"What's the most important element of health and fitness?" someone asked the other day. The setting was a rather relaxed one, so I'm not sure why I rapid-fired an answer as if I had just banged a game-show buzzer.

"Intelligent application of observation," I blurted out. No conscious thinking took place whatsoever.Now I often counsel my seventh grade students to trust answers that just pop into their heads, that it's often a matter of one area of the brain getting ahead of another. I believe that's what happened in this case.If I would've stifled my first response, I probably would've started comparing the benefits of aerobic versus anaerobic exercise, the advantages of intense exercise versus impeccable eating, and my brain would've been a cluttered mess in no time.My no-thought response went beyond such specifics, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. After all, for years I have written that scientific study can only be a starting point, that gaining an understanding of your body by experimentation is ultimately what you need to do if you are truly interested in optimal health and fitness.But experimentation takes time.Luckily, you can save a ton of time by my bang-the-buzzer-on-the-game-show answer.I created the less-of-what-you-love diet, for instance, purely through application of observation.Years ago, I had a series of discussions with a teacher who had been fighting the battle of the bulge and losing far more than he had been winning. Because he had been a great collegiate baseball player and still coached, we'd discuss exercise options along with eating changes, but nothing ever seemed to work for him for more than a few weeks.Then one August he returned to school 30 pounds lighter. More importantly, he didn't look shrunken and sickly.The weight-loss looked right, and I believed this time it would be long term.I complimented him on his two-month transformation and asked how he accomplished it.His answer left me dumbfounded.Unbeknownst to me in summers' past, he had eaten a bag of chips and drunk a liter of soda at night while he relaxed and watched a baseball game. He simply gave that up not the baseball watching, but the 2000-plus calories that used to accompany it.Now I couldn't dispense that as worthwhile advice in a column. Most people never watch an entire baseball game. Seriously and more importantly, they certainly don't snack to that extent.But the next time I needed to tighten my diet, I remembered what that teacher had accomplished and applied it to my situation. I was hoping to drop two pounds of body fat to improve my bicycle climbing.As a result, I stopped eating Reese's Puffs, a cereal that I would snack on as a treat throughout the night. While the cereal is whole grain, it's higher in calories than any other cereal I eat.Furthermore, it's the only item in my house besides the reduced-calorie ketchup I put on an egg-white omelet about once a week that contains added sugar.A month after I gave my boxes of Reese's Puffs to my niece and nephew, I did my once-a-week-weigh-in. I couldn't be certain I was fully hydrated, so weighed myself again the next morning.That second reading told me that two pounds lost were indeed body fat, not a "false" water-weight loss.So how did this experience lead to me advising others interested in weight-loss to eat less of what they love? Because I've observed an increased interest in health and fitness, not a fanatical devotion to it.Extreme measures only suit extremists.But let's say you do what I used to do, snack on Reese's Puffs throughout the night. If you reduced your nightly consumption from two servings to one and make a similar reduction with another food some other time in the day, you've cut out about 250 calories, an amount that's that it doesn't feel as if you're dieting, and low enough so that your body doesn't perceive the change as famine.As a result, there's no reduction in the rate in which your body burns calories.If you now increase your caloric expenditure through exercise to average an additional 250 calories per day, you can lose a pound a week for a number of weeks.So if you're the sort of person who has trouble losing those last few pounds when you diet, intelligently apply what you've learned from this article to your situation.If there's not a food or two that you love and eat daily, pick three or four or five and commit to eating a lesser amount whenever you indulge. And if you want to accelerate the weight-loss process, increase your amount of exercise.Don't lose sight of the real goal: long-term body fat loss.There are faster ways to lose weight than the ones suggested here. What you lose in those cases, however, is a significant amount of "good" weight, muscle mass, a loss that makes keeping the initial weight lost off rather difficult.