I'm not sure if it's really a common myth or if it's just my imagination, but it seems that there's a meme going around about how difficult it supposedly is to lose weight.

Well, it isn't difficult at all. It is easy. In a nutshell: you'll lose weight if you eat less. Or, like a doctor once said bluntly to a patient who kept complaining how she cannot lose her weight: Nobody was fat in Dachau.

The key to losing weight is really very simple. If you want to lose some weight in a given day, you have to eat less calories than your body burns during that day. If on a given day your body burns 2200 calories, and you eat 2000 calories, you will lose a bit of weight. If you eat 2400 calories, you will gain some. And 3500 calories (kcal) are about 0.5kg.

It is nearly impossible to eat in one day exactly the amount of calories that your body burns during that day. You are either going to eat more, or you are going to eat less. If you want to keep your weight level, you have to make sure that the days when you eat more than you burn are balanced by days when you eat less.

The real difficulty in losing weight is that most people have no idea of how many calories they're eating. But trying to lose weight without knowing how much you're eating is like driving in a dark night with no headlights.

All of the special kinds of diets that people try to sell you are misleading. They try to tell you that the key to losing weight is separating food, or avoiding carbohydrates, or whatever. That's all bollocks. The only reason any of that can work is if it tricks you into eating calories at a lower rate than your body burns. But as soon as you adapt to the new regime, you'll start exceeding your calorie input again and you won't be losing weight.

So here's how to lose weight the easy, sure-fire, denis way.
  1. Calculate your body's daily calorie consumption. There are calculators to help you do this on the web. Search for "calorie calculator men" or something similar. Use multiple of these calculators and average the results, because every calculator gives them slightly different.
  2. Keep a diary of what you eat. Most food has nutritional information on its packaging. For food that doesn't, look up its nutritional information on the web. Just try searching for "turkey breast kcal" or something, and you'll find sites with volumes of nutritional info. Don't eat anything unless you can get reliable nutritional information for it. Keep track of every tiniest speck you eat. 10 grams of oil have more than 90 calories. Keep track of everything.
  3. Now that you know how much you're eating and how much you need, it's easy to tell when to stop. Suppose you put your limit at 1600 kcal. When you exceed that, stop eating. That's it. That's how you lose weight. By stopping eating when you hit this limit.
  4. If you want to lose weight without losing muscle mass, you'll need to bump up your consumption of protein. Depending on the muscle mass you want to preserve and the sources you trust, you need to eat somewhere between 80 and 120+ grams of protein per day. Doing this while not exceeding a certain number of calories means you have to eat a lot of chicken, turkey, tuna, salmon, cod - things that pack protein and are low in fat. If you want to hit 120g of protein on a 1600 calorie diet, this might mean eating more meat than you might be comfortable with. That's life. If you want to keep the muscle, you need to do it.
  5. If you adhere to these rules, you can pretty much eat anything you want. Sweets are fine, McDonald's is fine. Just know that a single double cheeseburger is 460 calories, and it packs only 25 grams of protein. If you want to reach 120 grams in 1600 calories, that's not a good enough ratio - unless you stuff yourself with tuna (not in oil!) the rest of the day. Likewise, 100 grams of chocolate are 600 calories, and pretty much none of that is usable protein. Still want to eat that chocolate whole? It's your call.
Doctors say that merely eating less will cause you to lose weight in the wrong places. As far as a man's health is concerned, the most important place to lose weight is the belly and the internal fat around organs. Apparently, to lose this weight, you need to exercise as well. I'm using an elliptical trainer for that.

For the past two weeks, I've been on an exercise and diet regime as described above. So far I've lost 1kg each week. I'm going to continue this until I eliminate my abdominal fat, and then I'm probably just going to keep recording my calorie and protein consumption indefinitely. When I get fit, I want to keep fit, and not let the cycle repeat itself.

So far, I have found the above principles to be quite successful. :)