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" What can a 43-year-old celebrity chef, with a passion for chocolate and a loathing of exercise, teach you about weight loss? The truth, for starters. Eighteen years ago I weighed 210 pounds. At five two, this was no small problem. My love of food was putting my health \u2014 not to mention my job as a spa chef \u2014 at risk, and I knew it was time to shape up. Over the course of a year, without crazy diets or insane workouts, I whittled my way down from a size 22 to a size 6. A decade later, I&amp;#039;ve kept it off. I&amp;#039;m living proof that losing a lot of weight \u2014 30 pounds or more \u2014 is within everyone&amp;#039;s reach; it just takes the right plan. If you&amp;#039;ve given up on getting slim, or think you&amp;#039;re too out of shape to start exercising, maybe you just haven&amp;#039;t found a plan that works for you \u2014 until now. These 10 simple rules from my book, Cooking Thin with Chef Kathleen, will change the way you think about weight loss forever.  1. Forget About Perfection  If you are tipping the scales at 200 pounds, getting down to 120 seems hopeless. Maybe you could have succeeded back when you were 145, or maybe when you were 170. But now, this mission feels impossible. That&amp;#039;s why you need to break your plan down into manageable tasks, starting with portion reduction. Note I didn&amp;#039;t say eat according to National Institutes of Health guidelines. And I didn&amp;#039;t say don&amp;#039;t eat those hot tamales. Succeeding at a mega-weight-loss plan never works if you go cold turkey, from thousands of calories a day to 1,200. Just focus on leaving one snack-size bite of every meal behind, and you&amp;#039;ll start to see results. 2. Dump Anything from Your Diet You&amp;#039;re Not Passionate About  Believe it or not, eating the foods you adore is not a major problem in weight loss. The problem is eating those foods plus everything else that crosses your path. To help me determine how passionately I feel about a certain food, I&amp;#039;ve developed a three-question quiz. For the sake of this exercise, let&amp;#039;s focus on salt-and-vinegar chips. I ask myself: Would I be tempted to maim a dinner guest for eating more than her fair share of chips, even if she were my own mother? Then I ask, would I behave like a three-year-old in a checkout line if I were denied access to the chips? And finally, if I were standing at the checkout and suddenly discovered I was penniless, would I be tempted to pilfer the chips anyway? Even one yes means this is a food I love and must find a way to work into my eating plan.  How do you &amp;quot;work in&amp;quot; a food? By working out a couple of others. To make room for my chips, I parted ways with a lifelong habit of Doritos, Fritos, and Cheetos. Not easy, but definitely preferable to giving up my life-sustaining snack.  3. Practice Slow Substitution For two decades, I was inseparable from my morning cup of joe. But when I decided to lose weight, I knew my sugar-with-extra-cream-so-good-it- tastes-like-mocha-dessert addiction had to end. Rather than quit coffee altogether, I decided to experiment with calorie swapping, so I could still have my caffeine fix, albeit less decadently. I went from cream to whole milk to 2 percent to skim. Did it taste the same? Truthfully, no. But over the course of a month, my taste buds adjusted. After three months, the idea of a rich drink at 6 a.m. was unappealing. My substitution was a success: Since caffeine has virtually no calories at all, I now had more room for my true passions, like chips. 4. Don&amp;#039;t Eat in Any Place That You Sleep, Read, or Work  I like snacking in bed better than any place on earth. In fact, I think restaurants should greet you at the door, hand you a pair of pajamas, show you to your chamber, tuck you in, and take your order.  It was with great sadness that I gave up eating in bed, but I&amp;#039;d abused the privilege for too long. You see, the fact that I was in bed meant I was already engaged in another activity. Adding food to the equation, as pleasant as it was, only complicated matters. I was no longer focusing on what went through my lips, allowing myself to take &amp;quot;just one more bite&amp;quot; too many times.  If you&amp;#039;re serious about weight loss, you must learn to separate eating from everyday activities, whether you&amp;#039;re reading, TV watching, or telephone talking. That means no noshing at your desk while filing a report, no snacks in a bowl while pounding out e-mail. It was only when I decided to isolate my meals from other events that I began to savor the food I was consuming. And only then did I recognize fullness when it hit. 5. Donate 20 Minutes a Day to Movement  Let&amp;#039;s get realistic here. No one with 80 pounds to lose is going to feel excited about exercising \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve been there. But all I&amp;#039;m asking for is 20 minutes a day. That&amp;#039;s the length of time you spend on hold with the DMV, staring out the window wishing for Madonna&amp;#039;s body, or picking up the same plastic toys that your child is going to deposit right back on the floor an hour from now. If two tens sound more doable, that&amp;#039;s okay by me. A brisk 10-minute post-breakfast walk and another just before dinner add up, so grab the mail and keep going. Don&amp;#039;t have the right equipment? Lost your shoes again? C&amp;#039;mon, I find it hard to believe you&amp;#039;re reading this barefoot. Put on the most comfortable kicks you have and start moving. You&amp;#039;re not going that far today \u2014 but the point is, you are going somewhere. Prove to yourself you can get going. Worry about the details later. 6. Defy Negativity When I was in college in California, I used to zip around town on a moped. Stopped at a red light one day, I turned to check out a car full of college boys next to me. Just as I was getting the nerve to smile, one of them looked me dead in the eye and called out, &amp;quot;Fat chick on moped!&amp;quot; Well, as you can probably guess, that sent me straight to Mee Heng Low&amp;#039;s for moo goo gai pan and fortune cookies. How I wish I&amp;#039;d been smart enough to turn off or tune out my negative internal dialogue and steady my self-esteem. Burying hurtful comments \u2014 whether from people in your life or from inside your own head \u2014 under mounds of food only makes you feel worse two hours later. It takes courage to believe you can succeed, but without it, you will surely fail. 7. Fake the Right Attitude  There are people who wake up one morning and declare, &amp;quot;Today I&amp;#039;m going to throw out all the junk food, hire a personal trainer, and get thin in six weeks.&amp;quot; And they do. Yippee for them. I can&amp;#039;t relate to those people. I need constant reinforcement. Halfway through my workout, I need motivation to stick it out until the end. I found that encouragement from the Spinning-class instructor at my local gym. Some of his expressions I&amp;#039;ve adopted as my own:  &amp;quot;To see change, you&amp;#039;ve got to earn change.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s mind over body, people. You can talk yourself into this or you can talk yourself out of it \u2014 your choice.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Focus on the finish line. If you don&amp;#039;t see it, you&amp;#039;re going to get lost.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If you believe you can, you will.&amp;quot; 8. Don&amp;#039;t Be Afraid to Dine Alone It should come as no surprise that your family may not be thrilled with your commitment to healthy eating. No kid I know is going to be jumping up and down over having kale for dinner, or even broccoli. And your nondieting spouse may find your new habits confusing. Your job is to not let this deter your efforts. Think of it as leading by example. Don&amp;#039;t buy separate groceries. If something&amp;#039;s too tempting, don&amp;#039;t have it around. If the troops complain, let them fend for themselves. Hey, any kid who really takes exception to a healthy sandwich can always use her allowance to buy lunch at school. But also remember, just because you have decided to change doesn&amp;#039;t mean everyone has to change with you. Respect boundaries. We don&amp;#039;t all move at the same pace, and this time, you may need to walk those first few steps alone. 9. Beware of Subconscious Cheating  A couple of months into my diet, I discovered my bathroom scale was registering &amp;quot;false readings&amp;quot; again. What do I mean by that? I mean where once the numbers had been going down, suddenly they started rising rapidly. Though I told myself there was no good reason why my plan wasn&amp;#039;t working, I knew better: I was cheating. Not blatant cheating \u2014 like making multiple trips to the dinner buffet \u2014 but the subtle, while-you-weren&amp;#039;t-looking sort. Subconscious cheating is usually brought on by a shakeup in your normal routine, like too many hours at work, not enough sleep or your favorite TV show being preempted by a lousy football game. For reasons unknown, such disruption triggers a diet-be-damned response. It starts with incremental increases in serving size: an extra splash of milk in the coffee, another cup of cereal to the bowl for good measure. When lunch rolls around, a few extra slices of meat go on the sandwich, which naturally leads to another thick slice of cheese and a bigger dollop of mayo.  I wish I had a magic solution to this insidious form of self-sabotage. Unfortunately, I can only say this: The scale doesn&amp;#039;t lie. If you think you are eating the same, but the numbers have suddenly gone up, you&amp;#039;re cheating, plain and simple. So it&amp;#039;s time to get back on track. Be vigilant about portion size and stay true to exercising. Your body is trying to trick you into thinking you can get away with doing less. You can&amp;#039;t. 10. Treat Your Health Like Your Only Child  When a doctor tells the mother of a boy with a broken leg, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s going to take eight weeks to heal and several months of physical therapy,&amp;quot; the mother doesn&amp;#039;t start bargaining: &amp;quot;Listen, Doc, two weeks is all I can devote. I just don&amp;#039;t have the time or discipline. If permanent damage is the outcome, so be it. I&amp;#039;m busy.&amp;quot; Without question, she takes on the task. She&amp;#039;s 100 percent committed to her child and his care. So why should you treat yourself any differently? Your body is the only vessel that is carrying you through life; you need to care for it. Sure, there will be setbacks and moments of total frustration. But you&amp;#039;d never give up on your parents or your child. And you can&amp;#039;t give up on yourself. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/diet-nutrition/advice/a17325/lose-75-pounds/>