You've heard the line, "I gain a pound if I just look at a piece of cake." It always gets a laugh. Ha Ha.

The "experts" agree one pound of body fat is equal to about 3500 calories. They say if you either eat 500 calories a day less or burn 500 calories a day more, you will lose a pound a week. It sounds so simple. In fact, there is an article in our local paper today about how if you trim 100 calories a day out of your diet, but keep your activity level the same, you will slowly but steadily lose pounds. If it was really that simple, there would not be an epidemic of obesity.

I used to laugh with everyone else at the "gain a pound if I just look at a piece of cake" line, but sometimes it sure seemed to be true. A piece of cake has somewhere between 200 and 500 calories, depending on the kind of cake and whether it has icing. At the worst, that would mean I would have to eat 7 pieces of cake to gain a pound. But that's not what happened. If I ate a piece of cake I would gain two, maybe three pounds.

Scientifically impossible, perhaps; but it's what my scale would report.

When my husband and I first married, it drove me crazy that he could eat mounds of pasta and multiple slices of bread and never put on a pound. I exercised and counted calories, and still struggled to keep my weight level. It wasn't fair, and it just didn't make sense.

Nutritional principles kept my weight steady during my health nut years. But it was not until the Blood Type Diet that I began to understand why the "gain a pound if I just look at a piece of cake" joke seemed to be true for me. Type Os gain pounds when we eat wheat. Some is water retention; some is fat, but nonetheless the scale does go up.

All of this came home to me again last weekend when I ate two pieces of pizza on Saturday night. My weight was up two pounds on Sunday. It took until today - four days- to lose those two pounds. Admittedly I did more than look at the pizza. But two pieces of pizza do not have 7,000 calories, and shouldn't increase my weight by two pounds over night according to the "experts." But the "experts" don't understand Blood Type principles or understand me as a Type O!

If you are Type O, and have stumbled across this website, and if you laugh at the "gain a pound if I just look at a piece of cake" line not because it's funny but because it's painfully true; I urge you to try the Blood Type Diet. If you are not Type O, there are other weight loss keys that will work for you and your Type.