I am not selling you anything. Many individual people are not trying to sell you anything. Most corporate forces are trying to sell you something. If you are overweight, it is probably, in whole or in part, because you have been sold too many things. You must not allow this to happen. Food companies exist to sell you more food, even though both of you know this is not what you need. Do not allow them to make poor eating decisions for you, and refuse to support companies that exist for this purpose. Do not buy self-destructive body-image illusions, do not buy a lack of self-respect. And if you are overweight and wish not to be, know that improvement is not an act of consumption, either. Ignore the diet industry, which has no more concern for your health than the food industry it is supposedly counterposed against (except they're more often synonymous). Biology trumps commerce. Be an organism, not a buyer.

Eat breakfast. This seems counterintuitive, especially if, like me, you were already in the habit of skipping breakfast. Surely eating three meals is worse than eating only two. But it's fairly simple to discover how this isn't true. If you don't eat breakfast, you will begin building your hunger for lunch as soon as you wake up. By lunchtime, you will be very hungry, and you will think that since you are hungry, and have deprived yourself all morning, you have earned a nice big lunch. Later, you will be fat. If you eat breakfast, even a small one, you will be in a better position to make rational decisions at the day's other mealtimes.

Don't eat crap. There are many short phrases to which my diet plan could be reduced, and this is probably one of the most succinctly comprehensive. I attribute my weight gain mostly to the idle consumption of food that I didn't even particularly enjoy, most of it under the heading of "snacks". Do not eat cookies extruded by factory spigots. Do not eat anything made by applying lard and artificial flavors to reconstituted potatoes. Think at least three times before eating anything that is advertised on television, or that comes in a package that has had more design energy put into it than you would put into leaving a note for the UPS person. If you are doing something so unengrossing that you have to eat while doing it to stave off boredom, go do something else instead.

You need to exercise. That is, maybe you don't, technically, and in theory you could make all the progress you need by simply changing your diet. But it won't actually work. You need to take positive action. You need to participate, physically, in the physical process of improvement. If you have let yourself get fat, the largest part of what you're correcting is your relationship with your body. So get to know it. Run, or lift weights, or bike, or row. Do something at least four days a week that elevates your heart rate and keeps it elevated for 20 to 30 minutes, something that you'll feel tired and exhilarated after. You're going to have a new body, at the end of this process, so start thinking about the new things you'd like it to be able to do.

The first four things will be enough to start the process. It will seem like it should be more complicated. You've heard hundreds of stories about how hard it is to lose weight, after all. But most of them were made up to sell you something, and the rest of them were wrong for other reasons. Losing weight is both easy and simple, and the best way to convince yourself of this encouraging contention is to weigh yourself as it happens. Weigh yourself every morning, in the same place in your morning routine each time (and you'll need a morning routine, if you don't already have one, because you've got to manage to exercise and eat breakfast now), and keep a chart. From one day to the next, your weight will go down or up or stay about the same, but it will go down more often than up, and as your chart begins to cover weeks and months, the line will slope steadily downwards. Once you have lost 5 pounds, you will know you can lose 10. When you've lost 25, you'll know you aren't crazy for aiming for 50. Once you've lost 50, you'll realize that what you're doing isn't actually losing weight, it's resetting your body.

Let your clothes balloon. It may be very tempting to try to buy new, smaller clothes as soon as you possibly can, as another tangible measure of your progress. Don't. Buying new clothes you're only going to shrink out of again is a waste of money, and a bad encouragement to quit before you're done, but more importantly, you will get better physical reinforcement from feeling your existing clothes getting baggier than you would from continually buying incrementally smaller clothes which then feel exactly the same. Don't turn a physical process into a head game.

Reinforcement is important. Let your friends help you. You are not alone in the world, and like most of the big things you will try to do with your life, you will try to lose weight in the context of other people. If you allow them to be sources of excuses and procrastination, they will become pressures toward failure. If they don't offer to help, make them. Get them to split entrées, or join a gym with you, or drag you up mountains, or be dragged. Somehow, get them invested in your success. Improve yourself as a member of your communities, not just as an isolated body.

Weight loss is satisfying, but as a hobby it's incredibly dull. Plus, sooner or later you're going to have lost all the weight you need to lose, and then where will you be? Be engaged, be curious, have interests. If you can combine your interests with your exercise (learning languages is particularly good for this), or with your dietary changes (cook, or find some new restaurants from which to bring home leftovers), that's excellent, but even if you can't, concentrate as much energy on the other things you care about as you do on losing weight. Your goal is a vibrant stable state, which is about much more than metabolic rates and fat saturation.

In fact, while you're changing your diet and your exercise, change anything else you can think of. Get a better job, find a better apartment, commit to your relationship, hone new skills, give away things you don't need, sort through your battles and pick which ones you really care to keep fighting. Refuse to accept inertia or decay. Be a person who can change, and who is aware enough, and willing, to focus on anything that starts going wrong. The project, again and again and again, is self-improvement. If you've neglected your body, you've probably neglected other things.