The Unweighed Diet
With an intelligent cooperative patient who is determined to lose weight and who is only moderately obese all that may be necessary is to discuss in detail the essentials of treatment and the kind of food which must be avoided because of their high caloric content. If this is nor successful then more detailed instructions arc necessary and the patient should be treated with an unweighed but measured diet.

No scales are required to weigh the foods as all the household measures needed are incorporated in the instructions. The content of the diet can be varied by making use of the exchanges available for bread or by eating foods with a low calorie content, which can be taken as desired.

Intensive Dietetic Treatment
The dietic regimes described above aim at achieving a rate of weight loss of just over 1 kg each week. Very fat patients will have to persist with .such a regime for predictable periods before achieving their declared target weight.

Slow progress may be disheartening and lead to the abandonment of treatment, it is possible to increase the physical activities gradually and reduce the diet still further, provided there are no orthopedic or cardiovascular complications.

Patients have been kept on diets providing only 400 Cal/day fur periods of several weeks, whilst they walked 10 miles daily. This regime involved negative balances of the order of 3,000 Cal/day. The patients lost weight at a rate of up to 3 kg a week, yet remained well.