So in the name of keeping it simple, above is a list of dos and don’ts to follow based on my experience of losing my former chubby farm-boy build.

I often get asked about what I do to stay in shape despite having a pretty sedentary job, and the response varies from “that’s insane” to “I can definitely do that.”

Before getting the same lame line of “you don’t know what it’s like, man, you’ve always been fit,” I’m going to toss that out from the get-go. 

I was 240 pounds my senior year of high school and about 2 inches shorter than I am now at 185 pounds. For a while, I was really into marathon distance running so I took it down to 155 but have since bulked back up through weight lifting and a really specific diet. I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum in the last decade and going in either direction can take years to achieve.

The attitude is the key — go into it believing you can do it.

Now for the tough-love.

Dieting doesn’t work, because dieting implies it’s a temporary change. This has to be a permanent lifestyle change.

No more lounging on the couch all day, every day, eating cookies and drinking beer.

Getting there will be miserable, you’ll be hungry, sore and worn out. Pain is just weakness leaving the body, right?

The tricky thing about health is there are so many sources saying so many different things. Even how health is measured is debatable and complicated.

Fitness and health boil down to a few basic things:

• Does your doctor say you are in good shape?

• Are you happy with your body?

Scales are not an accurate measurement of health since they do not factor in height, age, body composition or overall fitness, so many people go for the Body Mass Index instead.

But BMIs are misleading too, since they don’t factor in that muscle weighs more than fat. According to BMI charts, I am overweight even though I am 6 foot tall and weigh 185 pounds and I wear 29x36 jeans.

One calculator that I find handy is for Basic Metabolic Rate, which determines how many calories are needed to function under 24 hours of rest (that is, if you’re in a coma).

In my case, a 28-year-old male with my height and weight needs about 2,000 calories per day. Meanwhile, a 45-year-old female who is 5’4” and 130 pounds needs about 1,300 calories.

The BMR number can be used to determine how many calories are needed for that day based on the level of activity by using the Harris Benedict Equation.

So let’s say I decide to just Netflix binge all day and be a bum. Under those conditions, the equation calls for a multiplier of 1.2 — meaning I’d need 2,400 calories just to function for that lazy day.

But a day that’s filled with hard work and intense exercise gets a multiplier of 1.9. It’s pretty common for me to workout and run obscene amounts, so just to maintain my weight it takes over 4,000 calories per day.

Now for the madness of trying to gain muscle weight. I try to take in 6,000 calories each day from healthy food, but finding out what is and what is not healthy today is tricky.

The only label that isn’t misleading is the nutrition facts. Read them and you’ll be shocked at what you’ll find.

Juice isn’t really juice, and chicken nuggets are less than half chicken, and the remaining 55 percent is fillers — and the list goes on.

I’m not a nutritionist or anything like that, but I am observant. One thing I see is there are basically no fat Amish people today and obesity was rare in the 19th century — so I mostly eat the food they eat.

If it comes from the ground or off a tree, it is good to go.

If it was available 150 years ago, it’s on my plate or in my glass. Yes, that means whiskey and beer are on my grocery list, but there’s one thing that’s never in my cart — food with high fructose corn syrup.

High fructose corn syrup was originally intended to be a cattle-fattener. Instead, it ended up being used as a cheap way to sweeten food by taking the most fattening part of the corn and concentrating it into a blob and mixing it into everything from bread to pop.

Cut that junk out, and weight falls off and stays off a lot easier.

I’ve been at this for a decade now, so I’ve added a few adjustments to my Amish-inspired approach to include protein enhanced foods with ingredients that are still natural.