For the vast majority of us diets do not work. Full stop. Period. Changing your diet for a certain period of time in order to lose weight will allow you to lose weight for that period of time. But what happens when you stop diet. Yup, you guessed it, because I've been there and, seeing as you're reading an article about losing weight, so have you! Diets do not work. In a world that is obsessed by being thin and conforming to a certain way of looking i.e. skinny, dieting is the most popular pastime in the western world. Whilst it used to be a pastime solely dominated by the female population, men are become just as obsessed by this media driven phenomenon as their female counterparts.

So why do people use diets and why have people been drawn to diets for so long? Well, the first part of the question is easy. People start diets in an effort to lose weight. They want to lose weight for any number of reasons. They want to lose weight for a specific event such as a holiday or a wedding or because they think it will make them more attractive to the opposite sex. Whilst these reasons may be valid at a particular point in time they are seldom sufficient to promote weight loss in the long term. What happens when that special occasion has been and gone? What happens if a partner is found (or not found - the answer is usually the same!) Diets provide a route to the fulfillment of a dream. Happiness!

Diets also absolve the person on the diet of any responsibility should they not lose the desired weight. "I was on the X diet (you've probably tried a few like me so put the name of that diet where the X is!) but it didn't work. Was it the diet that didn't work? Or another good one is "I was on the X diet for two weeks - I lost 10 pounds!". Pity those ten pounds lost have now returned with an extra three or four.

So, seeing as diets do not work, where does that leave us? Well, we need to think about the reasons for wanting to lose weight and the way to go about it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight for a special occasion or in order to find a partner but there needs to be a longer term goal in mind. Weight loss is about life change, changing from the things that made you put on weight to those things that will make you lose weight and then stabilize your weight.

Losing weight is more than something you try for a couple of weeks every now and then. It is about changing the perspective you have about food. There is no such a thing as good food or bad food for example. Some foods contain more fat than others just as some foods taste nicer than others (the nicer tasting food usually contains more fat though!) but neither are good or bad. Some foods just put more fat into your body than others, nothing more, nothing less.

So, let's cut to the chase. If you want to lose weight you need to think about losing weight long term. Get yourself a long-term goal and develop a plan to how you are going to lose weight. Break your plan down into small goals. If your long term plan is to lose thirty pounds break those thirty pounds down into five pound goals. But how are you going to lose those the first of those five pounds? You're going to make small changes to what you eat and you are going to write down everything you eat. As soon as you know exactly what you eat then you can start making changes. Did you think that the biscuit you had between breakfast and lunch didn't count as food!

Take time to prepare your food - you never know, it might even become enjoyable. Eat normal meals but do not eat between meals. Do not snack between meals. You will lose weight! Fortunately nature has given us a helping hand. There are supplements on the market today which allow the fat which we eat in our food to pass through the body without being absorbed. Obviously if less fat is absorbed into the body the less fat the body will store and you will lose weight. The best of these all natural fat binding weight loss products on the market today is Proactol. Proactol allows nearly thirty percent of all fat to pass through the body un-absorbed thus allowing natural weight loss.

So, if you want to lose weight, give up diets now. They don't work