When people come to me for advice on how to lose weight, they typically don't ask about what exercises they should do, they want to know how they can control their appetite. They are well aware that they are overweight because they eat too much, but they just can't stop...for a variety of reasons.

The first thing I tell them is to not go on a diet. For a week, anyway. I have them start a journal in which they keep track of everything they eat and drink, every day. What time they consume it, how they feel before and afterward. After tracking tendencies for seven days or so, they have the self-knowledge to find out why they over-eat.

Acquiring the will-power or building the techniques to do something about it is the next step.

The second thing I tell my people is that, once they start on their diet and exercise routine, to not step on a scale for at least two weeks.

The reason for this is simple. People want instant results. It seems to take only a day to put on five pounds... and they expect to be able to lose five pounds in a day as well. Doesn't happen that way. It's not fair, but that's the way it is!

And when you first start your diet and exercise routine...it takes even longer for those first pounds to come off.

And after they've "deprived yourself" for a week, and worked their butts off on treadmills or weight benches, and seen the scale move not one iota, too many people fling up their hands and just give up.

It's not even that they expected it to be easy and it turned out to be hard, it's that after all that hard work, the weight still didn't come off!

Well, that's because they were being impatient.

By eating less and working out, they are gaining muscle mass and losing fat - and muscle weighs more than fat. Therefore, it's even possible to gain weight once you start dieting and working out...and you must not let this frighten you.

After about two weeks or so, it's safe to get on the scale, and because you will be following a healthy diet - not depriving yourself of anything and certainly not starving yourself - you will lose about two pounds a week until you reach the weight you desire, and then you will add a few calories to your diet, but maintain your exercise regimen, in order to maintain your new weight.

Frankly, once that weight loss actually starts, I typically advise my people to stop looking in a a full-length mirror and use a scale to track their weight loss. I don't want them to become obsessed by how they "look." (It has been documented that to a woman with an eating disorder, no matter how skeletal she may look in a mirror, she always sees herself as having folds of flesh.) Once they get down to the correct weight for their age, height and body type, that's where they stop and that's where they maintain, regardless of what they think they look like in the mirror.