The diet industry alone is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business. Hundreds of books and thousands of e-books are published each year, promising the answers to all your questions. They claim to have the diet that will change your life and get you to an ideal weight in no time. The major problem with many of these diets is that they are not sustainable. You cannot continue the diet they offer for an extended period of time, leaving you confused and helpless when you step away from it. If you think about it, the diet industry wants this to happen and is willing to pay big dollars to ensure that it does. Because if you found the perfect diet that was actually sustainable, you would eat less overall and never have to buy another diet book again. Since food publishers sell books and food companies sell “diet foods,” they cannot afford any miracle diet that changes people’s lives forever.

This in turn, is why people will lose weight, gain it back, lose it again and gain it back again, over and over and over. This vicious cycle continues time after time, until you just give up and learn to live with all that extra weight you’d rather shed. The funny thing is, the answer really is simple and right in front of you. We had the answer hundreds of years ago, but somewhere in the last 30 years we completely lost sight of it. The answer went from being simple to extremely complex, completely confusing a relatively simple topic along the way.  Here are a few, easy-to-follow rules for you to make for yourself.  If you stick to them, you’ll surely be on a better path and find yourself a whole lot less confused.

It’s Not a Diet

I hate saying the word diet, just because people associate it with a method of weight loss. In truth, Webster’s Dictionary describes a diet as, “the kinds of food that a person habitually eats.” You can see where we become so confused. If these “diets” that we go on are supposed to be short-term fixes and a proper diet is habitual, it is a bit of an oxymoron. The first thing you have to do is change the meaning of the word “diet” for you. It now needs to be a habitual way you eat that can be sustained from now until forever. The best diet is actually the furthest thing from what we think of as a traditional diet. The best diet is simply the way you eat.

It’s Not Fat, It’s Worse

Somewhere in the last 30 years, America has developed this obsession with fat. The idea that fat makes us fat sparked this craze to cut the natural fat out of foods. In turn, the food industry started making up for the lost flavor by adding sugar to foods. Not your regular old table sugar mind you (which still isn’t recommended), but instead sugars like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Our food’s sugar content has skyrocketed dramatically, which has a lot of negative effects on the body. Sugar spikes blood-sugar levels, which in turn spikes insulin, causing the body to deliver nutrients we eat to the places we don’t want them to go. The sugar put in foods in order to reduce fat content actually gets stored in the body as fat in the long run. Basically, we’ve been fooled.

Make a rule for yourself that you will drastically reduce the amount of sugar you eat that does not come from fruits and vegetables. Doing this will automatically put you in a better position to lose weight.

Be Aware

Paying attention to how much sugar you eat comes down to you looking at a food label for how much is in each item. Just being aware of what is in the foods you are picking from the grocery store is a key step if you’re trying to start to lose weight. It’s heartening to know that the food industry is finally starting to make foods that are better for us, but they’re still putting them right next to foods that are terrible, so vigilence is key.

Simply looking at the nutritional facts of all the options of a specific type of food will make a huge difference. If you notice that one brand is 400 calories per serving and the other is 300, make the choice for the brand with 300 calories. I found some bagels the other day that have a very similar taste but are completely different. While one had over 50 carbs and nearly no fiber the other had only 19 cabs with 9 grams of fiber. The decision to go with the latter will make a huge difference in your ability to lose weight.

Please just compare the nutritional facts of the foods you are looking at.

Avoid Being Labeled

While I just told you to look at the labels of the foods you are buying, the best types of foods come with no labels at all. Making fresh fruits and vegetables your main food choices takes all the pressure off of you because just about every single time they are far supreme to any packaged foods. Think about it, the bonus of eating fruits and vegetables is that you can eat a lot more throughout the day than if you eat packaged foods. More nutrients, less calories doesn’t sound too bad to me.

Avoid The Hype

Food companies are equally as large (if not larger now) than any car company out there in terms of profits. They spend billions on research and basically know exactly where the trends are heading. Once we started to recognize as a whole that tans fat’s were no good for us, they stopped putting it in our food. Then they started making sure that we could easily see that their foods don’t have trans fats.

Even foods that never had trans fat in them were labeled “Trans Fat: 0″  to make sure that you could see they were a trans fat free product. The same is now happening with the likes of HFCS, Omega-3’s and fiber. Just about any food you see now has some form of nutritional reinforcement right on the label. While 20 years before we would never see on the front of the box that a cereal had fiber in it, now companies rush to show us how much it has.

When it comes down to it, many of these companies are doing this as a way to trick you into thinking their product is healthy. I recent heard that Golden Grams is going to begin an ad campaign claiming to be a cheap, healthy snack. Really? Sure  Golden Grams are cheap but how in the world are they healthy? The will likely claim that they have a few servings of whole grains.

If companies have to tell you that their food is good for you by flashing a graphic at you chances are it is not. Don’t buy into the food just because it say’s it has some Omeg-3’s or fiber in it.

Remember that your diet should not actually be a diet but more of a way of life. One of the worst things you can do is to actually go on a “diet.” Learn to make some simple adjustments and eat the foods that our grandparents were eating when they were younger. Just 30 years ago when obesity and diabetes was not much of a concern at all. Our bodies chemistry hasn’t changed at all, our food has. People weren’t worried about being on a diet or eating certain types of “low-carb” or “low-fat” diets, if they needed to lose weight they just ate less. Now with there being about 50,000 products in your average grocery store you need to start paying attention. If you know people who are in their 70’s and 80’s ask them what they ate when they were kids. I bet if you follow that diet you will be alright.