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Wouldnt it be great to be able to eat as much as you want as often as you want and have body fat melt away while you sleep, watch TV, or sit behind your desk at work? Id certainly go for that - being able to be fit with very little or no effort at all.

Turn on the TV and what do we see? Television ads promising you weight loss and fitness with no effort. Want to lose that extra fat around your belly? Just take these pills. Walk into the bookstore and browse through the rows and rows of books advocating one diet fad or the other. The problem is that most of them offer conflicting information. Ill be straightforward in telling you that rather than separating the fat from your body, most of these people are more interested in separating your money from your wallet.

Ive tried many of these diet and exercise fads and can tell you that most of them flat out do not work. Some of the diets will work, but will force your body to do things that it was designed to not do, therefore your body thinks its deathly ill and starts burning fat as an energy source. Losing fat is not a bad thing at all, but tricking your body into burning fat by responding with a survival mechanism is. What are the long term effects of these fad diets? Who really wants to live the type of restrictive lifestyle that these diets push on you? Who really wants to work hard and suffer for something that in 20 years from now will be the laughingstock of the fitness community? There has to be a better way

The true path to fat loss is so simple, yet no diet book author would ever admit it. The secret is this:

Burn more calories than you eat.

Thats all. Theres really nothing more to it than that, and you probably already know this! There is no more effective way, no special fruit from the amazon, no machine that you can use that will give you better results.

Unfortunately there are plenty of people who would like to pull the wool over your eyes about what to eat, how to starve yourself, what machine to use to get the perfect body. Next time you reach for the next diet fad book, brochure on an ab exerciser, or pick up the phone to dial a number you got off of an infomercial, think about this - they didnt work in the past, and they wont work again because youre still not burning more calories than youre taking in.

After scouring the internet, bookstores, and trying just about any diet I could find to lose that extra 30 pounds Ill tell you whats worked for me:

Keep a food journal, tracking all of the calories that you take in. Be detailed. Youll be surprised at how much stuff you can cut out if you just write it down. Personally, I was disgusted at the amount of sugars and junk foods I was ingesting on a daily basis. I didnt eliminate them, only cut back a little.

Find out how many calories you burn in a day. You burn most of your calories just by existing. This is called basal metabolism. Find a chart to see how many calories are burned for certain activities for your weight class.

Exercise regularly. It doesnt take much, only around 20 minutes a day 3-5 days a week. Regular exercise will increase your metabolism and cause your body to burn even more calories even while youre not active.

Being fit is a lifestyle. It doesnt have to be severely limiting and it doesnt even have to be painful. Being fit is always easier in the long run than putting yourself through the ringer with limiting or starvation diets.

My search for the perfect diet and exercise program took me 8 years and ironically the one thing that worked for me was the easiest and least expensive thing out of all of the others I tried.

Jason Stewart is a fitness buff, writer, IT professional, and a father of 3. For more no-nonsense tips on fat loss, visit http://www.jmsgo.com/fatloss