Q: I'm confused, In your diet Myths, it says that it is not true if you eat before you go to bed you will gain weight. I saw Oprah's TV show once and she said one of her secrets to losing weight was not to eat anything(even water) before 7:00 P.M. before she went to bed. Which one am I supposed to listen to??? Thanx for your help. Great Site!

A: Listen to me :) The reason why a myth like 'Do not eat before sleep' exists is because most people eat junk, especially at night. If choosing before not eating anything and eating junk you would of course choose to not eat at all. What I am telling you is that if you structure your diet following the principles in my article and eat right, then eating at night will only help you lose fat.

What Oprah and almost all other popular diets try to do is to give you one quick fix to solve your problems. In Oprah's case it may be not to eat at night. Others will tell you to skip one meal per day or not eat bread or replace every other meal with Kellogg's Special K, etc etc. Most of them will give you some quick result up front (usually drop a few pounds quickly) and that's it -- they will NOT continue to give you results going forward and are not likely to prevent the weight from coming back.

Instead of 'quick fixes' like that I am giving you a complete nutrition approach to losing weight and keeping it off. You can't pick and choose only the parts of my advice that you like -- in other words, you can't eat junk at night because I said it was OK to eat at night -- instead you need to eat the way I describe in the article, including at night. Hope that clears things up a bit.