Are you miserable with how you look and feel? Have you tried diet after diet and failed? Have you given up on losing weight? You are not alone. Every year millions of people take a trip on the diet and weight loss roller coaster. They spend billions of dollars on every fad diet out there in an attempt to lose weight.

What are the secrets to losing weight? First of all, diets don't work, period. There is NO magic pill, machine or “secret" that will magically make your body lose weight. You have to think of it as a new way of life, a permanent commitment, not just something you do for a few days or a week and it's over.

If you follow a diet or weight loss plan that requires you to totally eliminate foods or severely limit certain foods, you are setting yourself up for disappointment, frustration, and disaster from the start. You do not have to starve your body to lose fat. In fact, you must never skip a meal to lose weight. Think about it. The main goal of your body is to survive.

If you try to lose weight by reducing your calories too much, your body will respond by storing fat instead of losing it and using muscle tissue to provide it with the calories it needs. You body reacts this way because muscle is the most readily available energy source.

Using muscle tissue to feed the body lowers muscle mass causing the body's metabolism to slow down. This, in turn, makes it that much more difficult to lose weight. Starving yourself is NOT the answer! The result is a vicious cycle of trying to lose weight but gaining weight instead.

What will burn that stubborn body fat and rev up your metabolism without burning muscle mass? To effectively lose weight, you must drink lots of water, exercise daily, and eat five or six small nutritious meals throughout the day, no more than four hours apart. This weight loss plan keeps your metabolism working at maximum efficiency to burn fat.

Your body will not store up fat calories because it senses there will be a steady supply of food and you will not feel hungry or deprived between meals. With this change in your eating habits, you will not be as tempted to cheat and your weight loss will be much easier.

In addition, you MUST do some sort of daily exercise. Walking, power walking, jogging, elliptical training, bicycling and swimming are excellent and easy exercises that will put your body in fat-burning mode. These exercises force your body to burn a higher percentage of calories from fat and they increase your muscle mass which allows you to eat more. Plus, your body will burn calories for up to an hour after the activity stops.

The secrets to the most effective diet and weight loss plan are to listen to your body and eat when your body tells you it's hungry, do daily exercises and make the commitment to follow these guidelines for a lifetime. Once you train your body to follow a proper diet and nutrition plan, you will eat more frequently but you will eat fewer calories, feel more satisfied, and lose weight in a healthy manner. In that way and only that way, will you lose weight and keep it off.