If you're not committed to a healthy eating lifestyle, your plan is ultimately going to fail. Counting calories is a quick way to drive yourself crazy, and doesn't do much on it's own to guide you to weight loss. Eating 1,500 calories' worth of fudge a day and nothing else won't do much to help that tub o' guts around your waist. The real key to weight loss and management is to pay attention to the kind of carbohydrates you consume.

Fructose is a deeply underrated contributor to America's obesity epidemic. Fructose is, of course, a type of sugar that's found naturally in fruits and even some vegetables, but it's also added to a staggering number of processed foods in the form of high fructose corn syrup. It's an incredibly cheap little elixir, which has a bit to do with corn being heavily subsidized, as well as the fact that the U.S. government artificially fixes sugar prices. But that's neither here nor there. Breads, cereals, soft drinks, snacks of almost any kind and fruit all have high levels of fructose. It's everywhere you look.

Most of the carbs we eat are made up of chains of glucose. When glucose enters your bloodstream, your body releases insulin to help regulate it. Fructose, however, is processed in the liver. When too much fructose enters the liver, your liver can't process it all fast enough for the body to use as sugar. So instead, it starts making fats from the fructose, launching little fat goblets of triglyceride into your bloodstream.

Our bodies make fat from fructose at alarming speeds. You've got to remember: your body's working against you in the fight to lose weight. Biologically, your body is programmed to protect and insulate itself - particularly when dietary restrictions are implemented and you begin to eat less. Furthermore, the processed foods high in HFCS aren't exactly food for thought. When your liver is shuttling that excess HFCS into your bloodstream to be stored as fat instead of processing it, the satiety center of your brain isn't being triggered, which means that you're still hungry after eating that candy bar.

The good news is that you can dramatically cut your fructose and caloric intake just by doing some smart shopping. Sure, nobody likes a stinky hippie. But the fact is, they've got some damn good grocery stores. Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Easy Green are all very good places to find organic, non-processed foods that are free of pesticides and HFCS additives. From personal experience, Trader Joe's doesn't have the variety of selection that Whole Foods offers, but it's considerably less expensive.

Don't be scared. There's been a lot of developments on the health food menu in recent years. Not all good food tastes like shredded woodchips soaked in ass these days.