Over the past few decades we’ve been trying harder and harder to be healthy and fit. The result: We got heavy and sick. What’s going on here?

If a doctor prescribes us a medication and it makes us worse, we would stop taking it and fire our doctor. If an architect builds us a house and it crumbles, we would fire them too, and we certainly would not blame ourselves for our housing issues. Why not apply the same logic to health and fitness? Seems reasonable. But what else is there other than the old calorie counting approach we’ve all been taught?

There is an alternative.

We can do what every human being up until a few decades ago did: Eat actual food and stay active. No complex calorie counting. No confusing workout routines. No pills, powders, or potions.

It may be helpful to think about this alternative approach like this: Want to avoid lung cancer? No need to worry about breathing, just don’t smoke. Keep the stuff that causes lung cancer out of your body. Similarly, want to avoid obesity and diabetes? No need to worry about eating, just don’t eat “foods” that didn’t exist prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Keep the stuff that causes obesity and diabetes out of your body.

We’ve gotten worse while trying harder because we’re essentially trying to avoid lung cancer while continuing to smoke. We’ve been instructed to eat foods that cause obesity and diabetes. Avoiding those diseases is really hard and complex when we are told to eat the foods that cause them. We’ve been given bad information, but we can certainly take the power back and make slim simple again.

To get started, try these seven tips:

1. Remember that nobody knew what a calorie was let alone counted them when the rates of overweight were twenty times lower than they are today. Counting calories cannot be required to stay slim.
2. Avoid any person or program who makes health and fitness seem complex. There’s a good chance they are more interested in making money than in helping you.
3. Vitamins and minerals are essential and there are essential fatty acids and essential amino acids. There is no such thing as essential sugars or essential starches. Don’t make the majority of your diet unneeded sugars and starches.
4. If a food doesn’t spoil, it will likely spoil your health. Make sure most of what you eat comes out of your refrigerator or freezer.
5. Replace your fear of fat with a fear of anything processed. Note: Processed = not found directly in nature.
6. If our grandmothers didn’t eat it, we shouldn’t either. She, and all of our other ancestors, stayed slim and healthy without really trying. We can too.
7. Exercise “cancels out” eating processed foods like exercise “cancels out” smoking—it doesn’t. Processed foods, like cigarettes, do damage to our bodies that has nothing to do with calories, and therefore cannot be undone by burning more of them.

If counting calories and exercising obsessively is working and enjoyable for you, please keep it up. However, if you are interested in simplifying slim you may enjoy THE CALORIE MYTH.

– Jonathan Bailor