Here is the diet I'm following. It's not easy. It's not clear-cut. It requires you exercise a lot of common sense. It's boring. It doesn't lead to super-fast weight loss. It's not clever. And it requires you to hold yourself completely responsible.

Imagine you've lost all the weight you want to lose. Now think about how you're going to maintain the weight. Are you going to remain on the South Beach Diet the rest of your life? If so, then that's a fine way to lose weight. If you're going to count calories or carbs or fat grams the rest of your life, then that's a fine way to lose weight for you.

You should choose a diet based on how you plan on maintaining your weight loss. That way the whole process of losing the weight will serve as practice for maintaining your goal weight. Too many people plan to lose weight in a way that has no relation to how they're going to keep the weight off. In that way they haven't prepared themselves in any way to stay at their goal weight. Sure, you can go on a liquid diet for a couple months and lose 50 pounds, but once you go off the diet you haven't had any practice of eating normal foods in normal amounts so as not to gain weight. This is why fad diets are so rightly criticized. They're not criticized because they don't work. They're criticized because they don't teach you anything about eating and living like a normal human being at your goal weight.

For me, I know that I'm not going to be counting anything or avoiding certain foods the rest of my life. I know that I want to be able to have pizza and burgers and candy. I know that I want to have cake on my birthday and Christmas cookies in December and to have the occasional hot fudge sundae and not feel like I'm "cheating" when really I'm just enjoying my life. The way I plan on maintaining my weight is by stepping on the scale once a week or so and if I'm above my goal weight I'm going to eat a little less and exercise a little more the coming week. If I'm at or below my goal weight I probably won't give what I'm eating that much thought.

The way I've been losing weight is just a version of my maintenance plan. I have a weight loss goal every day. This goal is measured in tenths of a pound. I weigh myself every day. If I haven't reached my goal I try to eat a little less and exercise a little more the next day. If I've exceeded my goal I know I can eat a little more and exercise a little less the next day and be fine. If I've reached my goal, then I know I'm doing about what I need to be doing. That's it. You might say, "Andy, don't you know that your bladder holds 5 pounds of liquid and your weight can fluctuate 10 pounds in a day without you doing anything and what you weigh on the scale from day to day doesn't have a direct relation to how much you've eaten and so on and so on?" Yes, I understand all that. I'm not talking about eating dramatically more or dramatically less because of the number that comes up on the scale. I'm talking about making small changes based on the daily fluctuations of my weight. In the long run this leaves me eating and exercising at about the rate I need to in order to lose weight at a pace I'm happy with.

I told you, it's not very interesting.

Maybe you'd like to do the same thing. I think that's a good idea if you have the right personality-type for it. You need to be able to just see weight loss as a project. You can't get your ego tied up in it and you can't flip out because of the numbers on the scale. If you're the type of person who gets really upset if you go a couple days without losing weight, and then you go off on a binge and call yourself worthless and dry your tears with an ice cream sandwich, then you're probably better off with something a little more regimented where you only weigh yourself once a month or so.

In my next post I'm going to give you a starting point that works very well for this diet. In fact, it's a complete diet in and of itself that I think almost anyone could use to reach their weight loss goal (and maintain that weight). And the whole thing can be described in 7 words.