Are you afraid you might develop diabetes? If you have lots of belly fat, you should be concerned.

If you answered yes to any of those questions, it's probably time you lost some weight. The problem is that if you're anything like me, you have a lot of trouble with willpower. The willpower problem gets worse the longer each diet and exercise program lasts.

What if you could strip off 20 pounds in just 30 days? What if you could lose 40 pounds in just 60 days? It's absolutely possible. I know. I've done it more than once, but the last time I did it, I also learned to keep it off. Now, I'll never be fat again.

Here's the big question. Would you really like to lose 40 pounds in the next 60 days and keep it off for the rest of your life?

Of course you would, who wouldn't?

I encourage you never to use diet pills, surgery, or diets that are so extreme they change your body chemistry. I don't recommend any of those things. You and your body are responsible for putting all that fat on you. Take the responsibility for getting it off.

Do you know how you gained that weight? I do. Over a long period of time, you took in more calories than your body burned. It may have only been 50 excess calories a day, but over a long span of time those calories turned into pounds of fat.

A pound of fat is equivalent to approximately 3,500 calories. If you took in 50 calories per day more than you burned, in 70 days you gained a pound. In 350 days you gained 5 pounds. In 5 years you gained 25 extra pounds.

A regular slice of white bread contains about 50 calories. Just one extra slice of bread per day over a five-year period, and you gain 25 pounds. That may sound like bad news. It's really good news. Why?

Because if just one extra slice of bread per day made you gain 25 pounds, then leaving off that bread means you won't gain more weight. Leaving off two slices of bread per day, means over the course of 5 years, you will lose that 25 pounds.

When I first started gaining weight in my early 30's, I drank one or more regular soft drinks every day. To stop gaining weight, I stopped drinking sugar-filled soft drinks and started drinking diet drinks. Soft drinks sweetened with sugar generally contain over 130 calories per 12-ounce can. Drinking one per day in excess of what your body is burning, translates into gaining more than a pound per month or 12 pounds per year.

The key to all weight loss that doesn't involve surgery or changing your body chemistry is increasing your daily activity and decreasing your caloric intake. That sounds simple enough.

The question then becomes, "How quickly do you want to lose weight?"

The fewer calories you take in and the more calories you burn each day, the faster you will lose weight.

A typical female who is fairly inactive normally burns about 1,800 calories per day. A male with similar activity burns about 2,200 calories per day.

If you set your calorie intake at 200 calories below the numbers above, and you do extra activities that burn 300 calories per day, you will lose 500 net calories per day, 3,500 per week, and you will lose approximately one pound per week.

The further you decrease your caloric intake and increase your activity, the faster you lose weight. I don't recommend going below a caloric intake of 1,000-1,500 calories per day. That can cause problems.

You can, however, increase your activity level gradually until you have a net calorie loss of up to 1,500-2,000 per day. When you do, you will lose about one-half pound per day. That's around 15 pounds per month. Now that's losing weight.

You can do even better, but you have to learn to turn your body into a furnace that burns far more calories than you eat. When you get your metabolism rate up high enough, you will probably be amazed at just how much weight you can lose and how quickly that fat will melt away.