How to Lose Weight

The answer, of course, is that you need to change your lifestyle in one way or another. Somehow, you need to incorporate a healthier amount of activity and appropriate amounts and quality of food.

It’s not magic.

I actually wrote this short (and some would say utterly useless so far ) piece to introduce you to an excellent article that pretty much sums up the difficulty in getting great on-point advice on how you specifically should lose weight and become a healthier person.

The article is written by Yoni Freedhoff, the founder of the non-surgical Bariatric Medical Institute here in Ottawa. Dr. Freedhoff is an obesity expert if ever there was one. Note, it was updated in 2021 and I now link that version.

Every Diet Works For Someone, No Diet Works For Everyone, Diets Are Difficult - IF 2021 Edition

Update in late 2025 ...

A while ago (sometime in 2024), my A1C crossed from pre-diabetic (where it had sat for a year or two) to diabetic at 6.6. This, of course, is never good news as this is a disease that has a lot of negative consequences as you age. It is *very* important to keep that number under control.

So I finally had a reason to take my diet seriously. As in life-and-death seriously. What I did was cut all sugar out of my diet and try to reduce portions to sensible levels at all times. I do splurge now and again (you gotta live), but we're talking quite infrequently.

I switched to whole grains where possible (much lower sugar spike after eating). I never eat desserts (3 or 4 in the last 23 months). And so on. I lost 65 pounds in less than a year and it has remained off. Stressful times have caused spikes now and again, but I have always managed to return to the baseline, which is 65 pounds under my peak.

And then there is this method ...

I was informed recently about an article that teaches a safe method of losing weight fast using both diet and exercise. This is of course the gold standard, which generally includes a well-balanced diet with moderate exercise that includes some strength training and cardio. The key to that is consistency, which is my Achilles' heel (and don't tell me it's not yours lol).

Anyway, the site looks interesting to me and says all the right things on my first examination, so consider checking it out if you want a well specified approach to losing weight.

How to lose weight fast: Myths & Scientific Facts About Weight Loss

Grammar and sentence structure … they matter …

There is a pretty interesting article about HPE – a company apparently known for its COBOL support (a language with which I have a lot of experience from my early career) – spinning out its software assets and simultaneously embracing a major Linux distribution – SUSE. That article is here, if you are interested …

http://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-linux-distro/?ftag=TRE17cfd61&bhid=24982480711624769285967525327163

But I noticed a paragraph that was so poorly structured, it took me three reads to make sense of what the author was trying to convey.

With Canonical Ubuntu, the top cloud Linux, and Red Hat, the leading server Linux, SUSE, which is also a major enterprise Linux player and a powerhouse in mainframe Linux, is one of the three biggest Linux powers.

There are two major issues with that sentence, each of which harms readability. The first is the passive tone, which is done by reversing the thought and starting with some passive description to make the point. The second is several parenthetical asides separated only by commas, as if you are reading a list. It’s a brutal read.

Straightening it out requires that the thought be made active in tone, and that the parenthetical passages be isolated with either parentheses or dashes. In fact, separating the the main statement from the enumeration of the other players with two sentences is even better.

Something like this:

SUSE, a major enterprise player, is a powerhouse in mainframe Linux and one of the three biggest Linux powers. The others are Canonical Ubuntu – the top cloud Linux, and Red Hat – the leading server Linux.

Don’t be afraid of active language or short sentences. They will improve your writing dramatically. (Note to self – you too!)