It seems there are an endless number of weight loss programs to choose from and it can be hard to pick out the best diets. You do not want to waste time and perhaps money on something that will not work for you. Here are 3 pointers you can use to make sure you are choosing from the best diets when you set out to lose weight.

1. Is It Sustainable?

The first way to know if a diet is any good is to see if allows all types of food groups. Remember the saying ‘everything in moderation’, because a good diet will allow you to eat anything. Yes, that includes burgers and chocolate, it just has to be in moderation with the content evaluated as part of the total plan. Any method that cuts out any food groups in the long term can be pretty much classed as a fad diet, and it is unlikely to be a healthy one.

2. Is It Too Fast?

The second way to assess a potential diet is to look at the speed of weight loss claimed. Again there is an old adage to remember, which is 2 lb per week. At the beginning of the diet the weight will come off quicker, but not by vast amounts. Any method claiming to lose you more than 5 lb per week is clearly a diet with not enough calories or nutrients in it, in other words a crash diet.

Some diets have a crash element where you go on a very restricted food plan for the first 7-14 days. After that the diet expands to include more food groups and a higher number of calories. This works for some people because it takes advantage of your high motivation in the beginning to kick start your diet. But there is a danger that you will binge at the end of the first stage.

3. Will You Have Support?

The third way to pick the best diets is to look for some kind of support group. Doing it by yourself makes it unnecessarily harder than it has to be, while having a support group makes it all the easier because you are going through it with other people. You can motivate and help each other with advice and encouragement.

If you just buy a book and follow its advice by yourself, that is fine in the beginning, but there is nobody to help you out when your own motivation begins to falter. Look for either a real life support group or an online forum where people are following the same diet and will have a genuine desire to help you.

So to sum up, if you check that you are allowed to eat all food groups, that the speed of weight loss claimed is not too high, and that there is a help group in place, you will be well on the way to picking from the best diets and avoiding the bad ones.

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

As the writer of a popular fitness blog I get emailed almost every day by people asking what diet to use, why their diet does not work, and especially why everyone seems to gain weight after they stop their diet. Well the simple answer is that diets just can’t ever work.

OK, to stem the risk of seeming a little crazy (I have in fact given positive review of a couple of diets) I will expand on the simplistic so that you can know why a diet will never work and what will work.

Diets can never work because they are only temporary. How many of us have been awed by the weight loss of a coworker that was on Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig or Atkins? Of course after the weight came back on we did not congratulate them on the return of their old habits but it was in fact the old habits that came back to roost.

The life of a diet

There is always a sense of excitement when someone starts a new diet. It is like any other lifestyle change in that when we begin a diet we like to look at our perfect selves in the future instead of the warts and all that we live with now. The first few weeks on the diet are full of small victories, a pant size here, 5 pounds there and eventually we not only take pride in our weight loss but actually identify ourselves with losing weight. The trouble is you can not sacrifice forever and eventually you have to stop losing weight and oh yeah maybe the people in the office are not really asking to much about the exciting new diet anymore.

Eventually the diet ends. We have either reached a goal weight, stopped sacrificing or just given up. Lets for example say that the ultimate happens. You hit your goal weight! Well now all of the stars have aligned and you feel great about yourself, have pride and a feeling of accomplishment and eventually go to bed. What happens tomorrow.

I will tell you what happens tomorrow, far to often the old habits creep in. After the initial goal there is nothing left and you get tired of sacrificing. You eat a couple of candies ( you lost all that weight of course you deserve it). You start going out with the people from work in the evening, eat a bit of a bigger lunch and then before you know it you are up 5 pounds, then 10 and then you feel like a loser for not keeping things up but the habits are already headed in the wrong direction.

Enough of the crappy story.

I told you that I would tell you what will work and after all that I know you want to know it before you get to the all magical goal weight.

What can you do to make a diet work?

The fact is that a diet is not nearly enough, all a diet is to your body is a phase that will eventually end. What you really need is a lifestyle change. Eating better is good but just losing weight and feeling better is not enough. When the chocolate is calling you need a bigger and deeper reason to keep to the rules that you have. In fact what are your rules?

This is the first big part of successful lifelong weight loss, what do you feel is important? What is the role of food in your life? What are the rules that you have in the food arena? What are the foods that you just do not want to eat anymore? Remember that once you finish your weight loss all of those foods that you are denying yourself will expect to be back in your diet. You can not banish foods forever, but, you can just decide that these foods are no longer going to be important.

The next big part of your life will be your relationship to exercise. We all know that we need to exercise but if the diet is going well and we can avoid the exercise then many of us will skip it altogether. What you really need is a goal based exercise program. I can not think of anything worse than knowing that you have to exercise for 30 minutes a day for the rest of your life. A better way to do exercise is to make it a social event. Join a walking club, get a squash team together, join an online forum that talks about successes in exercise. If you are only looking at exercise as an important chore to losing weight then once you have lost the weight there will be no reason to continue and guess what, you won’t continue. So just like the food it will be important for you to make sure that the value of your exercise is internalized an important lifestyle choice so that after the day you reach your goal weight there will be no decision the exercise has just become a part of your life.

The time to act is now

No matter where you are at in the cycle of dieting, just starting, almost though, at your goal weight or, on the other side with your weight moving up, it is important for you to decide on the role and value of diet and exercise that will carry you for the rest of your life and not just until you hit your goal weight.