The Secret to Losing Weight and Keeping It Off, Whether It's a Little, or a Lot

Jared Vogle has the best-known weight loss story, but his is hardly the only one, and women can be equally successful with their own plans. Donna Lennart, whose story was featured in Good Housekeeping, has followed Weight Watchers for five years, reducing her weight from 243 pounds (110 kilos) to 160 pounds (72 kilos), and keeping it off. Chris Spirou's weight ballooned to 270 pounds (132 kilos)--and then she got pregnant. She managed pregnancy and gestational diabetes and then stuck to Jenny Craig to lose 130 pounds and keep it off four four years.

But what if you don't need to lose 200 pounds? What if you just need to lose 20 pounds? Scientific research tells us that the principles that worked for Jared, Donna, and Chris can also work for you.

Sponsors of the meal replacement product Healthy Solutions sponsored research in the use of calorie-restricted diets to encourage moderate weight loss. Healthy Solutions dieters were told to eat as many of the company's 300-calorie meals as they wanted (at separate times, not all stirred together in a great big bowl!), up to 5 meals a day. They also encouraged dieters to eat all the fresh fruit and vegetables they wanted.

In the Healthy Solutions study, dieters took advantage of the permission to eat all the fruit and vegetables they could, and most ate five of the prepackaged, restricted calorie meals as well. But the average participant in the study lost 44 pounds (20 kilos) in three months, and kept it off as long as they continued to use the prepared meals.

In another study, also funded by the makers of Healthy Solutions, Dr. James W. Anderson of the University of Kentucky tracked the progress of people who had lost 100 pounds or more with meal replacement products. Those who continued to use meal replacements after they had reached their target weight loss an average of 137.4 pounds (63 kilos) during the initial diet, but continued to maintain a weight loss of 90 pounds (41 kilos) even four years later. Those who were unsuccessful on the diet were those who ate too little, especially when a lack of fat in the diet triggered gallbladder disease.

What is the common element of Jared Vogel's Subway Diet, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Healthy Solutions, for dieters who make those programs work?
 

Dozens of diet plans work for a month, two months, or maybe even a year, but diet plans that require the dieter to make the decisions, and do the shopping, and the cooking, and the cleaning up, usually fail. Buying a digital scale and weighing your food, buying a digital scale and weighing yourself, drinking 8 glasses of water every day, telling everybody you know that you are trying to lose weight, and especially planning to diet for a few weeks and then go back to your old ways of eating, simply do not work.

The weight-loss method that works for both the short term and the long term is letting vegetables and fruit fill your stomach and letting someone else you can trust count your calories. Then when you reach your target weight, continue letting someone else do the calorie counting for you, but eating all the low-calorie food you need to fill you up.