Without a shadow of a doubt, the most frequent New Year’s resolution in the West is to lose weight. However, it is also the first New Year’s resolution most likely to be broken! Losing weight is not hard 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 diminishes too. Maybe, we get an office job with a promotion, whereas we used to work ‘in the field’. But people in general, do not regulate 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!

Fortunately, there are dozens of diets on hand to help us attain our weight loss goals. There are the traditional calorie counting diets, as advocated 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 want to follow is all yours, of course, but it is well worth examining the main kinds of diet to see which one will suit you. Then you must determine whether you will need 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 at ease in yourself? Or is it for health reasons? Or all three? Have a think about your reasons 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 in front of you and read it out loud to yourself every day.

Consult some of the slimming sites online and work out a few key numbers like the typical 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 eventual goals.

You could create a graph and plot your weekly weight to see how you are doing. Set realistic goals and targets. You can get loads of free information from the Weight Watchers and Atkins websites or / and visit 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 author of this article, 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.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to be slimmer just to have a sexier body. Many people have moulded their bodies to make them look more healthy and more desirable. However, there is no way to attain this new look in a day of two. The problem is that most people do not want to wait, they want it now.

This can lead to these people making rather rash and, it has top be said, rather silly decisions. They are not willing to wait and they are not willing to work for what they want. This is why so many people turn to rapid weight loss diets. Some ‘guru’ brings out a new fad diet and a good proportion of the ‘I want it now’ crowd jump on the band wagon. Only to be disappointed again within the year or less.

Speed diets or rapid weight loss diets tend to put out great advertising copy that is very hard to resist. However, all diets, no matter which one you choose, Weight Watchers, Atkins or fad diet, depend on overweight people making lifestyle changes in order for them to work permanently.

There is a very apposite saying: if you always do what you always did, then you will always get what you always got. That says it all. You can lose weight with all but the stupidest of diets, but if you go back to your old ways when you hit your target weight, you MUST slowly, but surely creep back to your old weight.

If you give your body more calories than it needs, it will store them for when it does need them. The problem is that that day never comes for too many people, because they never exercise themselves. This is especially true of fad diets like the ‘cabbage water’ diet. Yes, you will lose weight on it, but you would lose weight by fasting whatever you did. For a while, and then you might get sick. For a diet to work, it has to be adaptable and enjoyable enough for you to be able to stick with it for the rest of your life. Make no mistake, dieting is long-haul.

Many rapid weight loss programs actually only squeeze the water out of you. Just like a wet sponge. But a good dieter maintains his or her grip on that sponge, not letting it soak up water again. The problem with short term dieting, is that you let go of the sponge underwater.

This is why serial dieters first lose weight and are happy; then finish dieting, go back to their old weight and become depressed. In that state of depression they are suckers for the advertisers of the next latest craze diet. In other words, they are being manipulated and literally squeezed dry, but of their money too.

These silly rapid weight loss programs also include fat loss pills. They are not making you lose fat, well, maybe a tiny amount gets flushed out with all the excess water you are carrying. They are only diuretics under another name. How many pills would I sell if I called them diuretics? How many more would I sell if I called them miracle fat loss pills?

Type the word diuretic into a engine and find out more about them. They are all around you in mild healthy forms. A diuretic will essentially cause your body to lose more fluid than was in the diuretic. Tea is a diuretic, for example.

This list of these dopey dieting aids to rapid weight loss goes on and on, but someone must be buying them and you can bet your bottom dollar that it is the sad, depressed dieter who let go of the sponge.

Slimming soap! Slimming soap is being advertised as being a rare Eastern remedy for corpulence. Well, let me tell you, I live in the East and I have never come across it here. Asians are slim because they do a lot of physical labour and do not come under the pressure to eat junk food that Westerners do, although that situation is changing quickly too.

Magnetic weight loss earrings, I ask you! Even being inebriated without a present for your wife ten minutes before Christmas Day is not a good enough excuse to fall for this one, surely? The advertisers say that the secret of this set of earrings is that they are magnetic.

Well, if you believe this, why not get a pair of $1 children’s toy magnets or even a couple of fridge magnets and put one in each hip pocket? Two? Well, after all, you would not want to lose weight from only one side, would you? You would be lop sided.

Just remember, when you are looking for a rapid weight loss diet: there ain’t one ( that will work for life). If you are putting on weight, then your lifestyle is wrong and it is up to you alone to change it.

Owen Jones, the author 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?

A lot of people do not understand their bodies. That much is obvious because they think that fasting will help them become fitter. They feel convinced that their bodies will burn off their excess fat and that they will lose weight as a result. They also appear to imagine that they will automatically end up with more muscle, just in the right places too. Some take up fasting for fitness because they believe that it will purge them of the toxins in their bodies.

Another conviction that these fasters have is that they are will be able to flush out all of the impurities in their bodies by drinking lots of water while not eating food. Even if this is correct, it would be a long process that would mean that you would have to fast for at least five to seven days though in order to complete the detox process, although it is still not clear scientifically whether fasting is the right tactic for those that desire fitness.

There are many other routes to fitness that do work well though. For example, you can cut back the amount of food that you consume. Cutting back is not fasting, it is dieting and it is not only far more effectual, it is also far less difficult. This, combined with drinking plenty of water and increasing your amount of physical exercise will help you to become fitter.

If you drink a lot of soda like cola or lemonade, which are full of sugar, like a lot of kids do, or lots of cups of sugared tea or coffee, like a lot of adults do, then just replacing those drinks with water or weak tea will help you lose weight quite rapidly even if you do not make any other changes to your diet or your level of exercise.

It is also possible to damage your body if you embark on a strenuous exercise routine only relying on body fat to keep you going. Your body probably will not be able to deliver enough energy to fuel such a change, because your metabolism will be too low.

Someone going about it in this way, can become very weak and dizzy. It is not a good idea to run the risk of injury because you have not given your body all the fuel it requires to complete the tasks you are asking it to do.

It is best to consult a physician before you make any changes to either your diet or your fitness program. Confer with your doctor about your thoughts on fasting and fitness. They will be able to inform you whether they feel it is something you can try or whether it is simply too dangerous.

Fasting is all right if you have do it for religious reasons, but do not attempt much physical exertion. Ask a Muslim how he or she feels during Ramadan! Fasting for long periods can lead to high blood pressure and even liver damage. So, be very careful before trying to fast yourself fit, there are much better ways.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, 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?