Did the headline of this column cause you to cry out "Contradiction"? If last week's still lingers in your mind, it should've.

That column claimed that since your body metabolizes food in a manner unique to you, the most effective diet for you has to be determined by you through the weighing of foods and the experimentation of meal times, amounts, and the ratios of fat, carbs, and protein.So how can the next column offer pointers on a purely personal endeavor?Because giving general guidance expedites the process, and providing solid rationale makes it more likely that you'll invest what strikes most as a significant investment of time.For years, I've been asked "What's your best advice for losing weight?" For years, I've said, "Weigh your foods."And for years, I've watched that you've-got-to-be-kidding-me look appear upon face after face.While weighing your foods with a dietary scale and then calculating the total number of calories isespecially at the starta time-consuming task, there is a quicker way to accomplish the same.Find or buy an app for it on your cell phone.While I will not profess any knowledge about how to do this (my cell phone is from 2003 and used for bicycling emergencies only) or which app is best, I can report this. I watched one already good cyclist get dramatically better over the course of a year as his body weight dropped and his power-to-weight ratio improved.When I asked him how he was finally able to stick to a diet (previously, he had tried and tried and tried), he told me he didn't eat a morsel that season without entering it to the app.So if you know you'd never weigh foods and calculate calories for more than a few days but frequently use your cell phone for information and entertainment, give the high-tech alternative a try.Either way, knowing the number of calories you're about to consume does more for you than ultimately provide a daily total. It increases awareness about the foods you are eating before you actually do so.One of the theories as to why the United States is so overweight is because we're just not mentally engaged when we eat. Instead, eating has become a reflexive response.Brian Wansink, PhD. and professor of consumer behavior at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, has a term for this that doubles as the title of his well-received book: Mindless Eating (Bantam, 2006).In it, he describes what he calls the "mindless margin": those 100 to 200 calories that are so easy to tack onto a meal or a snack, yet they aren't really enough to fill you up or make you conscious that you've eaten more.They are enough, however, to pack on pounds over the years.To explain, here's a test I'd love cereal eaters, especially kids, teens, and young adults, to try. Fill your bowl the way you typically do and then estimate how much you've put in.After you make an estimate, move the cereal from the bowl to a measuring cup, feel your eyebrows raise, and your stomach drop.I bet that nine out of 10 who try this experiment will underestimate the cereal amount by at least 50 calories.Even when I used a small cereal bowl and added what seemed to be a reasonable amount of Fiber One to it, I doubled the number of calories the company lists as a serving. Do that two or three times during the day, and you've created the mindless margin, which is a recipe for slowly accruing weight gain.I specifically used a small cereal bowl because of a study Wansink and his colleagues recently had published in the Journal of Pediatrics. While prior research found that adults serve themselves bigger portions if given bigger plates, about 22 percent, elementary school children are even more greatly influenced than that by cereal bowl size.Compared to when they were given the size bowl that I used, children given a bigger bowl ate 42 percent more cereal on averageand left another 26 percent uneaten.Yet according to Wansink's book from 2006, food packaging also plays a strong part in the amount of food you eat.To prove this, Wansink gave 124 students 200 M&M's packaged two different ways: either in a large Ziploc bag or in a large Ziploc bag that contained 10 smaller bags of 20 candies each. When given the single large bag, an average of 73 M&M's were eaten in an hour. When the smaller bags needed to be opened, an average of 42 candies were consumed.The difference is 112 caloriesand a prime example of how little things can cause you to unconsciously eat more than you think you really do.Something that won't happen if you weigh your foods.