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choose from that can be effective in jump-starting your healthy lifestyle change. Among them are:
Peer group diets (e.g., Weight Watchers)
Prepared food diets (e.g., Jenny Craig)
Programmed eating diets (e.g., Atkins, the Zone)
Appetite suppressants (medication)
Surgical intervention (e.g., stomach stapling, banding)
    Regardless of how any individual chooses to jump-start a weight-loss program, though, there are three things on which every doctor, nutritionist, health professional, and diet guru agree, and those three principles are what ultimately are working for me, long term. As far as I’m concerned, they comprise the only fail-safe diet in the world, the only one that works for most of us, and for the long run.
    Are you ready? Write this down. Magic words.

    Portion control
    Nutritional balance
    Exercise

    Simple as that. Eat less. Eat right. Move more. In this country, we’ll do almost anything to lose weight. I know someone who bought a bristle brush that would help her scrub away cellulite, and someone else who wore her magic weight-loss earrings everywhere: granted, these women aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, but when you’re desperate—hey, you’ll try anything. But I, for one, am pretty fed up with diet crazes. You can take any diet on the planet—the low-carb diet, the high-carb diet, the South Beach Diet, the Scarsdale diet, the Weight Watchers diet, the Zone diet, the Three-Hour diet, the Dr. Perricone diet, the Atkins diet (Atkins Nutritionals filed for bankruptcy in August 2005), the French woman’s diet, the ice cream diet, the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet (that’s right— cabbage soup diet ): you name it, it exists. Think about this statistic: 95 percent of all dieters will regain their lost weight in one to five years. No surprises here: If any one of these really worked, why in the world would we be looking for yet another diet book? Wouldn’t we all be on the same diet if it worked?
    Rebecca Blake, MS, RD, CDN, is the senior dietician/nutritionist in the Department of Clinical Nutrition in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She also runs the weight-loss program “Winning by Losing” at the fitness center in the famous 92nd Street Y in New York City, and she maintains a private nutrition counseling service. I’d say she knows a little about weight-loss plans that work.
    “Portion control,” says Rebecca, “is the major key to weight loss and its long-term maintenance. If you want to lose weight, you must not allow yourself unlimited portions of anything —except perhaps water. A diet like Atkins that promisesyou can eat as much as you want of X, Y, or Z is never optimal or beneficial for long-term weight loss. Weight loss is about achieving a calorie deficit, and, as Star says, that’s achieved primarily through portion control. Period. The way you arrange for portion control is to consume fewer calories than you will burn by exercise. That ice cream diet, steak diet, bacon diet, cashew diet, or even cauliflower diet—whatever the promised ‘miracle’ food is this month—will never work long term because if you take too many calories in of any of these low-, high-, or no-carb foods, low-, high-, or no-fat foods, you will gain weight—that I promise.
    “Still, I try not to even use the word diet when counseling my patients because it connotes hunger, deprivation, and other nasty things,” says Rebecca. “Can you ever eat ice cream when you’re on a weight-loss plan? Yes. What about that cupcake? Of course. You can eat everything in a healthy, balanced diet—the question is always, how much will you eat? That’s portion control.”
    I’ll say it again.

    Portion control
    Nutritional balance
    Exercise

    I had medical help starting my weight-loss effort but only discipline and these three elements will lead to my permanent healthy living. It works and it continues working. My guess is that it’ll work for you. Of course, I can and will give you some of