Take chocolate, for example, I can’t tell you it’s good for you. But eating a small quantity infrequently won’t harm you. If you deprive yourself, that’s unrealistic. Also unrealistic is the idea that gimmicks and fad diets are successful ways to lose weight.

It’s easy to lose weight. What’s tricky is keeping it off. That requires a permanent change in eating and exercise habits that most people are unwilling to make.

Also be wary of extreme weight loss measures such as Oprah’s liquid protein diet. That diet is very risky and expensive. It should only be undertaken by extremely obese people who’ve failed to lose weight every other way.

Starving oneself isn’t safe and often isn’t effective for causing weight loss anyway. There’s a misconception that you will lose weight by only consuming 400 or 500 calories a day. But your body will suppress your metabolism to compensate so you might even gain weight. You’d have to keep eating less and less. It would be very devastating to your health.

Instead, people should eat a reasonable amount and exercise to keep their metabolism up. The word, exercise, turns people off. By exercise, I didn’t mean jogging in the snow or getting sweaty and yucky in the gym – just keeping active will do.

For diet, be sure to include plenty of fibre and starchy carbohydrates, minimize the amount of fat and pay attention to the amount of salt and sugar. Drink plenty of water as well – it’s a very forgotten nutrient.

Moderation is recommended for children’s diets as well. Restricting diet at an early age is too extreme and can cause growth retardation. Children need more fat and cholesterol than adults. Children should drink whole milk until they are at least two years old and never drink skim milk until they’re teenagers.

Overweight children should never be put on a weight loss diet. Instead, their current weight should be maintained until they grow into it.

Children needn’t be deprived of sugar either. Believe it or not, sugar has a clean bill of health. It doesn’t cause hyperactivity. It has been linked to dental caries, but the concern is more for dental hygiene than eating sugar.

On the other hand, sugar has no nutrients so no one needs to eat it. But it’s not realistic to deprive children of foods they’ll encounter elsewhere. However, they should know the difference between healthy foods and treats. Treats are okay in moderation, but not as substitutes for healthy foods.

Adults needn’t be overly concerned about sugar in their diets either. It’s more important to limit the amount of fat. We eat so much more fat than needed. We’re probably better off with jam on our toast or syrup on our pancakes instead of butter.

So there you have it. You can really eat anything you want and still lose weight if you follow the nutritionists’ advice about moderation.

When it comes to the battle of the bulge, most Americans are losing. For some, the reason is too much inactivity. For others, it’s a combination of inactivity and poor nutrition. Obesity is on the rise, not only among adults, but for children as well. On average, Americans put on 1 to 2 pounds annually between the ages of 20 and 50, typically because of their high-fat diet and too little exercise.

Research has constantly pointed out that exercise can help reverse this damaging health trend, but renewed emphasis is being placed on the role of nutrition in promoting weight loss and a heart-healthy lifestyle.

If people would only follow guidelines regarding proper nutrition, there would be a considerable decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Cancer deaths would drop another 30 to 40 percent as well. These are big numbers and represent millions of lives.

Proper nutrition for weight loss and health starts at your local supermarket and favorite restaurants. The problem is that people do what they want to do when it comes to food, instead of doing what they know they should.

Proper nutrition should be everyone’s concern. If people have interest to spend the time exercising during the week to maintain or improve their health, then they should carry it full circle by paying attention to good nutrition as well. And this means drastically reducing their dietary fat intake.

The dietary fats that you can see (butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, etc.) and the hidden fats you can’t see (fat in ice cream, meat products, etc.) are the real enemies in your diet. Exercise alone will not rid your body of the fat laid on by these culprits.

Combined with good nutrition, however, you can certainly bring about tremendous reversals. Reducing fat from the diet take some willpower and commitment.

Increase the amounts of fruits, vegetables and grains that you eat, while cutting back on red meats, fried foods and rich desserts.

When carbohydrates are eliminated or drastically reduced, a person’s appetite is diminished. That is because the body switches over to using protein and fat, and there is a chemical change in the body, called ketosis.

The hardest part of dieting for many people is controlling their appetites. But if you can consume just the same number of calories, regardless of the diet composition, you will lose the same amount of weight.

All low calorie diets are potentially dangerous. Semi-starvation is not the right approach to weight loss. Yes, the very low carbohydrate diets can lead to fatty deposits in the liver. The emphasis on proteins, particularly fat meats and other foods high in saturated fats, and even eggs, may significantly increase the total cholesterol levels.

The proper diet for weight loss is not a low calorie diet, but rather a balanced diet that includes all of the four basic food groups. It should provide 1,200 calories a day for adults. Anything less can lead to problems and needs to be managed by a physician. The low calorie diets being promoted today usually produce only temporary results. All you need to do is look at Oprah Winfrey’s story of rapid weight loss and not too long afterward, a rapid weight gain, back to where she started. That is the usual story. If you want to lose weight, you need to be on a program you can follow for life.

Don’t forget the value of exercise. A proper limited-calorie diet (rather than a very low calorie diet) along with a good exercise program is essential. And it really doesn’t matter if you have three or six meals a day. Calories do count and the total calorie intake is the important factor.

Americans are the most overweight people in the world. Our abundance of food, easy access to fatty snacks, sedentary lifestyles, and, in some cases, genetics contribute to our weight problems. About 90 percent of U.S. residents surveyed say they weigh too much and 35 percent want to lose at least 15 pounds.

The myth that being thin equals success is the force that drives the majority of us to diet. There is a concentrated focus on making people, particularly women, feel dissatisfied about their bodies. The fashion industry perpetuates an average woman’s guilt over weighing more than she perceives she should.

The best clothing styles are made for slimmer figures, while overweight women often have to go to special stores for larger sizes. Women are stigmatized by having to go into heavy women’s stores. Although more men in recent years have become concerned about their bodies, women are more likely to take radical steps to lose weight.

A little walking will help it come off faster. And a lot of walking is better yet. Moving the large muscles of the body, as in walking, swimming, bicycling and rowing, changes the balance of fat to carbohydrates burned. Once your body is working well more fat is used to keep you going the same distance. It’s a good thing getting better. Fat can’t be left out of your diet entirely because you need some of the components – and as long as you must have them, they might as well come from something you like.

Foods in the diets are largely interchangeable so you can have what you like within the range of permitted fats. Cooking methods may have to be changed a bit. That means less frying and more broiling and baking.

Although many people who go through low-calorie diet programs gain back the weight, it isn’t always the fault of the diet. Crash diets really don’t work in the long run. Yes, it is possible to lose some weight for a while, but they really don’t change the lifestyle habits of the person. In some cases, there may be a potential danger with weight reduction – particularly if an individual is severely obese and requires medical supervision.

Incidentally, a person who has a normal amount of water in the tissues and goes to bed may also lose 5 pounds in one day. But it is not fat, and the weight will be regained once a person is out of bed.

It is important to drink enough water. The amount should be enough to cause a person to pass about one quart of urine or more a day.

But drinking water alone will not help you lose body fat. The key, as with many fad approaches to diets, is in how many calories you consume. If you continue to consume the same number of calories and have the same level of activity, drinking lots of water will not help you lose weight.

But if drinking water helps you limit your calorie intake, you might. The same applies to diets that are mostly lean meat. By limiting your appetite, and the fact that lean meat is not a high-calorie food, it is just a way to help limit your calorie intake. A pound of raw, separable lean round steak contains only 600 calories.

If you want to lose weight, limit your calorie intake and maintain a sensible exercise program.

Why diets don’t work

For decades, experts believed that weight problems were caused simply because people ate too much. That is, they consumed more calories than their bodies needed and the extra calories were stored as fat. New research, however, suggests that the real reason some people are heavier than others may have more to do with physiological differences between people than with how much they eat.

The most appropriate approach to preventing obesity may be to increase physical activity, rather than decrease caloric intake. There’s another reason why cutting calories alone doesn’t work.

Surprising as it may sound, crash dieting may actually cause you to gain weight in the long run. How? Drastically cutting back on calories can slow down your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories). Each of our bodies has an internal control mechanism, or setpoint, that drives the body to maintain a certain amount of body fat. When we diet to lose weight, our bodies automatically try to compensate by conserving body fat – in effect slowing down our metabolism.

What’s a dieter to do?

Researchers are now pretty much convinced that increasing your activity is the easiest – and safest – way to lose weight. By increasing your physical activity instead of cutting back on calories, you won’t have to go around feeling hungry and miserable all day long. That means you’re more likely to stick with a sensible diet plan and make the weight loss stick, too.

Regular exercise helps you burn fat. Exercise slows down the rate of protein breakdown in your skeletal muscle, which means that an even greater portion of the calories will be burned as fat. You can see the results in groups of people who exercise regularly throughout their lives. Obesity is virtually nonexistent among nomadic people in Africa – even when fat comprises up to 70 per cent of the diet. Those people keep up a lifelong modest level of exercise. Their low body fat seems to be related to that continuous activity.

Dieting alone, on the other hand, usually causes you to lose water during the first several weeks, which you gain right back after you go off your diet. If you can manage to stick to a low-calorie diet for more than a few weeks, you’ll shed some fat, but the accompanying muscle loss can zap your strength. And although you won’t rapidly lose weight by exercising, you’ll probably notice improvements in your appearance fairly soon.

Since you’re building lean muscle mass, which weighs more than the fat you’re losing, your clothing size may drop before your weight follows suit.

But won’t exercise stimulate your appetite and make you want to eat more? That’s a myth. While it’s true that athletes in training do require more calories than most of us, studies have shown that regular, moderate exercise doesn’t appear to have much effect on the caloric intake of the average person.

If exercise is such a great way to lose weight, wouldn’t exercise and dieting work even better? Yes! In fact, scientific research is full of examples of the role of exercise in weight loss.

The beauty of combing exercise and diet, of course, is that you don’t have to cut calories so drastically, since the calories you burn during exercise add to the calorie deficit you need to lose weight. And since exercise helps stoke up your body’s calorie-burning abilities, it counteracts the detrimental effects that dieting alone has on metabolism.

If you decide to combine the two, just remember to diet sensibly. To start, make sure you take in at least 1,200 calories a day. If you eat any less than that, you’ll be short changing yourself nutritionally. One of the best ways to cut back on calories is to cut fat from your diet. That’s because fat has more calories (9 per gram) than protein or carbohydrates (4 calories per gram). And some studies suggested that it’s possible to gain weight on a low-calorie diet that’s high in fat.

• Each day, have something from the four basic food groups: Three servings of milk or milk products, two of meat or meat substitutes, three or more of fruits and vegetables and three of breads and cereals.

• Don’t start a diet before vacation or any holiday.

• Don’t weigh yourself more than once in two weeks.

• Cut back on salt, which helps retain water.

• Try hot soup before meals, because it must be eaten slowly and is filling.

• Meals and snacks should be planned in advance. Have a morning and afternoon snack and three meals.

• Keep a food log and monitor yourself. Having a friend do it might tempt you to cheat.

• Instead of buying cakes, pies, or cookies, make your own with as little sugar as possible.

• Don’t buy sweet snacks, chips or candy.

• keep a plentiful supply of fresh fruits and vegetables in the home.

• Make your own salad dressing from scratch or from a packaged mix using polyunsaturated vegetable oil.

• Restrict intake of hard and processed cheeses. They are high in fat and cholesterol.

• Choose whole-grain cereals and breads.

Myth No. 1: Anyone can lose weight if they really try.

Study after study has proved that permanent weight loss is impossible for most of us; approximately 95 percent of people who lose weight gain it back within a few years. Diets have long been promoted as a “cure” for obesity. If any other treatment for a medical problem had a success rate of only 5 percent, it would be pronounced a failure, not a cure.

If diets worked, there wouldn’t be a single fat person left on the face of the earth. We have tried every diet known to man. Now we know that we didn’t fail; the diets failed.

Myth No. 2: All fat people are compulsive eaters.

The truth is: not all fat people eat compulsively, nor are all compulsive eaters fat. A few years ago, the Smithsonian Institution exhibited a collection of diet products, books and videos next to a poster stating that fat people “do not, on the average, eat any more than anyone else.”

Most scientific researchers now agree that weight is determined mostly by genetics and heredity rather than environment or behavior. So much for the old saw that all fat people have poor eating habits and no willpower.

The program is similar to other established programs that emphasize slow weight loss, a well-balanced diet and moderate exercise. It’s the Bible verses that add a twist. A focus on the Almighty helps during that stressful step on the scales.

“We memorize a Scripture verse and recite it when we stand on the scales. This puts your mind to reflecting more on being God’s creation than whether or not you’ve lost weight.” Weight loss is a popular side effect – not the goal of – the 13-week program. Weekly meetings consist of a wellness lesson, Scripture study, and scrutiny of what dieters have eaten. The program uses the American Diabetes Association’s low-fat, high-fiber diet.

“Many times, the Bible talks about not eating fat. It’s amazing at how we’ve come back to the fact that the diet that Daniel ate was very healthy.” Daniel, an Old Testament prophet, ate only fruits and vegetables.

Materials include a cookbook and a notebook with instructions, general tips on good health and space for diary entries.

But unlike every other addictive substance food is critically different in one way – it is a human need. We must have it to survive. Alcohol, nicotine and other substances of addiction can be hard enough to give up or manage – and they are nowhere near as important to us as food is! Is it really any wonder that dieting has such a high failure rate? As smokers in the western world have given up over the last couple of decades, overeating has really taken off!

When we accept that food is a highly addictive substance and start to tackle it from this perspective, we begin to take control of it. Ignore its habit-forming potential and we are powerless to control it.

Very few weight loss programs fully appreciate the addictive quality of food and even fewer deal with it – primarily because they simply don’t know how to. Very few diet program planners are qualified in both human psychology and human physiology. It is deadly simple and much easier to tell people what they should eat with the latest and greatest diet.

Trouble is, this focus on what to eat is largely irrelevant; I don’t think I have met an overweight person who did not know what they should eat and what they shouldn’t eat!

Getting people excited – and motivated – about a new diet is easy;  people want to believe in a new quick and easy solution, but this motivation only works for the short term. The enticement of a quick and easy solution is the real life version of the story of the drunk looking under the streetlight for his house keys.

As the story goes, a man out for a late night stroll comes across the hapless fellow and helps him search. After spending some time helping the drunk without any sign of the keys, he ventured the question ‘Are you sure you dropped them around here?’ ‘Oh no’, replied the drunk, T dropped them over there in the shadows, but it’s too dark to find them there.’

The best way to develop a new eating lifestyle  is to involve the others with whom you share your refrigerator so that you create a sub-culture that makes it easier for everyone in it to eat in way that keeps everyone slim.

Perhaps our greatest responsibility, however, is to the next generation. Rates of obesity in children have doubled. Those of us who are parents must make it easier for our children to manage their weight by making healthy eating an automatic lifestyle for them from a young age. In this way – by the time they are making their own food choices, healthy eating will be a deeply entrenched habit.