For most of my life I have tried lots of short term fixes for my weight problem, all of them failed, all of them were based on false ideas. I've gone through binges of eating certain types of food and doing certain types of exercise. Most of them resulted in a perceived short term gain. All of them made me more stressed, more anxious, and failed in the end. Most made me depressed when they ultimately (and inevitably) failed, none addressed my real problems, and few gave results that anyone else noticed. I've done everything, from doing sit-ups religiously for a couple of months to eating nothing but soup and bread for evening meals.

The reason that I tried these approaches were two fold; they carefully avoided addressing the real issues and problems and the true causes of my weight problem, and they didn't require that much effort or real change. These are also the reasons that none of these approaches worked in the long run. Each was a placebo, it gave me an excuse to not do what was really needed. I could excuse myself anything because I was doing a dozen sit-ups a night, or because I was only eating soup in the evening. Unfortunately I was excusing chocolate bars and wedges of cheese.

All of these approaches appeared to have some slight effect on me, but that was always illusory. It took me quite a few years to understand why my perceptions were not mirrored by a loss in weight, or in anyone else noticing. The reason is simple, my perceptions of my body, and any changes to it, are far more sensitive than any other measure. We all notice when we lose a little bit of weight, because we are so intimately acquainted with our own bodies that we tend to notice the slightest change. The danger of these small changes is that they can be the perfect excuse to relax. How many times have you said to yourself (or heard someone else say) "I can eat this Mars bar because I was good all last week and lost a pound. Losing weight is a bit like investing on the stock market; it's a long term thing, if you keep cashing in every time you make a small gain you will never make anything. If you lose some weight, you need to bank it, then add more to it, not use it as an excuse to have a binge.

This is why I believe that "dieting" in its traditional form is fundamentally flawed for many people. So many people yo-yo diet, losing weight, only to put it back on as soon as they stop the diet. The reasons are all psychological. We lose weight at the expense of a period of hell during which we don't eat much, are miserable and stressed because of the diet, and are obsessed with food. We then finish the diet and immediately want to eat all the things we have abstained from, and can excuse it because we have lost weight. So we promptly undo all the good work that got us that far, and probably end up putting on more weight than we lost.

How do we stop this vicious cycle? I think there are several approaches, which I am attempting.

Don't go over the top:
Don't use fad diets that involve you eating strange combinations of foods, or cutting your intake drastically.

Set long term aims:
Don't try and lose 6 pounds in two months, try and lose two stone in four months. By picking bigger targets, but giving yourself realistic time to reach them, you are more likely to achieve them, and even if you don't, what you achieve will be more than you would have. If you pick short term goals it is very tempting to stop when you get to them, by choosing a long-term goal you will have the time to have set-backs, to fail occasionally, but by the end you will have fundamentally changed how you eat and live, rather than just temporarily tweaking it.

Be honest:
Probably the most important. I have heard so many people say that a diet "didn't work" for them. But this makes no sense. If a diet involves you consuming fewer calories than you expend, then you will lose weight. The only way a calorie restriction diet doesn't work is if you don't follow it. Many people fail because they are not honest with themselves. I have been there myself, you deceive yourself, forgetting about those mars bars or that ice-cream, pretending that you are sticking to the diet, when all along you are pigging out. don't underestimate the mind's ability to lie to itself, or justify behaviour that it knows is wrong.

The best way I have found to be honest is to record what I eat in some way. Honestly writing down what you eat at the end of each day, or recording what you haven't (e.g. no chocolate) forces you to confront your own habits. I have a chart on my wall, dates across the top, and a list of "good behaviors" down the side (walked to work, ate no chocolate, etc), and each day I tick off which ones I have stuck to. To limit my intake of tea and coffee when I'm at work I have four tokens on my desk, one for each cup; when there are none left, I stop drinking.

Decide what your real aim is:
Look in any magazine at the checkout and you will see diet after diet promising to let you lose half a stone before the summer comes, or drop a jeans size in two weeks. But are these really what you want? I know what I want, to reach my healthy weight and stay there for the rest of my life. You know what? Life is a long time, so all this rushing is silly. You might very well be able to drop a jean size in two weeks, but you will put it all back on in the two weeks after you stop, and if you really think you can keep the diet up for months after that, then you are kidding yourself, and you will be back to where you started within a month. By all means set intermediate targets, but always keep in mind your ultimate destination.

I don't care about looking good in swimming trunks this summer, but I'd like to look good for next year, and the year after and all the years after. So that is my goal. By the time I am 28 (next October) I want to be at a point where I no longer have to think about losing weight because I am fit and healthy, because I don't have to shop around for ages trying to find clothes that fit and look good on me, because I no longer fear chocolate and cheese, and most of all I'm happy with how I live and who I am.

At no point between now and then will I consider myself to be on a "diet".