Losing weight is about starving. There’s no other way. If you are going to successfully lose weight, you basically have to stop eating. If your calories are much over 1500 calories a day, the bet is you are not going to lose weight quickly enough to stay on your diet. And if you’re eating much more than protein and fat (less than 8 grams of carbohydrate per feeding), the bet is you’re not going to lose weight at all. Maintaining weight is about damage control. It’s actually easier to lose weight than to maintain, because in order to lose weight you can follow a very structured, low calorie, low carbohydrate, weight loss program – like the Cat Food Diet. But in order to mainatin, you need to come up with a damage control structure or policy, that allows you to relatively freely feed on many more foods. The Cat Food Diet is my preferred weight loss program. My preferred weight maintenance program has many more rules and is much more complex – eat chocolate bars instead of chocolate desserts, pitch the bread on the top half of sandwiches, no nuts, limit cheese to 4 slices a day, no liquid calories other than ice cream, etc.