The most important thing to do if you’re genuinely looking for a healthy weight loss diet program is to be determined to ignore what all the glossy magazines are telling you about what the Hollywood stars, or the New York socialites, are doing for their diets. Unlike you, whether you’re a working mom or home mom, they can afford the very best in personal trainers to help keep them trim, home cooks and dietitians all able to prepare and measure their food down to the last calorie. Heck, especially for the movie and TV stars, gaining and losing weight could almost be seen as part of their job.

Doesen't that look delicious?

So, rule number 1 is - don’t try to compete with the magazine images and stories about what size or shape you should be.

No diet fads

Rule number 2 would be to stay clear of diet fads, as that is exactly what they are - a media fad that will disappear as soon as someone else proclaims a new one. I would say that whatever the diet fad is, be it the cabbage soup one or the Atkins diet - they can help some people to lose weight quickly, but are they sustainable in the long run? How many people do you know, apart from yourself probably, who have tried one of these fad diets only to come off it in a few days feeling thoroughly ill and demoralized? The reason is quite simple, a fad diet is usually proclaimed by an individual or a very small cohort claiming success - if it worked for them great, but that doesn’t mean to say it’s a diet suitable for all.

Gradually dieting to your ideal weight?

Before embarking on any diet, be sure to know what your target weight should be. A popular way of doing this today is knowing your BMI - Body Mass Index - which compares your height to your current weight and then gives you an ideal range within which your weight should be. Whatever weight or size you are now rule number 3 has to be - a healthy diet is one that helps you to attain your ideal weight, not lose that much weight that you no longer look healthy. There is of course no problem for someone who is already within their ideal weight dieting to lose some weight so that they are at the bottom of that ‘healthy weight’ BMI scale - just don’t go below it. A fourth rule would be to lose any excess weight slowly. That’s not to say spend a lifetime shifting those excess pounds, but it is a fact that weight lost slowly is less likely to be regained than weight lost rapidly. Particularly appropriate to obese people is the reason they are obese is simply because they eat too much, their first step in a diet should be to reduce their food intake until they are merely in the overweight category and then look to some serious dieting to achieve their ideal target weight.

Healthy weight loss diet

Almost implicit with rule number 4 is rule number 5 for a healthy weight loss diet, which is don’t try and starve yourself. It is a simple metabolic fact that if you try and starve yourself your body will try and store any food you do take in as fat - this is the bodies defense mechanism against being starved, which is counter-productive and in the long term could do you serious harm. Which finally brings me on to what exactly is a healthy weight loss diet then? Think a healthy diet is for life, not just a few weeks of the year!

Healthy weight loss

As a busy mom the possibility of eating three square meals a day, and nothing else, is probably not a reality. For a long time this was seen as an ideal way to lose weight, without getting into any fad diets, as it meant we cut out all those fattening snacks in-between meals. So instead a current healthy weight loss program is the ‘Three + Three’ diet, you’ll need a bit of self-discipline to follow this diet, but it is not one of the torturous fad diets. ‘Three+Three’ simply means that you eat three low calorie meals a day and have three nutrient rich snacks totaling 1500 calories - all spread out as equally as possible across the day. The exact recipes and foods you’ll eat are available elsewhere, but by knowing you’ll be due a meal or snack every 2 or 3 hours you won’t start craving foods or snacking inappropriately. The regular supply of food to your system allows it to burn calories at a regular pace and reduces the tendency to store fat - a process known as thermogenesis.