You would think that skipping a meal would be beneficial to losing weight. Unless you’re eating nine meals a day, you’d be horribly wrong. Skipping breakfast means that your blood sugar is low by lunchtime, and you’re ravenous, so you eat a giant meal. Quickly. So quickly, in fact, that you usually end up eating more than you really need to.

The solution is to eat something — anything — for breakfast, preferably something healthy. Me personally, I don’t have time, so I have a shake for breakfast (Carnation Instant Breakfast, Slimfast, etc.). They’re about 250 calories so they won’t break the bank. This way, I’m not dying by the time lunch rolls around, and I eat properly.

There’s no big secret to weight loss. One of the revelations I took away from The Hacker’s Diet was that 3500 calories equals a pound. (Yes, I know nutritionists are having a conniption right now with that statement, but on average, across all types of food, that is a correct statement.) So how do you lose weight? Either take in less calories, or burn more than you take in. The Hacker’s Diet outlines a system where you can measure what you’re taking in, and then just subtract 3500 calories a week from what you ingest, et voila: You lose a pound a week.

I don’t have the patience for a complicated system, but Walker’s book was still an eye opener for me. How simple and dumb is it to lose weight? Well… simple and dumb. Just ingest less calories than you need, and your body will take the rest from fat. Duh.

The problem is how to ingest less without feeling hungry and crabby all the time. More on that later.