Eat Wisely. Drink Moderately. Smile Merrily.

Have you been overdoing it with good food, good drink, and good friends? Do you consider "Eat, drink, and be merry" to be your personal mantra? If this is apparent at your waistline, it might be time to adjust your habits, but you don't have to give up your mantra to do it.

A traditional, healthy, and effective path to fat reduction is through changes in diet and exercise. Those lifestyle modifications are highly recommended whether or not you seek out programs or procedures to help give yourself a head start.

Teach your metabolism to run faster. Eat within half an hour of waking up in the morning. Snack on foods low in fat and sugar every two to three hours. This does not mean a life of rice cakes, which have actually somehow become flavored and fairly tasty in the last several years. This does mean selecting something a bit more wholesome than chips or candy bars.

No matter how attached you are to wine with dinner, beer with football, or a good scotch after a long day, reducing your alcohol intake will help you reach your weight loss goals. All alcoholic beverages contain sugar. You don't have to be drinking some brightly colored, frozen concoction to get all the calories of a rich dessert. Also, alcohol is a depressant. Even if you're a happy drunk, the metabolism you've been revving up will shift into neutral.

Although you may not choose to take up running, exercise is a vital step toward fat reduction. Start showing up at that gym you've been paying membership fees to every month since New Year's three years ago. Walk out your front door. Keep walking for a good, long while before you turn around and walk home. Consider it very local sightseeing or just an opportunity to experience sunlight instead of the overhead fluorescents of your workplace and assorted backlit screens of every area of your life.

If getting motivated to pull on your sneakers and sweats is more than you can inspire yourself to do most days, get a workout buddy. You'll both get more exercise; neither of you will want to be the one to cancel on the other. Strength training on machines or free weights will help you build lean muscle. All of those classes on the gym calendar will help you get your heart rate up and most will help target specific muscle groups and remind you that stretching is important.

Of course, if you're already doing these things and still have a problem area you just can't trim down, there are fat reduction procedures that can help. Liposuction is the best known of these, but there are now several options within that course of action. If you've lost most of the weight you wanted off and are left with stretch marks or stretched out skin, a tummy tuck may help you more smoothly flatten those hard won abs. Your health comes first, including the healthy joy of looking great when you walk into your favorite restaurant.