Dr. Sam Klein, head of Washington University’s weight management program, told me a couple of years ago that you must cut calories to lose weight; exercise is fine, but it’s not a weight loss tool, he said.

I imagine he has been in a running gun battle with the purveyors of exercise for weight loss. But he’s right. exercise makes you healthy. Until you’re working like an elite athlete, it’s not going to reduce your weight.

An example Dr. Klein gave me was you can lose more calories by not eating a bag of potato chips than by walking for a half hour on a treadmill. Wrap your mind around that while I go on.

I started pondering this stuff after reading a post on this blog from a stealthy old friend in Nebraska — he thought I didn’t know who he was — where he nicknamed me Walrus because I wasn’t the sleek, risk-taking, tequila-guzzling, womanizing roadie he knew 35 years ago back in Lincoln when we collected street signs and held jazz concerts as charity events. Still, after the chuckle, over my friends timelessly tactless means of communication, I figured, he’s right. (Don’t worry, we’ve never called each other by our real names.)

No, this isn’t a promise to start a Draconian weight loss plan. Those days are over for reasons only me and my doctor need to know. But there are some things that I could give up to at least start a process of looking less like I should be sunning on an Arctic ice flow.

The mantra of all of the health experts I know is, start slow.  So those of you who want to take the advice I’m giving to myself, here’s what I’m starting immediately. It involves connecting dots.

1. — Stop unconscious eating. Those one or two Hersey’s Kisses that you accept from your co-workers desk, or even the miniature candy bars can run from 10 to 30 calories each. One, two or three a day can be equivalent to what you’d want to burn after an hour or so on a treadmill.

2. — I don’t drink soda or much alcohol for that matter, considering how much mescal  mud I went through before I was 30. But I caught me lying to myself about the junk I was eating. For example. my current roadie works out four times a week in the morning and evening and Saturday — nine hours a week at the Monsanto YMCA — and walks a half-mile from her parking lot to her office. So when I say let’s get a pizza, I haven’t had one in a month, she says, OK. That would  be fine. My workout is walking trails on weekends and my dog at night. Still for meals, I lie to myself and say, let’s eat Italian this evening, or a fried chicken or catfish dinner on the Hill. When I add them up, i was eating really good tasting, high-calorie food three dinners a week. So I’m consciously one junk meal a week, home cooking without wheat or corn, six days a week.

3 — Start eating breakfast again in the form of those skim milk and berries smoothies I made until last fall.

That’s it through April. I don’t know how many calories that I’ll save. But I do know that I’ll eat less than I’m eating now.

The good news is I haven’t gained a pound for eight years — or lost one, either. So cutting out those calories will have an effect.

Anyone here have any bad nutrition habits they’d like to break? Share it with your brethren.

Signed,

The Walrus.