There is no magic pill to weight loss, and there is no single solution. If you exercise like crazy, but have a terrible diet full of junk food and deep fat fry everything, then despite your exercise you probably won’t make the weight you want. Likewise, a great diet without exercise can only get you so far. It takes a combination of factors, and both diet and exercise, to successfully lose some weight.

One of the most basic steps is to have a healthy diet. There are fad diets to never eat meat, and other fad diets to always eat meat, but never eat carbs. For most people the best way to go is to avoid the fad and gimmick diets and find something reasonable. Making sure to eat all your fruits and vegetables each day is not only healthy, but it fills up your stomach with foods that are very light in calories and often have no fat at all. For the same reason you should eat grains and fiber every day. When it comes to meat, white is generally better than red. If you can replace beef with chicken and pork with fish—do it! The difference between those different meats are huge.

If you are a pop drinker, switch to water. For many people that alone can equal twenty pounds in a year! Suppose you drink two to three Cokes a day. That is 600-750 calories, assuming you are drinking a can and not a larger bottle. If you stop drinking pop, that is 4200 calories a week, and 16,800 a month you are not adding. A pound is 3500 calories. That means you prevent yourself from adding almost 5 pounds of calories a month just by switching to water. You know what the bonus is? Drinking ice cold water each day a actually burns 50-100 calories a day! So at the end of the month, not only do you keep five pounds off, but burn another half a pound. Water also flushes the system, and this does not even include the benefits from keeping all that sugar out of your system.

If you’re not a big exercise person, start with a 30 minute walk every day. A good thirty minute walk is 100-150 calories or more. This can also help to raise your metabolism. If you are willing to exercise a little harder, a stationary bike is a huge way to burn a large amount of calories in a short time.

Also, though many people’s schedules don’t allow for it, see if you can eat five or six really small meals instead of two or three large ones. Your body generally can’t burn more than 500 calories at any meal setting, so smaller meals not only puts less calories right into storage, but keeps the metabolism up and burning over the whole day.

Mind all the details, keep all these little hints in mind, and you might be amazed at the weight you start dropping with what seems like barely any effort at all.