Losing weight isn’t all that hard. You can just eat less and exercise more, and the pounds will come off. The food that’s consumed during a weight loss program is called a “diet.” But the fact is we all eat a “diet” every day. The foods chosen and the quantities consumed of those foods are what make up anyone’s diet.

If you are really, really serious about taking off those extra pounds and keeping them off forever, you have to make some lifestyle changes, and those changes have to be permanent. Weight control is not a temporary task or an event — it is a journey.

A diet is all about choices. When you go out for lunch with friends, you can CHOOSE the burger (double meat and double cheese) and fries, or you can CHOOSE the grilled chicken sandwich with no fries. It’s YOUR choice. You’re the one ordering the food.

The same thing is true of snack food. You can CHOOSE the large bag of chips, a candy bar, and a regular soda or you can CHOOSE the small bag of pretzels and the diet soda. You’re the one buying the snack.

Exercise is also a choice. You can choose not to exercise. I had a friend who told me her idea of exercise was jogging to the fridge. You have the power to decide to take that walk after dinner or watch TV.

Weight control is all about the choices we make each and every day. Diets alone don’t work. They never have.

Weight loss diets have been around for a while now. William the Conqueror was so disturbed about the weight he had gained that he locked himself in a room, ate no food, and drank only alcohol. Sounds like fun, but it didn’t work. He died when he fell off of a horse, and he was so obese that the clergy had a problem fitting all of him into his stone sarcophagus.

I remember my grandmother going on the banana and pineapple diet. She ate nothing but bananas and pineapples for several weeks. She didn’t lose any weight because she ate so many of them, and after she gave up that fad diet, she never ate another banana or pineapple as long as she lived.

Some of the fad diets that come along are weird, some of them are laughable, and some of them sound so reasonable that one would think that maybe the painless road to weight loss had finally been discovered. The old eat less/exercise more tried-and-true road to weight loss isn’t much fun. So if a painless weight loss diet has been discovered, the world wants to know what it is.

The Atkins Diet was a biggie. The diet said that the problem of weighing too much wasn’t caloric intake or lack of exercise. The problem was carbohydrate intake. We were told to eat all of the meat and meat products that we wanted; just avoid vegetables and all grains and we would lose weight without being hungry. The thing is, the plan did work — for a while. It just didn’t work forever. Pounds were lost and promptly regained. The body needs a well-balanced diet to function correctly, and it simply will not put up with that kind of abuse for long.

The human body requires certain nutrients in order to function correctly. It needs vitamins, minerals, and trace elements that keep all of the parts clicking along and all of the pipes clear and in good working order. When the body is denied the needed nutrients, it first looks around to any of the missing elements that might be stored. If it finds none stored, it simply cannot supply the needed nutrient to the organs that need it, and the results aren’t pretty.

A good weight loss diet provides healthy, nutritious foods that supply all of the body’s needs while supplying fewer calories. Needed nutrients come from a diet that contains protein, carbohydrates and fat — yes, fat. We need some fat — the good kind, however; not the bad kind.

A good weight loss diet is not a starvation diet. It’s not a diet that leaves the dieter constantly hungry and unsatisfied. It’s not a diet that consists of only one food, one or two foods, or a diet that leaves one food group completely out.

There are lots and lots of weight loss diets out there. You can’t pick up a newspaper or a magazine, or turn on the TV, without seeing advertisements for one weight loss diet or another. There are a great many choices, and in order to choose wisely, you need information.

Good weight loss diets will include foods from all of the food groups. Granted, the portions allowed in some food groups might be much smaller than those allowed from other food groups. But a good diet also advocates exercise. There are two parts to weight loss. Eating fewer calories is one of them. The other one is burning more calories through exercise.