I had an epiphany on my 40th birthday, seen above right: Not only is this going to kill me, but it's going to be a slow and painful process. By the time my mother was my age, she already had high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. I was extremely lucky to still be healthy, but I had a lot of work to do if I was going to stay that way.

I started eating less but the scale didn't budge. Within a few months I was diagnosed with stress fractures in my right foot. Nobody would say it, but I knew it was because I was carrying around too much weight. I spent close to a year in a boot and unable to exercise, losing hardly a pound. Frustration led me to buy myself a mountain bike for my 41st birthday; less than six weeks later I had flipped over my handlebars and broken both of the bones in my left forearm, clean through the skin. It was then that everything changed.

How did I do it? To be honest, the accident triggered it. If you have a strong stomach, you can click here for a look at the x-ray of my broken arm and the subsequent repair.

A four-hour surgery left me with plates and screws in both bones permanently. I spent nearly four months in various casts and a summer at home on painkillers, completely stripped of my appetite. My left arm was useless to me; I wore nothing but running pants that could be pulled up with one hand. Buttons and zippers were out of the question. When I finally put on a pair of jeans, they just about fell off me; I had lost more than a full size.

The shock of the injury and three months of minimal eating had pushed my body over the hump, so to speak. I believe that after nearly ten years of hovering around 300 pounds, it takes something dramatic to push a person's body in the right direction. Some people have gastric bypass; I had compound fractures. Different means, same end. Having said that, I think the same effect could probably have been accomplished by beginning my weight loss with a medically supervised fast. The trick was keeping the ball rolling once I started eating again.

While I was recovering from the surgery, I developed certain eating habits that I decided to stick with. Granted, my stomach had shrunk so I was eating a lot less than I used to -- but I knew that it wouldn't be long before it stretched back out again. I've seen too many friends go through gastric bypass surgery and lose a lot of weight, only to gain it back. I had lost one size and I was determined to keep going, so I made some serious commitments to myself.

I'm going to share the basics with you. Here's what I learned:

1. It's about when you eat and what you eat, not how much you eat. Nobody ever got fat eating vegetables. Eat if you're hungry -- just make a good choice.

2. You must eat breakfast every morning within two hours of waking up. It's been a long time since your last meal and your body needs fuel, whether or not you're hungry. The perfect breakfast? Half a cup of oatmeal (the real thing, not instant) and a piece of fruit.

3. If you don't feed yourself, your body will hang onto whatever calories it gets and you won't lose weight. Don't starve yourself; you'll lose weight much faster if you eat.

4. You must eat regularly and consistently, at around the same times each day. When your body gets into a groove and knows there food is on the way, it will give up the calories you've consumed and burn them for energy.

5. Stick to proteins, fruits and vegetables. Avoid unnecessary carbs (do salads instead of sandwiches) and fats (go easy on the salad dressing). Read labels and avoid high calorie, high fat foods. You knew that already, didn't you?

6. You must change your life permanently. Yes, forever. "Diet" implies a short-term commitment and we all know that as soon as it ends, you'll gain the weight back. Commit to living a longer, stronger, healthier life. Listen: I literally looked at the chocolate in the supermarket and said out loud, "I'll never buy that again." And I mean it.

7. You must love yourself. I've lost weight through self-hatred before but it never lasted. My mood improved and I started eating again. This time the weight came off because I love my life, I love my wife, I love my work, and I love myself -- and I want to live to enjoy it all for a very long time.

8. Gym exercise will firm you up but it won't do much for your weight. For one thing, muscle weighs more than fat. For another, it's easy to build muscle under the fat but harder to lose the fat. It takes a serious cardio workout to lose fat and if you're as big as I was, you're not ready for it yet. Go for a walk instead. Sure, you can take the stairs instead of the elevator, but try to avoid the heart attack. I, personally, did not start working out until I could breathe, which happened around 225 lbs. It's different for everyone. I work out now largely because I eat more -- my stomach stretched back -- and I want to maintain the loss I've made.

9. Running is the best exercise in the world. It's the most bang for the buck in terms of what it does for your body and, speaking as an anthropologist, it's precisely what we are evolved to do. Other animals may be faster but we're the ones with endurance; the marathon is the consummate human sport. Even today there are people who hunt by chasing their prey, hour after hour, until it collapses of exhaustion. Then they can just walk up to it and kill it.

The surface you run on, however, is crucial. People did not evolve to run on cement; you need a soft and springy surface such as a treadmill, an indoor track, a dirt road, or a grassy field. Start off slow and work yourself up to a mile, then work on running that mile faster and faster. A mile a day buys you quite a few calories. Lately, I've begun running (nearly) barefoot. After all, so-called "running shoes" were invented in the 1970s!

10. Make good food choices. Since this is extremely difficult to do when you are out in the world, bring food with you.

This last recommendation is perhaps the hardest one to follow since we live in such a poor food culture. Have you ever seen the web site called thisiswhyyourefat.com? Oh, my. Is there any doubt or question as to why we are so unhealthy? Just look at what we eat. We're poisoning ourselves.

Human beings are not designed to eat processed foods laced with chemicals, nor are we adapted to a constant intake of high-fat, high-calorie “fast foods,” or even the daily consumption of meat, for that matter.  But these things are staples of American culture. Cheeseburgers and fried chicken, pizza and French fries, extra-large servings of extremely high-calorie foods -- they're killing us. Prepared foods are loaded up with corn syrup, carbs and chemicals, and restaurants turn burgers into 1200-calorie lunches.  Who could possibly eat like that and be fit? 

It might make you angry if you think about it:  We live in a country where the two predominant commercial messages are “eat” and “be thin,” creating not just a state of constant internal conflict but also a perfect economic cycle.  We’re raised on McDonalds and Coca-Cola, a yin whose yang is later met by the twin gods of the medical and weight-loss industries.