Yahoo! Answers

Lately I've been spending some time on the Diet & Fitness section of Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is a new feature on Yahoo! where you post questions that you have on just about any subject and other users will answer you.

A very common question is "how do I lose weight?" I think most people realize that eating less and exercise is the best answer, but even that is too general for most. It's kind of like asking, "how do I get something to the moon?" The obvious answer is to put it on a rocket. But most people wouldn't even know where to begin in building and designing a rocket that could make it to the moon. Similarly, I believe most people don't know where to begin once they realize that "eating less and exercise" is the answer to losing weight.

The purpose of my book was to document how I ate less and exercised to lose thirty pounds. I first learned about calories - how much I burned and how much I ate. Then I learned to change my eating habits to balance out my calorie burn/intake equation. At the same time, I have a host of advice that I have found helpful in keeping my exercise from getting boring.

Much of this stuff is basic knowledge that I learned from a variety of sources and finally pieced it all together into a set of actions that worked for me. I think they should teach this stuff in school so that everyone will know the basics before they hit the real world.

Is it easy? Not always. It does require self-control. Once you know how to design and shoot the rocket to the moon, you actually have to go through the efort of building and launching it, which takes discipline and setting the right priorities.