There are diets that work for certain people, there are diets that do not work for certain people and then there are diets that never really work for anybody at all. Dieting is the most popular past time in the Western world and, makes no mistake that this is not a women-only issue. If you are a man and want a lot of women around you, then you have to stay fit.

Pessimists would say that a diet is a bunch of foods we don't like, in too tiny portions for our appetites and we must eat all that at specific times of the day. As nobody really eats this way, nobody can successfully diet and change their life style. I would say that dieting is, more than anything else, finding a structure.

It's been said that people cannot eat healthy with so many temptations around them and this is why diets don't really work, but the truth is that way too few diets offer a healthy structure that is both easy to follow and tasty. We cannot eat bland food all our lives and we can only drink this much grapefruit juice before we decide enough it's enough.

Add to that all the scientific discoveries that stress out the importance of our genes to our overall body type and the naysayer do seem to make a valid point when they argue that diets never work. The fact is that, as one medical study showed, 80% of the children who have two obese parents are at risk of growing into obese adults themselves and only 15% of the children who have two normal-weight parents are at risk of growing into obese adults.

So genes do play an important role, but so do your environment and your life style. It doesn't matter how skinny your mother and father are if you drink a gallon of high sugar fizzy drinks a day and eat only the greasiest burgers with XXL portions of fries.

We are all at risk of being involved in a car accident, whether we drive or not, but very few of us would ever have a car accident and even fewer will cause one to happen. Not drinking alcohol prior to driving and not being too tired to stay focused really does help.

And the same case can be made for dieting. Dieting is more than something you try for a couple of weeks every now and then. Dieting is changing the perspective you have on food. For example there is no such a thing as good foods and bad foods, but there is something that is called moderation. And it means that if you know you should cut out sugar and fat, and then avoid eating huge portions of anything that contains a lot of refined sugar and a high amount of fat.

It won't get you very far to start on a frustration diet that demonizes chocolate and burgers! You should be able to adjust to a healthier burger, though. Like not buying a burger, but trying to make your own, buying a lean cut of beef and having the butcher grinding it for you. Dieting and healthy life style is not as much about giving up on foods we love, but on making choices that are sustainable for long term ? for a life time actually!