Ditch just one tempting food — and lose weight

Candy, cocktails and cheese may be giving you loads of extra calories

Losing weight seems to require an advanced degree in chemistry, titrating fat grams and balancing the pH of your digestive tract by eating starches with vegetables. (Or is it starches with fruits?) But it turns out you can simplify things — just by eradicating a specific (and especially tempting) food. “Sometimes cutting out just one type of food can make a huge difference in weight loss,” says Jennifer Warren, a doctor specializing in weight loss at the Physicians Healthy Weight Center in North Hampton, New Hampshire.

There's a reason your colleague's stocked candy jar just sprang to mind. All those Hershey's Miniatures and Twizzlers rank right up there with the emptiest of empty calories. Or maybe candy isn't your problem; maybe your diet is simply padded with extra calories from cocktails, cheese, white bread, or seemingly healthy broiled strip steak. “When you give up just one diet-sabotaging thing, you can save yourself hundreds and hundreds of calories a day,” says New York City nutritionist Lauren Slayton, founder of foodtrainers.net. The weight loss is often speedy enough that you can do this as a safer, far more sensible alternative to a crash diet (if you need to drop a size in time for your ex's wedding in three weeks, say). But you can also incorporate the change, with a little leeway, for the long term. And that's a lot easier than all that dissertation research.

Cut out: candy
Potential calorie savings: At least 300 calories a day, but likely much more.

Since so much candy — especially the chewy stuff, such as Skittles and Swedish Fish — is essentially pure sugar, it hardly registers on your sense of fullness. “Snacks that have protein and some fat will affect your shutoff mechanism in a way that candy doesn't,” Slayton says. Simple carbohydrates such as candy (and white bread, for that matter) are “digested very rapidly, raise your blood sugar quickly, drop your blood sugar just as quickly, and leave you wanting more,” Warren says. Subsequently, you just keep shoveling it in. Katie, 36, a designer in New York City, admits she used to buy a big bag of jelly beans every afternoon and “would eat more than half of every bag while sewing.” And yet, when she got home from work, she was always ready for dinner.

Katie finally decided to give up candy: “It was my first meeting with my trainer, and he asked me about my eating habits,” she recalls. “I'd just had a bag of M&M's, and our session was at 6 A.M.” She started bringing baby carrots, cucumber spears, and apple slices to her studio. As Slayton points out, “When you're a candyholic and still crave something, I know it's not the same, but try something sweet like mango or another fruit.” As Katie started shedding weight — she went from 140 pounds to 117 in about four months — saying no to candy became easier: “When offered it, I would think, ‘I don't eat that’ or ‘I have control’ or ‘My body is more important than that candy.’” Her body also felt a lot better: “I was nearly euphoric,” she says. Slayton suggests that you don't have to live without candy forever: After a few weeks of total prohibition, “you can see that you don't have to gorge on it,” she says. “You can try maybe once a week to get a reasonable portion” — like a mini Snickers bar — “and eat it and enjoy it.”

Unexpected bonus: You can lose your taste for other sweet things, such as sugary drinks and soda, too.

Cut out: alcohol
Potential calorie savings: About 500 calories a day, if you have two frozen margaritas; about 300 if you have two cosmos.

The number of calories in a mojito isn't too far from that in Peanut M&M's. Plus, when you drink socially, you tend to eat more. Then, just to stretch it into a two-day mistake, you're also more apt to make bad food choices the morning after (along with snooze-buttoning right through that 7 A.M. Spinning class). The desire to inhale a bacon-egg-and-cheese croissant isn't caused by fuzzy-headedness or a hangover; alcohol consumption can result in waking up with excessively low insulin levels, according to a study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “Overnight, you develop low blood sugar and wake up with an appetite that's through the roof,” Warren says. “Sometimes it can start a carb binge that lasts all day.”

When Theresa, a restaurant publicist, was in her early 30s, contracting asthma meant she had to stop running. She treated the asthma with a steroid inhaler (with the side effect of weight gain), and she treated her newfound after-work free time with Pinot Gris … and soon found herself ten pounds heavier. Even after seeing a trainer for several months, she hadn't lost weight. One night, when she dropped a Diet Coke can into the recycling, she noticed something startling — four empty wine bottles in the bin. “I had consumed those bottles in a one-week span all by myself.” She decided to give up alcohol for a month. “I lost the bloat within a few days,” she says. “Within a few weeks, I'd lost two inches from my waist.”

Notably, significantly curtailing alcohol — drinking just one night a week, or giving it up as a kind of monthlong detox — also has happy benefits. For instance, Jennifer, 41, a television programmer in New York City, quits drinking for the month of January every year as a way to atone for the usual December debauchery, and to peel away the resultant weight gain. “It's the time of year that my stomach is the flattest,” she says.

Unexpected bonuses: You avoid the calories in mixers like triple sec and sour mix, you won't scarf bar snacks like mini pretzels or mixed nuts, and you'll sleep better.

Cut out: white bread
Potential calorie savings: Up to 1,000 — if you eat a bagel for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and dig into the bread basket at dinner.

A slice of white bread might as well come individually wrapped in cellophane and pierced with a lollipop stick, because, as Warren puts it, “white bread is essentially sugar. Its greatest virtue is that it holds your sandwich together.” White bread's simple carbohydrates are easy to eat, lead to spike-and-crash energy, and contain slow-to-burn calories that end up as fat.

Banishing white bread is difficult, especially considering its convenience, abundance, and general deliciousness: “I used to eat a bagel with butter for breakfast, a sandwich at lunch, and then something bready or white-flour-y for dinner,” says Stephanie, 43, an economist in Boston. Whole-grain bread, with complex carbohydrates and blood-sugar-regulating fiber, is certainly a better choice nutritionwise, but it often contains more calories per serving than its pasty-white (and just plain pasty) counterpart. “If you're thinking short-term and want to see weight-loss results, don't reach into the bread basket at all,” says Slayton. (If you long for a sandwich, eat it between two large leaves of romaine lettuce.)

Which is what Stephanie finally decided to do one day. “I realized there was no middle ground with me. I had to give up all bread, all crackers, all pizza,” she says. “It was really hard in the beginning, but after a month or so, I didn't even want it.” And she certainly didn't miss how it made her feel and look: “full and bloated.” Granted, carbohydrates still dominate her daily diet, “but they're stuff with protein and fiber, like yogurt and fruit.” Since she gave up bread, she's lost at least eight pounds and, she says, “gained visible abs.”