If you’re trying to lose weight and get into better shape, then the first place to look is to your diet. While exercise plays a very important role in our body composition it can’t make up for a bad diet. Too many of us think that we can eat unhealthily all day and then use exercise to try and ‘make up for it’. That is not how diet works.

This is the first clue that many of us don’t really know how diet does work. The next clue comes with the next popular strategy that many people will use to try and get a body closer to the one they always imagined: severely restricting calories or just one food group.

The mistake people make here is that they are thinking of their diet purely as being a source of energy. Your diet is MUCH more than that. Rather than simply being the equivalent of the ‘fuel’ that a car runs on, it is also the water, the oil and coolant. Moreover, it is also the screws, the nuts, the bolts, the rubber the tires are made of and the glass.

You are what you eat. What you eat is reconstituted and recombined in or-der to create your body. If you try to lose weight by eating a lot less, then your health will suffer, your energy levels will suffer and ultimately you’ll be doomed to failure.

But despite these facts, most of us are still hoping to find some kind of ‘quick fix’ for our diet. We want some kind of immediate ‘cure’ for obesity, for lethargy or for spots and we think that the way to get it is simply to change the way we eat.

This is why there are still so many fad diets being promoted on the web. And it is why there are still so many big myths and extreme opinions doing the rounds.

The question is how you can cut through all of this misinformation and all of this bad advice and get to the core of what actually works. That’s what we’re going to be doing in this book: diet explained.

Because ultimately, losing weight and being in the best shape of your life doesn’t have to be complicated and it doesn’t have to be hard. It’s simply a matter of understanding the science and applying it in a smart way that will work with your routine and that will be easy to stick to.