This is the first of an occasional series about obesity. This first column is about what you can eat, on my magical diet plan and others.

I am tired of being the only doctor in America without a diet named after him, so today I am announcing Dr. Steele’s Low Bull Diet. Other diets are low in carbs, or low in fat, or high in protein, but my diet is low in bull and high in hard truth. If you follow it, you are going to lose weight, guaranteed.

There are several advantages to my diet over other diets, but two of them are key. First, you can eat any darn thing you want on it. Second, you don’t have to exercise at all to lose weight on Dr. Steele’s Low Bull Diet (this will be addressed in the next obesity column).

That “Any darn food you want” rule in my diet is one of its best features. On the Low Bull Diet you can eat high fat, low fat, high carb, low carb, tree bark, road kill, South Beach, Palm Beach, moose meat, ice cream, cream pies, any of it and all of it. BUT! – and this idea is worth millions in a book deal – at the end of the day, no matter what you eat, if you are going to lose weight you must have eaten fewer calories than you burned off.

That fact stinks, but hey, don’t blame that on my diet. In fact, no matter what diet you follow – Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, South Beach, Atkins, Pritikin, high protein, low protein, whatever – you must eat fewer calories than you burn in order to lose weight. This is the central feature of all diets; they may have different ways to get you to that target, but in the end, diet plans are all based on this fundamental rule of nature.

That is because every diet is ultimately about calories, and when it comes to weight gain and loss, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, whether it is in fat or sugar or protein. At the end of the day your body “adds up” all calories of every source; if total calories in are more than you burned off, excess calories will be turned into more weight regardless of whether the calories started as a piece of steak or a pound of pasta. If you ate 1,000 excess calories on the Dr. Atkins diet because you thought fat does not matter you will gain just as much as you would if you ate 1,000 excess calories on the Osama bin Laden Cockroach Diet.

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The crucial difference between various kinds of foods, and therefore diets, is not whether one helps take weight off more than another. The real difference is that some foods have much more calorie content per ounce than others.

Take the Dr. Steele Low Bull Diet – Ice Cream Variation as an example. This variation of my plan is for the ice cream lover; they eat nothing but ice cream and still lose weight! It works like this: If their calorie goal is 1,000 calories a day, they eat two bowls of ice cream at about 500 calories per bowl. Then they have to eat this bowl of hard truth; they are done eating for the day. At a thousand calories a day of ice cream they will still lose weight if they burned off more than 1,000 calories each day.

On the other hand, take the Low Bull Diet – Mown Grass Variation. If you like that fresh-cut taste, chow down to your heart’s content until you hit 1,000 calories’ worth. You can eat more bowls of grass than bowls of ice cream because grass has a lot fewer calories per bowl, but at the end of the day you still have to have eaten fewer mown-grass calories than you burned off in order to lose weight.

Most popular diets spend a lot of time telling you what you can and cannot eat, and their food preferences are a large part of what distinguishes one plan from another. They do so in part because you cannot sell a diet book if your diet plan is simple and fits on one page. Other diet plans vary by the dietary planning and emotional support they offer the dieter; they do so in part because you cannot sell the diet program if you don’t have a program that keeps people coming to the diet center.

Little evidence exists, however, that one diet is really any better than another at promoting significant weight loss. Popular diets such as the Atkins low-carb/higher-fat diet may offer advantages to some dieters in that the higher-fat foods may leave the dieter feeling full for longer. The discipline or support of one program may work better for some dieters than others. The reality is, however, whether with Dr. Atkins’ or Dr. Steele’s diet, if you eat fewer calories than you burn off each day, you will lose weight, and if you don’t, you won’t.

This is not to trash popular diets; many people have used them successfully to lose weight. It is to trash the myth that any successful diet – low fat, low carb, mown grass, Bud Lite, whatever – has an easy alternative to the hard truth that it requires you to eat fewer calories than you burn off in order for you to lose weight on that diet. In the end, it ain’t the carbs, it ain’t the fat, it’s the damn calories.

Next time, how to lose weight and never get off the couch, on the Dr. Steele Low Bull Diet.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.