Slim Pickings.

Byline: Rory Evans PHOTOGRAPHED BY HELMUT NEWTON

Slim PICKINGS

Certain foods can be a diet's downfall. By cutting out just one vice, you can reshape your body.

Losing weight seems to require an advanced degree in chemistry, titrating fat grams and balancing the pH of your digestive tract by eating starches with vegetables. (Or is it starches with fruits?) But it turns out you can simplify thingsjust by eradicating a specific (and especially tempting) food. "Sometimes cutting out just one type of food can make a huge difference in weight loss," says Jennifer Warren, a doctor specializing in weight loss at the Physicians Healthy Weight Center in North Hampton, New Hampshire.

There's a reason your colleague's stocked candy jar just sprang to mind. All those Hershey's Miniatures and Twizzlers rank right up there with the emptiest of empty calories. Or maybe candy isn't your problem; maybe your diet is simply padded with extra calories from cocktails, cheese, white bread, or seemingly healthy broiled strip steak. "When you give up just one diet-sabotaging thing, you can save yourself hundreds and hundreds of calories a day," says New York City nutritionist Lauren Slayton, founder of foodtrainers.net. The weight loss is often speedy enough that you can do this as a safer, far more sensible alternative to a crash diet (if you need to drop a size in time for your ex's wedding in three weeks, say). But you can also incorporate the change, with a little leeway, for the long term. And that's a lot easier than all that dissertation research.

CUT OUT: CANDY

POTENTIAL CALORIE SAVINGS At least 300 calories a day, but likely much more.

Since so much candyespecially the chewy stuff, such as Skittles and Swedish Fishis essentially pure sugar, it hardly registers on your sense of fullness. "Snacks that have protein and some fat will affect your shutoff mechanism in a way that candy doesn't," Slayton says. Simple carbohydrates such as candy (and white bread, for that matter) are "digested very rapidly, raise your …