You went one more diet, and this time you really lost a lot of weight. You feel great, you look better and you are much healthier. Still, you can’t get rid of the fear the weight might come back. Like other times.

It doesn’t have to! There are very effective strategies how you can ensure that it won’t. Gaining weight back after a diet is the result of having gone on the wrong diet (one that never told you about weight management) and of mistakes people make over and over because of not understanding the causes of their weight problem and the principles of long-term weight loss. How could they if their diet program never taught them?

Here are three powerful strategies that will help you to hold on to your weight loss achievements:

Understand your vulnerability
Don’t go “back to normal”
Monitor your weight

Strategy #1: Understand your vulnerability

You need to understand that right after losing weight you are at a greater risk to gain weight again. You went through a difficult time with many restrictions. Losing weight, especially losing a lot of weight, requires commitment, sacrifices and a serious effort – no matter whether you follow a restrictive crash diet or a slower healthy-eating-approach.

Now that you are slim, it’s very tempting to jump back into indulgence and eating whatever you feel like. It’s like wanting to catch up on what you missed whilst dieting. When you are aware of this danger, you can avoid walking into this trap. Because you will be on your guard.

Understanding your vulnerability means to understand the causes of your weight problem. Unfortunately, most diets don’t pay attention to determining these fat-making habits. Why did you gain weight in the first place? Only if you know that, you can take precautions so that it won’t happen again. Read the full story

You don’t have to eat just because it’s a certain time of the day. Meal times are set up arbitrarily. People in different parts of the world eat at different times of the day, and there’s nothing sacred or particularly natural about breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It might be interesting if just for a week you ate only when you were hungry, as if breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t exist. When do you suppose you would be hungry? It would probably be different for you than it would be for another person. People get hungry at different times and in different ways. There’s such a thing as the cocktail hour, but you already know that you don’t have to have a drink every evening at 6:00.

Eating by the clock is a good way to fall back into unconscious eating. The clock says noon, so you start putting food into your mouth just because the hands on the clock are pointing up. You don’t think about whether you’re hungry, or even about what you want to eat. You just move automatically toward food.
Eating because it’s time to eat doesn’t even have to center around breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You may have a friend with whom you always take your morning coffee break. Each day the two of you go down to the cafeteria or the deli and grab a bite to eat. You do it as a ritual, more out of a habit and companionship than out of hunger. Ask yourself whether you want to continue doing that. You can still take breaks with your friend, but you can change the ritual. You might want to take a walk together than eat. The important thing is that you don’t have to continue doing something just because at one point it became a habit.

Another way you can use time to fool yourself into eating more than you want is by saying, “If I don’t eat now, I’ll be starving by the time dinner comes.” Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. Eat what you want now, and let later take care of itself. Your eating habits and patterns will be changing. You might not get hungry at the same times. Let your body develop its own patterns. Avoid preventive eating. Carry an apple around with you if it makes you feel more secure.

And who said you have to wait till dinner to eat, anyway? You can eat anytime you’re hungry, even in the middle of the afternoon. You and your body are in charge not the clock.

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Fat and Happy? You must think I’m kidding. Who could be fat and happy? The two don’t go together. Let’s take a look.

Given everything that you’ve done so far to lose weight and everything you’re willing to do (or not willing to do) from now on, the truth may actually be that you are never going to get thin. If that’s the case, then wouldn’t the most practical thing be to accept yourself the way you are and get on with your life? If deep in your heart you know you really aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to be thin, then the most sensible, practical , and loving thing you can do for yourself is to accept yourself the way you are. Quit all this beating yourself up about your weight, and use that energy to start living the way you want to.

Think of all the things you could do if you just gave up and enjoyed being the way you are. You’d never again have to worry about dieting. You could buy clothes that were comfortable, rather than buying them one size too small to try to look smaller than you are. You could eat whatever you wanted and enjoy it. You could lean back and laugh when people bought diet books. You could stop putting your life on hold until after you were thin and start living it fully right now.

The very act of getting off your own back about losing weight will actually allow you to lose weight. When you accept yourself exactly the way you are, things will naturally start to turn around. Part of it is that if you start caring enough about yourself to get off your own back, you eliminate many of your reasons for overeating. Since there was no more battle on dieting, eating will become rather dull.

It will take a lot of courage in choosing to be fat and happy. It goes against everything written or spoken in our culture on the subject of weight. But you can end weight as a problem in your life forever in one instant by choosing to be fat and happy.

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You get up in the morning and step onto the scale. One of three things has happened: you’ve gained weight, you’ve lost weight, or you’ve stayed the same.

If you’ve lost weight, you’re ahead of the game and can afford to cheat a little. If you’ve gained weight, you may feel angry or depressed. If you’ve stayed the same, it looks as if what you’re doing is for nothing. And what’s the likely response to any of those three situations? To eat, of course. The scale can actually prompt you to eat. Read the full story

Who are these people who are so ignorant they don’t know the number of calories in a chocolate chip cookie, who don’t even know what they do to stay thin? Why are naturally thin people like that, and how did they get that way?

The answer is that they didn’t do anything and they don’t know anything – that’s just the point. Being thin is a natural state. We are the ones who have created the myths and the patterns and the rules that make and keep us fat. Take those away, and what you have is a natural state – thin. The Thins are like animals in the wild, following their body’s instincts from moment to moment. We are the ones who have done something out of the ordinary.

It’s not that thin people don’t enjoy food – they do. They probably enjoy it more than we do, because they actually taste it. I used to buy ice cream cones, and the first bite would taste just great. After the second and third bite, I couldn’t taste the flavor anymore – all I tasted was cold. If a thin person stopped enjoying the ice cream, he would probably toss the rest of it away.

It doesn’t occur to thin people to use food as a reward. They reward themselves with other things. You see, in order to be effective, a reward has to be just a little bit naughty. Thin people sometimes think it’s naughty to take the morning off to play tennis or to spend more money than they should on a new pair of slacks, but since they don’t find food even the slightest a bit wicked, it’s of no use to them as a reward. They can’t use it as a weapon against themselves or others. To them eating is like breathing – neither good nor bad. Read the full story

Are you ready for the big secret? Are you ready to find out how thin people can eat whatever and whenever they want without gaining weight? It’s going to sound deceptively simple, but don’t be fooled. It’s the simplest and yet the most difficult thing in the world.

What makes it difficult is that it involves some basic, fundamental shifts in how you approach food, eating, yourself, and your life. As you read, imagine yourself behind that thin person’s eyes, and notice how you feel. Read the full story

What then is the sure fire way to lose weight? Read the full story

There are numerous internet sites that will help you determine what should be your calorie intake, based on your own particulars and based on your diet they can also tell you what your present consumption is.

A Well-Balanced Diet should include nutrient rich carbohydrates, high-quality protein, and healthy fats. Read the full story

Ever since obesity has been termed as an epidemic, it has attracted attention throughout the world. In America weight loss has become a billion dollar industry. The air is thick with discussions and counter-discussions about various diet programs being proposed by various people.

There is a 5-Factor Diet, Atkins Diet, Bob Greene’s Best Life Diet, South Beach Diet, Cabbage Soup Diet, Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet, Anne Collin’s diet and now you have DASH diet and Fat Smash Diet and Size Zero Diet and….it goes on!

Proponents of each of these diet programs make claims of how much weight you will lose and how rapidly you will lose weight. Some go to the extent of claiming that you will lose up to 10-12 lbs in a week whereas medical experts warn that such claims are ridiculous and weight loss of such proportions can come about only by losing water which is detrimental to the system. Moreover there is always the danger of gaining weight just as rapidly when you stop working on the program.

Essentially all these programs boil down to a few basics. The body weight is contributed by fat, muscles, bones and water. Excess calorie intake is responsible for increased weight and so cut down the excess intake of calories. Increase metabolism so that stored fat can be burnt off. Burn off the fat that is stored in the body by exercises and fat burning food. But do not starve the body of the essential nutrients.

Basically diet programs fall into three broad categories: the “fad diets”, those that are based on specially processed food and those that can be called as “natural diet” programs.

There is no clear definition of “fad diet”, it is very subjective. Fad diet is popularly believed to be a poor weight loss diet. A fad diet generally becomes very popular very quickly and falls out of favor just as quickly. Fad diets quite often claim very quick weight loss. Their claims for efficacy are generally not confirmed by any legitimate scientific studies. Often promoted by parties that publish books about the diet or those that sell some supplements or ingredients that are part of the fad diet, a fad diet may not achieve anything at all or at times may have an adverse effect on health.

The natural diet program is based on use of food constituents that are normally in your diet; it recommends some of the constituents as being helpful and some others as being harmful from the point of view of weight loss. For example, it may recommend certain fish such as Sardines, herrings, etc as providing beneficial Omega 3 fatty acids or may recommend use of lean meat but not others such as pork; it may recommend low-fat skimmed milk but not the normal fresh milk. Natural diet is based on very clearly understood and recognized scientific knowledge.

The third category of diet programs mentioned above are based on use of specially processed food ingredients or supplements; this category is so highly commercialized that even if it has scientific basis at times lies on the boundary of fad diet plans.

In America Weight Loss has become an industry and every other day some new diet plan is announced. Various dieticians, medical doctors and others have jumped into the fray. Protagonists and antagonists of various diet plans fight it out with claims and counter-claims until some new diet plan comes along to divert the attention.Naturally people get a little skeptical about these diet plans. However, there are certain marked departures from the popular versions of diets in Dr. Ian Smith’s Fat Smash Diet. Firstly Dr. Smith’s diet is not proposed as a quick fix for losing weight but is proposed as a lifestyle approach on healthy eating, eating filling foods; secondly it lays stress on regular exercise and does not rely only on low calorie low fat diet.

Fat Smash Diet And Celebrity Fit Club

Fat Smash Diet has come to sudden prominence because of the platform of VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club from which it got projected. This is a reality TV series based on an earlier British version. Eight overweight celebrities, split into two teams of four each, compete with each other as they try to lose weight. They are monitored and supervised by a team that includes a nutritionist, a psychologist, and a physical trainer. Dr. Smith was the nutritionist who put the competitors through his Fat Smash Diet.

Later Dr. Smith has published a book detailing the nutrition and fitness diet plan that he had used on the reality show. His diet plan has devised a weight loss plan based on scientific principles and is backed by research. This is an easy to follow diet plan; DR. Smith claims that his plan can be easily used by anybody, irrespective of whether the objective is to lose 10 lbs or 50.lbs.

Dr. Smith’s diet plan has four phases, each phase consists of 4 or 5 meals a day; the meals consist of raw, steamed, baked, or grilled food. In each phase a certain amount of exercises is a definite component.

Phase 1 of 9 days is to “detox” the mind and body, as Dr. Smith says. This phase consists of mostly vegetarian food with some egg and dairy products. 30 minutes of exercise for five days a week are necessary.

In phase 2 of 3 weeks duration more food options are allowed and cereals, lean meat and seafood is included in the diet. Exercise duration is increased to35 minutes per day for 5 days a week.

Phase 3 lasts for 4 weeks. More leniency in the food is given; Pasts, bread and desserts and a small scoop of ice cream or 2-3 cookies are allowed. Duration of exercises is increased to 40 minutes.

Phase 4 is a lifetime plan phase in which the dieter eats most foods and drinks he had previously enjoyed; even alcohol is permitted.

Dr. Smith’s plan gives long lists of foods you may enjoy while still being able to shed weight and it also gives a list of those you avoid.

DR. Smith’s fat Smash Diet gives much greater freedom to the dieter; he insists that his plan aims to change the dieter’s “relationship with food”.

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