Before surrendering to calorie-counting and exercise, I tried everything else under the sun.

Calorie-counting and exercise are hard, and I’m not a big fan of hard. I have a black-belt in letting myself off the hook when things feel hard.

Also, I rock at American Consumerism.

I was once the proud owner of an Ab-Swing. If there’s a more worthless piece of non-exercise equipment, I have not yet found it. “Just sit on a swivel seat and swivel back and forth! Your love handles will melt away!”

You name it, I was taken in by it. ANYTHING to avoid the hard work.

Once, my chiropractor’s wife told me that she had gotten her blood screened for inflammatory foods. She found that she didn’t tolerate corn well. And, when she eliminated corn from her diet, she lost 50 pounds Just Like THAT!

So, what did I do? I forked over more hundreds of dollars than I care to admit to ship vials of my blood off to a lab for screening.

“Surely the problem isn’t that I never move my ass at all! Surely it’s not that I eat too much! I’m just swollen from eating inflammatory foods! I’ll stop eating oats or something and my fat will magically melt away.”

Know what the results said?

I don’t tolerate lettuce well. LETTUCE! Oh, and cabbage, cucumber, lime & cauliflower.

You can imagine how the pounds just melted away when I cut out the dreaded lettuce and perilous pickles. (Hint: Not at all.)

My library of minimal-effort exercise DVDs is truly impressive. I have everything from belly dancing to Carmen Electra’s Fit To Strip. No, I’m not proud of that. But, hey – maybe walking slowly around a chair can get me a Carmen Electra body! Right?

I spent months and years of my life on diets that allowed me to avoid actually eating less. I cut fat grams, while munching on Twizzlers. Hey, they’re fat free!

I cut carbs.

I took ‘energy pills’.

I drank shakes.

I ate freeze-dried NutriSystem foods.

NutriSystem actually helped me to lose around 30 lbs when I wanted to look like a hot little number when I had to send my husband off to Iraq. But you can’t sustain a NutriSystem life without eventually sobbing into your meals.

If those weight-loss-powders (“Sprinkle some on your food and eat as much as you want while losing weight!”) had been  on the market before I figured out my fitness, I’m sure I would have busted out my credit card for that, too.

While every diet I tried worked a little bit for a little while, none of them inspired me to incorporate them into my lifestyle for the long term.

Every fad diet made me so miserable, I counted the MOMENTS til I could give it up. (And put whatever weight I’d lost right back on, but I didn’t like to think about that part.)

Nothing worked properly, because I was looking for an easy way out.

What it took me decades to realize is that there is no such thing as an easy way out when it comes to fitness. If there was, no one would ever struggle with their weight.

So, friends, take it from me: Save your money. Every ad that tells you they have the solution ‘when diet and exercise don’t work’ is suffering from a grievous case of Pants On Fire.

Diet and exercise always work. You just can’t half-ass it.

Hey, at least it’s a lot cheaper than blood tests and Ab Swings!