Are you looking for a foolproof way to lose weight-one that doesn't require incredible willpower or starvation diets, boring menus, or tedious calorie counting? One that is fun, invigorating, and builds self-confidence? One that keeps your weight where you want it for life? There is one plan, and one plan only, that does all this and more. It's called the Exercise Plus or Minus Diet Plan. With it, you lose weight, change your metabolism, and diminish your appetite. You customize it to your own body chemistry, your own personality, and your own needs, so that it is tailor-made for you and you alone. It is very easy to follow, and you feel stronger, more vibrant, and more supple while you are on it-none of the weakness, depression, and frustration you get from fat diets.
      Why a "Plus or Minus" diet? Because you choose whether or not you want to dier at all. Exercise is so much more effective than diet alone as a weight-losing tool that you don't have to diet if you don't want to. As long as you exercise properly-and that means aerobically-you will continue to lose fat as long as you have fat to lose. However, this loss is gradual-about a pound a week. If you are carrying around a lot of extra fat, you may get impatient with that pace and decide to combine diet with your exercise for faster weight loss.
      As a general rule, you don't need to diet if you are less than 10 percent over fat. For example, if you weigh no pounds and only want to lose 10 pounds, or if you weigh 135 and only want to lose 15, exercise alone should do the job. If you are more than 10 percent over fat, you can either speed up the process with the Plus diet or eliminate the diet, lose the weight more slowly, and luxuriate in the fact that you are eating normally.
Sound too good to be true? Far from it. Obesity, says Michael Pollock of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Milwaukee, citing a study at

( Trip ) FAT AND SPORTS
Extra fat poses particular problems for women in sports. In addition to aggravating rheumatoid arthritis of the knees, encouraging high blood pressure, making you more resistant to your own insulin (encouraging diabetes if you have that tendency), and setting you up for kidney trouble, cirrhosis of the liver, and gall-bladder disease, fat makes you much less efficient at using oxygen, so it slows you down and decreases your endurance. Fat also slows you down because you are carrying around dead weight-as if you were exercising while carrying a 15- or 30-pound suitcase. According to Kenneth J. Cureton and colleagues at the University of Georgia's Human Performance Laboratory, 5 percent extra fat can make you 3.9 percent slower, 10 percent extra fat can make you 5.8 percent slower, and 15 percent extra fat can make you 8.6 percent slower. Fat rubs between the muscle fibers, acting as a friction brake on the smooth motion of your muscles and thus the speed and power of your movements. Finally, a thick layer of fat insulates you. In cold weather that's fine, but in hot weather you can't cool yourself, and you risk heat exhaustion or heatstroke.

the University of California at Irvine, is due more to inactivity than overeating. In the early seventies, Grant Gwinup, M.D., showed that over weight women who made no change in their eating habits but who walked briskly at least thirty minutes every day lost an average of twenty-two pounds per year, or half a pound per week, and the women who lost the most weight were the ones who walked the longest each day.