I like it, but I think he's fooling himself. If you want to lose weight, you need to take in less calories than you burn. Sure, you can increase how many calories you burn, but it'll make you hungry and, well, you need to buy a treadmill desk :-)

The simpler option is to eat less.

Of course, I know, this sounds simpler than you think. I'm just a single guy, so here's my personal anecdotal evidence: I gained about a kilo each year, reaching about 101 kilos this summer. Not huge, but not particularly thin either. (no clue how much that is in pounds btw). I decided to start eating less. I noticed, however, that it was very hard to resist cravings, so I needed rules.

Now, being Dutch, both my breakfast and lunch are centered around slices of bread. That's just how we do it here. I'd eat about 6 slices, with all kinds of nice toppings, for breakfast, and then again 6 for lunch. This is a lot - I'd eat a full loaf of bread (http://www.relouw-janssen.nl/wp-content/uploads/waldkorn.jpg) every 2 days. So I made two rules:

1) Only 3 slices of bread at breakfast, only 3 at lunch.

2) No candies, cookies, etc while at work.

Note that there is no rule 3: I can eat whatever I want for dinner. These rules aren't the "best" or "healthiest" rules; they're rules that are easy to apply in my current situation. You'll probably need different rules.

Turns out I needed these to be simple, strict, and well-defined rules, for this to work. I tried many times before with all kinds of approaches, but I failed each time, and discovered it was because the rules were either too vague or too difficult to meet.

I started with rule 2: no candies and cookies. Our office is littered with candies and cookies, so I needed to learn to resist, and I knew I could not do that if I'd just went from 6 to 3 slices of bread at breakfast.

I managed this without exceptions for 2 weeks, so I decided to start on the bread. Breakfast was easiest, because I bike to work and then eat buns at work that I made the day before. I could just make less and there'd be less for me to eat, whether I wanted to eat more or not. Our office lunch has a walk-by buffet where you take what you want, so I could apply a similar principle here: take only 3 slices. Then the only rule became: don't walk back to the buffet.

Putting a big bag/pot/jar of food in front of you while you sit down to eat is the killer. You'll have a very hard time resisting taking another batch. Take how much you think you're allowed to have elsewhere (in the kitchen, at the counter, whatever), take it to where you'll eat it, and don't go back to get more. No getting more. This really made it easier for me.

Now, I computed that I'm eating about 500-ish calories less every day. On the male average of burning/using 2500 calories, this is not a lot. Results match this: over a bit less than 3 months, I lost just under 6 kilos.

6 kilos on 3 months is not a lot. Losing 30 will take a long time, and that's even assuming that it'll keep going as fast (which it won't). This is fine, however. Fast weight loss probably means you're not changing your patterns, but you just decided to suffer for a while. There's absolutely no point in suffering for a while. Change your patterns, and you'll be able to really get thinner, and also not get fatter again anymore. It'll be suffering in the very beginning, but your body will get used to it! This is very important to realise. I do still feel somewhat hungry most of the day, but I don't mind anymore. It's not driving me nuts like it used to.

My next steps are cutting back on dinner, too (using the "don't go back to get more" rule). I really think I'm on the right track here.

On a slightly related sidenote: I can really recommend "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker of Autodesk fame (http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html). I didn't manage to do it, because all the heavy calory counting did just not fit my patterns ("is this hamburger 500 calories? or 700? how the hell will I find out?"), but the first chapters have some great info about what does and does not matter in weight loss, and why that's the case. There's a lot of bullshit out there about the topic, and the Hacker's Diet really helps cutting through to the core.

Note: I agree with the other commenters about exercise: you should exercise, no matter what. I bike to work (20km a day) and go to the gym once a week, so I think I've got it covered. Just losing weight without exercise is stupid, you'll turn into a sissy who can't bend a ballpoint pen.