contracting a horrid disease. When you get right down to it, there is only one reason most of us bother to try to lose weight:

Vanity.

We'll all be happier if we just admit it. We are vain, and therefore, wish to look a certain way, which includes being a certain weight.

There is another reason to lose weight, also pertaining to vanity: clothes. Nothing makes you look fatter than clothes that are too small. It creates unnecessary additional bulging, and also implies a sad, desperate background narrative to your corpulence: your weight is on a rapid upward trajectory and there's simply no telling where it will end. Even corsets no longer fit properly if you gain too much weight after they have been tailored. You might still be able to squeeze into them (they are corsets after all), but they will get this look -- oh, you know the look I mean, the overstuffed corset look, where, instead of a smooth line to the waist and out again, there's more of a reluctant buckling between the chest and hips, and the breasts are pushed up under the chin into a kind of flabby shelf that oozes out over the armpits.

Anyway, this is a problem, because corsets are expensive.

Why do I even need to emphasize that weight loss is about vanity? Because, in our strange world of cheap calories and an overhyped sex-without-sex marketplace, weight and food has replaced the quaint notions of (mostly sex-related) public morality held by earlier generations. All virtue is associated with foregoing the fleshly pleasures of eating "wicked" calorie-dense food, and all vice with indulging those same foods. But this sort of thinking leads ultimately down the wrong path, because it simply reinforces the idea that highly caloric foods are desirable, and hunger isn't. That's what your body already thinks. Also, unless you really break the societal brainwashing, you will continue to turn to super-calorie food when you are sad, tired, depressed, coming out of a nasty breakup, or any other time you need psychological comfort. So, forget the illusion of secular virtue, and embrace honest vanity.

Now, when arguing with your body, your body has a lot of advantages, and a lot of tricks up its sleeve. Part of winning the argument is that you have to know where your body is coming from. So, we are going to spend a few minutes looking at evolution. And if you don't "believe" in evolution, I have nothing further to say to you. Stop reading right now, and go use your magic wishing stones to lose weight, or pray to your guardian angels for a heavenly liposuction, or whatever it is you flat-earthers like to do. I'm serious. I'm through with you people.

A long time ago, human evolutionary ancestors were, more or less, extremely clever monkeys. Maybe like orang-outangs, maybe like chimps, maybe like something that no longer exists because it turned into us. So we were pretty smart. For monkeys. Then something weird happened to us. Nobody knows exactly how or why, but we developed this intelligence thing, this cerebral cortex thing, and suddenly we were capable of amazing feats of abstract thinking. Instead of just responding in a clever-monkey way to the pressures of our environment, eating bananas and squabbling with other monkeys over shiny objects, we could consider. We could make decisions. (And we've been miserable ever since.)

Human intelligence -- will, cognition, identity, all that stuff -- is layered on top of the clever monkey part. The monkey mind. When you are scared, tired, or your survival is threatened, the monkey mind tends to take over. It works like this. Your body wants and needs certain things. It talks to the monkey mind. The body says, "I'm hungry," and the monkey mind is supposed to use the body to go steal a banana from a tourist. This is fine, because the tourist probably wanted to feed the monkey a banana. But you have a human intelligence. So when your body says "I'm hungry," your monkey mind is still inclined to go steal somebody's banana, but your human intelligence says that you can't do that. You have to pay for the banana, or at least ask for it nicely. Or, if you are trying to lose weight, it might say that you can't have the banana at all. Your monkey mind does not want to hear this. It sees a perfectly good banana just sitting there and the body is bugging it to eat and why can't it have the banana? Your body doesn't want to hear this either. Your body starts to worry there might be a banana shortage. It turns up the pressure. More hunger. Maybe some anxiety hormones. Your blood sugar drops and your hands get clammy, maybe your head starts aching. Your monkey mind gets louder and more insistent, trying to take over.

When the argument is waged this way, you can't possibly win. Eventually you will eat the banana. Or, more likely, you will be so hungry and so anxious and so low in blood sugar by this point that you will eat anything that comes along. And in our current society, the thing most likely to come along -- the thing most likely to be cheap and readily available -- is junk food. High in calories, low in nutrition. So instead of eating a banana, you eat a banana-flavored Moon Pie.

Just eat the banana already. They're good for you.

You have to understand, your body is just trying to keep you alive. But (for obvious evolutionary reasons) it cares a lot about keeping you alive long enough for the kids to be on their own (say, about thirty-five in a pre-industrial society) and not so much about keeping you alive after that. In this light, your body's tendency to hoard calories makes perfect sense. Obesity-related problems will (maybe) give you a heart attack when you're fifty. Starvation will kill you right now. So take some steps to reassure your body that you are not in danger of starvation. This is best accomplished with fresh fruits and vegetables, which are cheaper and more readily available now than at any time in human history. (Even if they're not quite as cheap and readily available as junk food.) Your body will think it's summer, fruit is hanging on the vine, la-de-da, nothing to worry about. And produce, especially most vegetables, are so low in caloric density that you could eat them pretty much all day long and still lose weight.

(A note on caloric density -- this is calories/weight, and is primarily a measure of how much water is in a food. Vegetables = high water + high fiber = low caloric density. Rice cakes = dehydrated = high caloric density. Low caloric density is good. Avoid rice cakes. Haven't you been longing to hear that?)

Your body is a lot like a toddler -- it will yell and scream and cry if you suddenly start making it eat its vegetables, but if you are consistent and firm it will eventually come round to your way of thinking. Because, as much as it will throw tantrums at you, it also wants to please you. Your body and brain are set up to become good at the things they are repeatedly called upon to do. What do you ask your body to do? Run marathons on nothing but tofu and wheatgrass? Or sit on the couch eating Nacho Cheese Doritos and watching Survivor reruns? It's your call, although I don't personally recommend either one.

Your weight is not about what you eat today, or on Christmas, or on your birthday. It's about what you eat, and what you do, every day, every week, every month. It's about patterns.

Because many people still think of weight loss as a kind of secular penance, they take an unhelpful all-or-nothing approach. Every indiscretion becomes a reset button. Oh, I ate a cupcake today, I'll keep pigging out tonight and start my diet tomorrow. Or next month. Or at the new year. You know how idiotic that sounds, right? But you do it anyway. You know why? Because it's a trick. Your abstract-thinking human self is reassured by tantalizing dreams of what you will do someday, the wonderful discipline you will suddenly manifest, the perfect body you will suddenly have. And your body/monkey mind are reassured by the fact that you never actually lose any weight.

People can keep this kind of stalemate going for years. Maybe their entire lives. They keep the human part happy by periodically embracing new diets, and the monkey mind happy by giving up on those same diets. And I guess, if you're really happy that way, I won't...oh, who'm I kidding? I live to pop bubbles. You will never lose weight. There is no Santa Claus. You will not become a famous millionaire.

So far, I haven't talked much about exercise. That's because it's a completely different issue from your body's anxiety about weight loss and food scarcity. Your body is a little reluctant to engage in voluntary exercise, only because it assumes that you will, at some point, have to engage in involuntary exercise. Running away from tigers, perhaps, or climbing tourists to get their bananas. So your body has a mild incentive to want to conserve energy. A Newton's law sort of thing. Inertia. But inertia works in your favor as well. If you just decide that you will start doing something physical your body generally takes the hint and starts getting into it. If you make your body do something every day, your body kind of assumes that you have to do it, and it tries to cooperate. It learns. It tries to provide necessary muscle tissue. And, while there are some adjustment problems (sore muscles, etc.) those are side effects of your body trying to cooperate. If you keep it up, eventually, your muscles aren't sore anymore -- they're just stronger, better looking, etc.

There are some things to consider. If your goal with exercise is health and vanity, you don't want to rip muscles and cartilage and damage your joints and all that sort of thing, because it will interfere with your ability to keep up exercising. So think low-impact. Yoga is good, even if you're not a hippie. Walking is good, and you probably already know how to do it. Bicycling is good except if you decide you're going to bicycle to work and then stupid drivers hit you with their stupid cars. Jogging is good exercise but you're more likely to rip something. Etc. Really, I'm not an expert. Just pick something. Anything. Rock out to your iPod. As long as you do it. (The only diet that matters is the one you will stick to. The only exercise plan that matters is the one you actually do.) Most days is good, every day is better. Half an hour is good. An hour is better.

And one more thing, on the subject of exercise -- you can't buy it with money. I mean, paying money to a gym, or buying the latest exercise gadget, just helps make the gym and infomercial guys rich. Exercise takes a certain amount of time out of your day no matter how much money you spend on special shoes. Experts disagree on whether it is better to spend the time all at once or break it down into ten minute segments. But look, if three ten minute segments is what you will do don't worry about whether you "should" be trying to find a whole half hour of uninterrupted time. Unattainable goals just lead back to that place where you're lying to yourself about what you're going to do maybe someday. A little exercise is always better than none.

So, this is Ophelia's "holiday weight loss guide," and by holiday I mean "Hallothankschristmasnewyearukah," the nonstop sugarjunkfest that begins in the middle of October and doesn't really let up until the vernal equinox. Why is "holiday weight loss" an issue? Because during Hallothankschristmasnewyearukah people have parties, and at parties they have party food. And even when there isn't, technically, a party going on, possibly because of the long, dark nights, people try to party-up everyday life, which again involves party food. People have special little sugary butter things they only make during Hallothankschristmasnewyearukah (are you wondering when I'm going to stop saying "Hallothankschristmasnewyearukah"?) Maybe it's an instinctive response to winter, or maybe it's just that holidays are about tradition, and traditional foods all date back to an age when people actually needed calories, because they didn't have central heating, and they did have to hike through snow to get anywhere. People start keeping nut mixes at their desks, and actually drink things like eggnog, which, thanks to all the sugar, actually has more calories per ounce than if you just microwaved butter and drank it. Sugar is hydrophilic, bonding readily with water, meaning -- you can fill a cup with sugar, then fill the same cup with water. Then add carbonation and flavoring and you have a soft drink. Really, that's how much sugar they have. I'm not kidding.

Yes, sugar really is as bad as you think.

Sugar barons try to confuse the issue and claim that sugar isn't so bad. And it's not. Compared to strychnine. Yes, hippies make some pretty extravagant claims about the negative health effects of sugar which don't hold up. But that doesn't matter. If you think about it a minute, you'll realize, you already know what's wrong with sugar. It adds calories, contributes nothing nutritionally, and if you're sensitive it can cause a blood sugar spike/crash cycle which not only makes you cranky and difficult, but also can prompt excess consumption while you scramble to recover from the crash. Also, too much sugar all the time kind of burns out our taste buds, so that we become immune to the natural sweetness of things like fruit and milk. We like sugar because sugar tells us that fruit is ripe and (often) that food is good for us. But once we become accustomed to the hyper-pumped super-saturated world of sugar-coated sugar pops with chocolate milk poured on, we no longer even recognize, say, apples as sweet. So you don't like apples because they're not sweet enough, you eat Apple Jacks instead, and the cycle continues. Artificial sweeteners and various sugar substitutes only solve part of the problem -- the calorie part, or the blood sugar part. The taste bud burnout can only really be solved by periods of abstinence. You can eat sugar sometimes. But only if you really want it. Break the habit. It's easy.

Okay, it's not easy. This time of year people will be putting sugar in your face all day long. Just say, "no thanks." Don't tell people you're trying to lose weight. It's tacky, and can instill in others a perverse desire to break your resolve. After all, they don't want you losing weight when they're not.

Don't ever tell anyone you are trying to lose weight. Ever.

Remember what I said about fooling yourself about the diet you are going to go on next week/month/year? Just as, on some level, you know you're lying to yourself, everybody else knows it too. There is nothing good that can possibly come of telling people you're trying to lose weight. It won't make them stop waving fudge under your nose. It won't make them admire your newfound slimness until the slimness actually manifests itself. And it's none of their business anyway.

If other people make it awkward for you to refuse their alleged treats (like grandmothers. grandmothers are famous for this), go ahead and accept it -- then throw it away when they're not looking. You don't have to feel guilty about this. It's their fault for being rude. It's still none of their business what you eat.

If other people make it really, really awkward for you, lie. Lie big. Lie so as to make them embarrassed they pushed the issue. Tell them you can't eat certain things after having parts of your intestine removed after a bullet wound, or that you're allergic to chocolate, or that you're hypoglycemic, or that it's against your religion, or that you are psychologically disturbed by high-calorie treats because you had a little brother with Prader-Willi syndrome who literally ate himself to death. And then later, if somebody catches you eating something you claimed to be allergic to, or discovers that you never had a brother, and calls you on it, you can give them a withering look and say, "I just made that up to get you to leave me alone" as if it should have been obvious to anyone with half a brain that you were lying.

At actual parties, you can hang around the token vegetable tray. It's just there because people have a feeling that it ought to be, not because they expect anyone to actually eat it, so you will have it mostly to yourself. Other rules of thumb are easy. Avoid creamy dips, go for salsa. Drink martinis, avoid punch. If you really like crab puffs or port wine cheese balls rolled in slivered almonds, go ahead and eat them. But don't go nuts. You can do math, right? If a single crab puff or a tiny eggnog or an ounce of cheese ball has 100 calories, you can have a couple. But each one you eat is another hundred calories. There's a diminishing reward-to-calories curve, where the pleasure of having one rather than none is well worth it, but having five instead of three just isn't.

You have to invert your thinking. Your body, and your monkey mind, and thousands of years of pre-industrial history, all assume that calories are the goal -- inherently desirable -- and you spend effort to acquire them. The late-period industrial revolution has turned that on its head. Nowadays, you have to think of calories as the thing you spend. You have a limited calorie budget and you need to spend it on nutrition, then, if you have any calories left over, on enjoyment. If you can combine nutrition and enjoyment, that's better. This requires some soul-searching and experimentation. How much do you really like french fries? What about mayonnaise? Do you eat fast food because you enjoy it, or just because you can't think of anything else to eat? What kind of vegetables do you actually like? C'mon, there must be something. (And remember -- nothing counts as a vegetable after it's been deep fried.)

Advanced topics

I won't lie to you. There may come a time when you have made all the easy improvements -- sorta regular exercise, very little junk food -- and you still want to lose weight. (Vanity, remember?) At that point you have to decide how important your vanity is.

How much are you willing to suffer?

Can you stand being sorta hungry all the time? Can you spend an hour every day exercising hard? Can you count calories precisely and stick rigidly to the counted-out portions? Can you limit your consumption of the foods you really do like? And can you keep all this up for the rest of your life? If you have made all the easy adjustments -- all that remains are the hard ones.

This stage is harder not only because it requires more discipline and causes more suffering, but because it is more complex. This is the point where individual metabolic quirks really come into play. It's easy to know that nobody really needs to eat french fries or candy bars. It's harder to know that you, personally, can't eat potatoes at all without hopping onto the blood sugar roller-coaster. Or that for you a low-carbohydrate approach backfires by making you sluggish. Or that you really like periodic liquid fasts. Or that fasting even half a day renders you incapable of normal activities. Or that you really benefit from lots of herbal "dieter's tea." Or that you function well if you break up your food into many little snacks. Or that you stick to the rest of your diet plan easily as long as you can look forward to eating pizza once a week. Or that once a week is still too much pizza and you have to cut it back to once a month. No one else can possibly tell you these things -- not your doctor, not a diet guru, and certainly not me.

Pop culture, by the way, has lied to you. It has told you repeatedly that losing weight is the key to health and happiness. It's axiomatic. Lose weight = healthy = feel good! This is true -- up to a point. Or, I should say, down to a point. Because, if you try to drop your weight below a certain point, your health can suffer. You might have no stamina, you might be cold all the time, you might be more susceptible to infections, you might have frequent headaches, you might be cranky, you might suddenly need ten hours of sleep. I'm not talking about anorexia, either, although it might sound like I am. These negative effects happen well before starvation. They might not last. Your body might adjust and you will bounce back and suddenly be a bundle of happy, skinny energy, like a teenager. Or maybe not. Maybe the price you pay for being the weight your vanity prefers is an endless battle with your body in which your body never, ever succumbs, and you suffer for the rest of your life.

Is it worth it? That's up to you.

Please note that, as Ophelia is entirely fictional, all her advice should be regarded as for entertainment purposes only.