In life, there are three certainties: death, taxes, and failed diets.  Speak to the average man or woman in the street, and they soon tell you about the countless low fat, low calorie, high protein, low protein, eat grapefruit, eat cabbage diets they've been on.  And just look at them now.  Probably more overweight than they were when they started dieting in the first place.

Fad diets

In life, fads come and go.  By their very nature they usually aren't long lived.  By definition, a fad diet is one that has you follow an eating pattern that is

• unhealthy to your body

• unbalanced and doesn't provide your body with its required nutrients

• unable to be maintained over a long period of time, preferably indefinitely

Typical fad diets restrict the types of foods you can eat.  Let's call ours the zucchini diet.  In this diet you can eat as many zucchinis as you please, and eggs and peanuts only every third day.

While  zucchini is very nutritious, the problem here is that it doesn't in any way contain a wide enough supply of the nutrients that you'll need to keep you healthy.  So essentially, you're starting an eating plan that will, eventually, make you sick.

What comes off must go back on

Unfortunately, for all fad diets "what comes off must go back on" is a truism.  The fad diet may well help you shed those pounds quickly, but because it isn't sustainable over the long term (just for how long can you eat nothing but zucchini?), the minute you stop the diet, you return to your normal eating pattern.  This is the eating pattern that made you overweight in the first place.  So by the end of the diet, you've gained absolutely nothing.  Usually there is also a rebound effect, where you make up for lost time by over indulging in the foods you were denied throughout the diet.  Naturally, what happens is you end up putting on more weight than you had in the first place.  This is known as yo yo dieting.

Sustainable weight loss

So how then do we lose weight and keep it off?  The answer is quite simple.  Firstly, select a diet that is nutritionally balanced, and doesn't restrict you from any food groups.  We need all of them to keep healthy.  Secondly, your diet must be useful to you in the long term.  It must teach you a proper, healthy eating lifestyle.  A perfect example of a successful, balanced diet is The Weight Loss International Slim for Life Program.  Can you see yourself eating in the same way for the next year?  Ten years?  A good diet must be sustainable indefinitely to have a useful and permanent weight loss effect.