With all the diets, drugs, pills, potions and incredible claims about successes in the market today, one would have to think losing weight was easy. If it was so easy then why is the population of people who are overweight increasing.

Weight gain is simple, we eat more food [energy] than we need and we don’t move around anymore.

That’s it that’s the plain truth. More energy enters our body through food than is expended by our bodies through metabolism and any form of movement.

To date there are no pills or herbal concoctions that can get us off of our backsides and burn off the excessive amounts of energy we are consuming. There is no one-diet plan that is suitable for everyone. Just because a famous celebrity claims miraculous results with a diet doesn’t guarantee you will achieve the same success. We tend to not read or hear the part about the full time personal trainer, the 10k daily runs, the 3-4 gym sessions per week, the 6 hours of pilates and yoga a week, and of course the full time live in chef. Somehow we tend to miss those bits of important information, or do we just choose to.

The plain truth is losing weight is not easy and most people don’t find it enjoyable.

That’s why we spend billions of dollars annually on gimmicky weight loss products. We want to find the easy way out.

Unfortunately there is no easy way. Weight loss takes commitment, discipline and a never-ending successful positive attitude. It takes a lot of dame hard work to shift all of those years of excessive eating and couch sitting. You are a product of your own devises, and unless you decide once and for all to really be strong and committed to success you will always experience disappointment.

If you eat it you must burn it off it’s that simple. If you don’t want to burn it off don’t eat it, it’s your choice.

If you are waiting for a miracle drug or herbal concoction to be developed, you’ll be waiting a long time because no drug or potion is going to control the shoveling of food into peoples mouths or make them run around the block.

These things are done consciously they are choices we make. Every-time we put too much food into our system or too much of the wrong type of food, we decided to do that. There is no drug for that. Sure there are drugs that control our appetite but over time we can over-ride them or simply forget to take them. When does it become our responsibility to control what we do? Many of us claim we do not have enough time to exercise. We are all too busy, the day to day stresses in our lives are unbearable. Yet many of us can still find up to 4 hours a day to watch television or sit on the computer. That’s nearly 30 hours a week just in front of a TV or a computer screen.

Why? It’s a choice. Nothing more and nothing less. We choose to be overweight, we choose to eat what and when we like and we choose to sit instead of play.

Until we can all take responsibility for our own lives and conditions, there will be no change to our ever-increasing girths and health problems.

Why is it that when most people go on a diet they tend to put more weight back on after they have finished the diet than when they started.

There are many reasons for this frustration; hopefully I can help you to understand why this happens so that you can make better decisions in the future about how best to tackle the “battle of the bulge”.

First of all whenever you go on a restrictive diet your body senses that you are trying to starve it. It is not getting it’s usual supply of energy so it automatically goes into survival mode by changing many working functions that will preserve energy and maintain or increase your weight over time.

If you suddenly restrict your energy intake by as little as 10% your body will counter that with a 20% reduction in your metabolic rate. This can happen with in the first 24 hours. Your body lowers the rate at which you use energy for any given task and general bodily functions so that you do not perish. It has no idea that you plan to stop losing weight once you reach your goal weight, it just senses that it is losing valuable energy needed for survival.

Many weight loss diets that decrease food especially carbohydrates work by decreasing your glycogen stores. [The storage form of carbohydrates] Each gram of glycogen holds 3 times its weight in water so the majority of weight you lose is water and not fat.

Your brain and nervous tissue rely solely on glucose [carbohydrates] for energy, so when restricted muscle tissue is broken down to produce glucose. Muscle tissue is what burns fat so the less you have the less fat you can burn. Muscles are like your engines the more you diet the smaller your engines get and the less energy you will burn to lose weight. It is just like a car, a smaller engine will get more kilometers per litre than a larger more powerful engine.

Your body has remarkable survival abilities and will also resist your weight loss attempts by increasing your appetite. Even when you regain the lost weight it will keep going so that you store a little bit more incase next time you threaten it again, sort of like an insurance policy.

It will increase the activity levels of the fat storing enzymes so that you will store more fat than usual and they won’t bother to stop once you’ve finish the diet either. They’ll just keep storing for that rainy day. Your body will even increase the percentage of food absorbed from the small intestines. Dieting makes a difficult job an impossible one.

Hopefully you can see the difficulties and the reasons why only 1 in 20 people is successful at losing weight through dieting. Losing weight is not really that complex, but it does takes a lot of discipline and a lifetime commitment to a healthy lifestyle. Your body will always reflect the shape of what it is currently doing, in other words there is no point going on a diet for a couple of weeks and then returning to your current lifestyle because your old shape and weight will return with vengeance.

Learn to be patient and make simple healthy changes to your current eating plan that you can maintain for a lifetime. Increase your activity levels to include a minimum of 30-60 minutes of moderate intensity activity such as walking on a daily basis.

You may not lose 10 kilo’s in 3 weeks but in 6 to 12 months I guarantee you will weigh less, look and feel better than if you continue to yo-yo diet yourself to weight gain.