The math is pretty simple. One pound of fat equals 3500 calories. Want to lose a pound a week? Then you need to consume 3500 calories less per week than you use. That's about 500 calories a day. By cutting out 500 calories a day from your normal daily diet, while keeping your activity level same, you can lose approximately one pound a week.

All right - that doesn't sound like much, especially if you're more than 25 pounds overweight. Study after study has shown, though, that those people who lose weight gradually - at a rate of 1-2 pounds per week -are far more likely to keep weight off and maintain a normal weight for a lifetime.

So how much exactly IS 500 calories? If you're going to reduce your daily intake by 500 calories, it helps to know what you need to cut out, right? Here's how easy it is to lose 500 calories a day:

Use milk instead of cream in your coffee. Savings? 50 calories per cup.

Skip butter on your baked potato. Savings? 100 calories

Drink fruit-flavored water instead of a 16 ounce soda. Savings? 200 calories

Skip Big Mac and have a salad instead. A Big Mac weighs in at a whopping 460 calories. A fresh salad with a light dressing? Less than 100! Savings? 360 calories

Pass by bag of potato chips. An average snack size bag of chips has over 300 calories. Savings? 300 calories

Eat your corn on ear. A 1 cup serving of canned corn has 165 calories. An ear of corn has 85. Savings? 80 calories.

Switch to low-fat cream cheese on your bagel. Savings? 90 calories per ounce.

Love those fries and can't give them up? Swap skinny fries out for thick steak-cut ones. Thin French fries absorb more oil than thicker, meatier ones. Savings? 50 calories per 4 ounce serving

Among hardest parts of living in modern world is stress and anxiety. With worries about work, environment, economy, natural disasters, terrorism, and general state of world, it seems that there is no end to number of things to worry about. Though we cannot control many of these things, they still weigh on our minds and cause us stress and anxiety. However, despite these concerns, we should try to avoid stress and anxiety.

Stress and anxiety are, at their hearts, mental problems. They are conditions in which mind is racing and constantly circling around certain concerns. The concerns may be seemingly mundane, but concerns keep recurring until they push out all other thoughts in brain and create their own towering mass of worry. And this tower is, in itself self-propagating simply because stress and anxiety tend to create themselves because stress and anxiety cause mind to condition itself to stress and anxiety.

There is research to suggest that mind gets used to stress and anxiety and, once it is conditioned, it will quickly return to stress and anxiety. In fact, there is some evidence that shows that stress conditioning may actually begin when we are too young to do anything about it. Children who face a great deal of stress will find their minds altered such that they will quickly return to a state of stress at slightest provocation. It is almost as though mind misses state of stress and anxiety and wants to return to it once it has found state.