• Eat foods that are filling and low in calories. That means meals and snacks made of whole grains, such as rice, whole-wheat bread, and oatmeal, as well as legumes, such as lentils and other beans.
  
  
• When you eat meat, cut out fat and cut down portion sizes. Choose lean cuts of meat and modest amounts �?about 3 or 4 ounces per serving. Depending on how they are prepared, the leanest cuts of beef are eye of round (155�?17 calories per 3-ounce serving), top round (169�?77 calories per 3-ounce serving), tip round (170�?74 calories per 3-ounce serving), and flank steak (207�?63 calories per 3-ounce serving). Use ground meat labeled 10% fat, the lowest fat content in ground beef. The leanest kinds of pork are roasted tenderloin (166 calories per 3-ounce serving), roasted top round (150 calories per 3-ounce serving), roasted lean top loin (245 calories per 3-ounce serving), and lean ham (120�?57 calories per 3-ounce serving). Light-meat poultry has less fat than dark meat: Stewed light-meat chicken without skin has 159 calories per 3-ounce serving, while stewed dark-meat chicken without skin has 192 calories per 3-ounce serving.
  
  
• Avoid fried foods. Frying foods adds fat and calories. For stovetop cooking, it’s better either to stir-fry foods in nonstick pans lightly coated with a cooking-oil spray or to braise them in broth or wine. Baking, broiling, and roasting leave no extra fat in your meals.
  
  
• Use low-fat or nonfat dairy foods. Milk, yogurt, and cheese are good sources of protein and calcium, but the whole-milk versions of these dairy products are very high in fat.
  
  
• Avoid fast foods. Hamburgers, chicken nuggets, French fries, and other fast-food meals and snacks tend to promote weight gain for two reasons. First, they are high in fat or calories, or both. Second, the "value meals" are often excessively large, and thus they tempt you to overeat.
  
  
• Avoid high-fat and high-carbohydrate snacks. Both types of snacks are high in calories. Even snacks labeled "low-fat" are often high in calories because they contain large amounts of sugars and other carbohydrates.
  
  
• Watch what you drink. Regular sodas, fruit juices, and, especially, alcoholic beverages are high in calories. For example, a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains 154 calories, and an 8-ounce glass of lemonade, about 60�?10 calories. A can of beer is about 130�?70 calories; a 7-ounce gin and tonic is 171 calories; and a 3-ounce glass of white wine is 70 calories.
  
  
• Eat scheduled meals and snacks. It may seem that skipping meals or cutting out snacks is a smart way to cut out calories, but doing either of these things can work against you. You need to eat regularly, even when you’re on a diet. If you don’t, you’ll feel so hungry that you may give up in frustration.

The glycemic index is a measure of how quickly the sugar derived from a particular food is absorbed into your bloodstream. Doctors originally developed the index to help people with diabetes avoid foods that increase blood sugar, but some experts think it can also help people avoid obesity-related health problems.

The glycemic index ranks foods on a 100-point scale, with 100 being the fastest rate of absorption. Foods with sugars that are absorbed quickly have high glycemic indexes; those with sugars that are absorbed slowly have low glycemic indexes. When sugar is absorbed quickly, it increases the release of insulin, the hormone that transports sugar to the cells for fuel. Spikes in insulin levels, if they occur regularly, can promote insulin resistance, a condition in which the body doesn’t respond normally to the hormone. When insulin doesn’t function properly, levels of blood sugar and fats rise, increasing the risk for diabetes, coronary heart disease, and �?possibly �?stroke, kidney failure, and cancer.

In general, high-carbohydrate foods have the highest glycemic indexes; proteins and fats have glycemic indexes that are close to zero. Proponents of low-carbohydrate diets cite the glycemic index in justifying systematic reductions in carbohydrates. However, most scientists disagree. In cutting back on all foods with relatively high glycemic indexes, you would end up avoiding many healthy foods, including carrots (glycemic index of 71), sweet potatoes (glycemic index of 54), and brown rice (glycemic index of 55).

Some experts argue that people should avoid certain foods that are high on the glycemic index �?or should only eat them in moderation �?because they may cause insulin resistance and obesity, though this view remains controversial. The principal suspects are foods heavy in simple sugars, such as candy bars and cookies, and processed carbohydrate foods, such as potato chips, breakfast cereals, and many of the low-fat foods that have recently come on the market. In addition to wreaking havoc with your insulin levels, such foods tend to be high in calories, and excess calories are the cause of obesity.

Glycemic Indexes of Popular Foods
Food	Glycemic Index
All-bran cereal	30
Apple	36
Bagel, plain	72
Banana	53
Cheese pizza	60
Chocolate	49
Corn flakes	77
Donut	76
Ice cream	61
Kidney beans	27
Milk, skim	32
Milk, whole	27
Oatmeal cookies	54
Pita bread	57
Spaghetti	41
Yogurt, low-fat with fruit and sugar	33
Yogurt, low-fat with artificial sweetener	14
Adapted with permission: International Tables of Glycemic Index, Human Nutrition Unit, Department of Biochemistry, University of Sydney

If one person cut back on calories without exercising and another person increased exercise without cutting back on calories, the first person would lose weight more quickly. That’s because it’s easier to cut 500 calories from your diet than it is to burn 500 extra calories through exercise. You’d have to walk or run about five miles a day �?or 35 miles a week �?to lose one pound of fat. But if you only cut back on calories, you’re more likely to regain the weight you lose. Why should that be so? The body reacts to weight loss as if it were starving and, in response, slows its metabolism. When your metabolism slows, you burn fewer calories �?even at rest. When you burn fewer calories, three things can happen. If you continue eating fewer calories, you will either stop losing weight as quickly as you have been, or you’ll stop losing weight altogether. If you increase your calorie consumption, you may actually gain weight more quickly than you have in the past. The solution is to increase your physical activity because doing so will counteract the metabolic slowdown caused by reducing calories.

A regular schedule of exercise raises not only your energy expenditure while you are exercising but also your resting energy expenditure �?i.e., the rate at which you burn calories even when the workout is over and you are resting. Resting energy expenditure remains elevated as long as you exercise at least three days a week on a regular basis. Because it accounts for 60�?5% of your daily energy expenditure, any increase in resting energy expenditure is extremely important to your weight-loss effort. The kinds of vigorous activity that can stimulate your metabolism include walking briskly for two miles or bike-riding uphill.

For people who are obese and who have been sedentary, any amount of physical activity is beneficial, including walking, swimming, and water aerobics. But start out slowly and gradually increase the pace and duration of such activities. Low-intensity activities �?such as taking a short walk or raking leaves �?won’t raise your resting energy expenditure as much as high-intensity activities will, but they have other advantages. For one thing, they help reduce body fat and build muscles �?and muscles burn more calories than fat does. Regular weightlifting also builds muscle and has a similar effect.

Another benefit of regular physical activity of any sort is that it temporarily curbs your appetite. Of course, many people joke that after a workout they feel extremely hungry �?and promptly indulge in a snack. But because exercise raises resting energy expenditure, people continue to burn calories at a relatively high rate. Therefore, a moderate post-exercise snack does not erase the benefits of exercise in helping people control their weight.

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