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Without a shadow of a doubt, the most common New Year’s resolution in the West is to lose weight. However, it is also the first New Year’s resolution most apt to be broken! Losing weight is not difficult in theory, but practice is oh, so different. This is because it involves lifestyle changes.

Our bodies change as we get older and typically our level of activity decreases too. Maybe, we get an office job with a promotion, whereas we used to work ‘in the field’. But people in general, do not adjust their diet to match their variation in circumstances. We sit behind our desks or in retirement and think we can still eat and drink like we did twenty years ago. Big mistake!

Luckily, there are dozens of diets on hand to help us attain our weight loss goals. There are the traditional calorie counting diets, as espoused by Weight Watchers; there are the ‘new era’ diets like Atkins, which have us counting carbohydrates and there are no end of fad diets which are frankly not worth wasting time talking about.

The choice of which diet you would like to follow is all yours, of course, but it is well worth exploring the main types of diet to see which one will agree with you. Then you must determine whether you will require the help and encouragement of a weekly visit to a club or not, or whether you can get that companionship from an online club of slimmers, where you talk to fellow slimmers in the club forum online.

It is also worth fixing in your mind, why you want to diet. Is it to look better? Or to feel more comfortable in yourself? Or is it for health reasons? Or all three? Have a think about your motives and let them motivate you. Whenever, you feel like packing it all in, remember your motivation. Get a book and journal your progress, but first write your motivation in bold capitals on the front page or cover. Keep it before you and read it out loud to yourself every day.

Consult some of the slimming sites online and work out a few key metrics like the average weight people are for your height, sex and body type and your BMI or body mass index. Write these figures on the first page of your book too and use them as the ultimate goals.

You could produce a graph and plot your weekly weight to see how you are doing. Set realistic goals and targets. You can get heaps of free information from the Weight Watchers and Atkins websites or / and go to see your doctor for advice and leaflets.

Aim to lose something like 10-20 pounds in the first month and eight to ten per month after that. Go slowly and aim to go slowly, because then you will hit your targets and you won’t feel like giving up. When you get within five to ten pounds of your target weight, assuming that you have lost a lot of weight, rein back a little and allow yourself a little more freedom. Drop your target to one pound a week, so that you will get a feel for ‘eating normally’.

The dreaded exercise; you have to face it, you will have to do more exercise, but two times thirty minute walks a day is ordinarily enough. You could swim once a week too or get an exercise machine, if you are tied to the house by family.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with how to lose weight online. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? This and other unique content ” articles are available with free reprint rights.

A fad diet is a fashionable diet plan that promises to help you lose weight more often than not in a relatively short time. A fad diet frequently attracts a lot of media coverage, which then attracts a large number of overweight people to try it in order to get back in shape. Fad diets are often soon discredited, but they keep raising their head from time to time.

The grapefruit diet was or is an example of a fad diet. People wanted to believe that you could lose weight just by eating. The food in this instance was grapefruits, but there is also a cabbage diet. The problem with these fad diets is that their slimming effect is only temporary, because you cannot eat no more than cabbage or grapefruit for the rest of your life, so the weight comes back as soon as you go back to normal.

‘If you always do what you always done, you will always get what you always got’ is a true saying. But what is worse is that a lot of of these diets can be harmful to your health.

However, do not think that fad diets are a new phenomenon. Fad diets or fad medicines have an ancient history going back to fake witch doctors, medicine men and quack doctors who doubled as barbers! Fad practitioners have a long and scandalous history and they are still alive and doing very well, thank you very much, today.

These days, medicine is too tightly regulated for them, so they have turned their attention to susceptible, despondent dieters. Most of those that take up a fad diet are overweight teens longing to look like their favourite film star.

Fad diets usually concentrate on reducing or completely cutting out carbohydrates. It is the low intake of carbohydrates that brings about the rapid loss of weight. In fact, this rapid loss is due to the quick loss of water that these low-carb diets stimulate. Much of the fat might still be there, so that when you stop the diet, your body regains its normal amount of water and the lost weight is put back on just as fast as it was discarded.

In the normal course of events, carbohydrates are the basis of energy for work and activity, but with these fad diets, the carbs are no longer there, so the body begins to break down its store of fat. This may seem advantageous but it is not necessarily so. The ketones resulting from the breakdown of fat are excreted via urine and often increased quantities of urine, which can cause dehydration. People with certain medical conditions have to be very cautious too; diabetics, for example.

Fad diets are popular, but they can be very damaging to your body and when they do not have the desired result in the long-term, it can be very depressing leading to comfort eating. This is why many people start a fad diet, lose weight and are radiant for a month or two, but then slip back when they are getting near to their ideal weight. They go back to their old ways and the weight begins to return. They become depressed, certain that they will never be able to lose weight; they comfort eat some more, maybe giving up any hope of achieving a normal weight permanently.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with lose weight fast and safe. If you have an interest in losing weight, too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?

It is a good idea to set yourself targets, if you want to reach a goal. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this. For example, if you are a size 14 and you spend a fair bit of money on some gorgeous size 8 dresses as motivation, you will probably feel quite cheesed off if you are not wearing them a month later.

It is not a good idea to make yourself feel bad, so the right way to have done this would have been to set smaller, more easily attainable, less expensive goals. A consequence of disappointing yourself like that could be depression or / and desperation and desperation to meet your targets can lead to stupid decisions.

Foolish decisions like following a fad diet, because it promises you rapid weight loss. There is no such thing as sustainable rapid weight loss without a change of lifestyle. Yes, you can go for surgery and have lumps cut off yourself or you can pump yourself full of diuretics and squeeze the water out of yourself, but the weight will come back, unless you change the way you live.

Any diet that promises rapid weight loss without recommending a healthier, more active lifestyle is dubious. Many of these types of diet are fad diets. The organizers of these diets are only interested in selling you magic potion drinks or powders as meal substitutes. I have even seen one company selling magnetic earrings which were ‘guaranteed’ to make you lose weight, if you dieted and did more exercise!

Of course you will lose weight if you diet and exercise, but carrying the earrings around with you is not helping. It just adds to the depression when you read in the newspaper that the guru you have been following is outed as a charlatan.

Here are a few tell-tale signs to help you spot a phony diet:

Any diet that requires you to miss meals should start red lights flashing. If you stop eating, you are reducing the amount of calories you are consuming, so you can expect to lose weight. That is not rocket science. You do not need to pay for advice like that.

However, this tactic does not necessarily work either. If you miss a meal, your blood/sugar levels will drop and that has different consequences for different people, but none of them are good. It will also increase the likelihood that you will overeat at the next meal. It would be better to eat a salad, an apple or a banana instead.

Any weight loss program that says you can lose weight without exercising or without dieting is definitely iffy too, because exercise is essential for good blood circulation and metabolism, which are vital to your losing weight and living healthily.

However, exercise alone will not guarantee good health, you have to diet too. In this context ‘dieting’ just means eating healthily.

You do not have to wear anything special to lose weight either. Electric vibrating belts, magnetic earrings, sweat-inducing cummerbunds and the like, do not work. Full stop. They do not work and in a similar vein, powder and liquid substitutes are not worth it either. Get a liquidizer and make your own or just eat properly.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with losing weight quicklys. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?