Weight loss is typically accomplished in one of two ways. The first is the most used. Weight Watchers is an example. You simply eat fewer calories than your body burns each day. After your weight, measurement, and sex are taken into account, you are put on a plan of diet and exercise that will, over time, reduce your weight and fat because every day you are burning more calories than you eat.

Let's say you are a female and your normal routine typically burns 2,000 calories each day. If you begin to eat 1,700 calories each day and burn 200 more exercising, you are consuming 500 less calories than your body is burning each day.

Since a pound of fat weighs approximately 3,500 calories, you will generally lose about one pound each week. If you're 40 pounds overweight, it will take you about forty to fifty weeks to lose your excess weight. Do you have that much patience? Will you eat less and exercise more for that length of time?

The second method for losing weight is to trick your body. An example is the Atkins Diet. This is a very restrictive diet that severely limits the number of carbohydrates you eat.

Basically, without getting into all the details, you trick your body into not storing fat as it usually does. The goal is for your body to go into ketosis. That means your body burns its own fat rather than storing fat.

This type of diet also works fast if you strictly follow its tenets. You can lose as much one-half to one pound per day, often without exercising.

There are problems with this diet, however. You eat mainly meat, cheese, and eggs. Sweets, most all types of bread, most fruits, and many vegetables have large amounts of carbohydrates and are off limits or very severely limited. Constipation is a constant problem. Your energy level goes down dramatically because most of your body's energy comes from the carbohydrates you eat.

Can you tolerate such a restrictive diet? Can you function at a very low energy level?

These have been the main two options for losing weight without undergoing surgery or altering your body's chemistry with diet pills.

The good news is that diet experts are beginning to find ways for serious dieters to combine the two methods. In doing so, you can eat enough carbohydrates to keep up your energy level, but increase your activity enough to burn up those carbohydrates and quite a bit of fat each day.

You completely change your metabolism. You end up burning more carbohydrates and fat than you consume, and you lose weight rapidly.

Want to lose weight rapidly? Use common sense to combine the best of Weight Watchers with the best of the Adkins Diet, and you will be amazed at how quickly you can safely and easily lose weight.