"How can you do that? You have to buy a scale," he says.
And you have to use it religiously: "Out of bed. In the nude. On the scale. Every morning," Boden says. "It gets you to your goal."
You'll want one that shows 1/2-pound increments so you can fine-tune your diet at the first sign of weight-creep. Give it a test-drive in the store by stepping onto it six or seven times, always starting with the same foot. (It matters.)
"If you get the same weight five times, it's a good scale," Boden says.
Eat more soup. If you want to lose weight, "the long and short of it is that the emphasis has to be on calories: Calories, calories, calories," says Dr. Rex Ahima, director of the obesity unit at Penn's Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism.
Learn to look for calories on food labels. Then, to feel satisfied without consuming so many of them, try starting the biggest meal of your day with a homemade broth-and-vegetable soup.
"It's all water, so you're full," Ahima says. (If you don't have a recipe, Weight Watchers' popular Zero Points Soup is a good introduction to the genre.)
Better yet, Ahima says, have soup at two meals a day. Personally, he enjoys a broth-based medley of greens, mushrooms and carrots. Besides filling you up, soup can help you meet your daily produce quota, he notes.
Eat less to live more. At the end of the day, it all comes down to calories, agrees Dr. Intekhab Ahmed, a diabetes expert at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and president of the Philadelphia Endocrine Society. It can be useful to imagine that you've been granted a set amount of food to consume on the day you're born, he says, and that on the day you finish, you die.
