"Simple" and "easy" are not perfect synonyms. Alter your diet in an attempt to lose body fat, and you may very well learn that - especially if you're accustomed to the immediacy of the Internet and other technology.

In many dictionaries, you'll find "simple" defined as "easily understood; presenting no difficulty; uncomplicated." "Easy" means "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties." In most endeavors, feel free to use the words interchangeably, but recognize that altering your body composition can sometimes be the former without being the latter - even if you're not an Internet apostle.At least that's the case for two acquaintances who are and have recently asked me for help with losing body fat. Both thought losing body fat would be easy once they downloaded an app to their smartphones that claimed to have the procedure down to a science.But shedding body fat is as much an art as a science - an art that takes a protracted period of trial and error to perfect. Moreover, the more slowly body fat is taken off, the more likely it is to stay off. Unfortunately, there's no app to speed up trial and error or bestow upon you something else that's so important and less than immediate - experience.Consider all that and you can surely see how some people, especially those accustomed to the instantaneousness provided by the Internet, will decide losing body fat is far less than easy. Yet there are elements to it that can be categorized as simple. After all, losing body fat simply requires a caloric deficit.To understand caloric deficit, picture one of those old-time balance scales with two shallow pans on each side hanging from wires with a supporting beam in the middle - and each holds hypothetical calories. For you to lose weight, the pan containing the calories expended for that day needs to weigh more (and hang lower) than the pan of the ones you consumed that day. That's simple enough.Except that new research and old theories suggest that there's no surefire way to weigh the pans. That's why in the March issue of Health magazine, Mark Hyman, MD, director of The Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and author of Eat Fat, Get Thin, says, "The 'calorie is a calorie' myth is perhaps the most misleading nutrition lie ever."Sure, scientists can prove that one gram of protein averages four calories, one gram of carbohydrate averages four calories and one gram of fat averages nine calories. What they don't know, however, is the rate at which you burn them outside a laboratory setting.That's because the composition of your meals - the mix of proteins, complex carbohydrates, simple carbohydrates, and fats - can increase or decrease your rate. Other variables do that, too: the time and frequency of your meals, the digestion of your meals, the makeup of your gut bacteria, your secretion or lack thereof of certain hormones resulting from your meals, your frequency and intensity of exercise, and the amount of time you sleep.So what are you to do if you want to lose body fat and not live in a laboratory? Experiment with what nutritionists have discovered to be general tendencies and tweak them and transform them into what I like to call personal truths.In other words, try what works for someone else, see if it works for you, and if it doesn't, apply past experience and alter it a bit. Since this is time consuming and error may discourage the sons and daughters of social media, I'll share a key personal truth in the hope of expediting matters: I use meals to limit insulin secretion and increase caloric burn.If I keep my carbohydrate ingestion really low all day, and then eat ample -and I mean ample - amounts of complex carbs and some simple carbs after supper, I don't add body fat. While that runs contrary to just about everything you've recently read, the strategy is suggested in a book published even before the height of the no-carb craze, Dr. Rachael F. Heller and Dr. Richard F. Heller's, The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet (Signet, 1993).I think this works for me because I still consume ample amounts of protein with the ample amounts of carbs, which stabilizes my blood sugar and keeps my body from releasing too much insulin. And if my liberal use of "ample" has you thinking I eat a lot, you're right.More importantly, I eat frequently.During a typical day, I eat seven times - and three times after the meal I consider supper. Eating three times after six o'clock is rarely recommended, but the pattern has been employed by many bodybuilders for many years. Besides improving the assimilation rate of the vitamins and minerals, it may work because the seven separate meals increases the number of calories expended digesting food.To conclude, there are certain foods that don't seem to create a gain of body fat, even when I seemingly overeat them: whole-grain cereals devoid of added sugars, fat-free yogurt, fat-free cottage cheese, squash, and baked potatoes. Experiment and you might find the same is true for you - for these and other foods.