There’s an easy way to lose weight and it’s not going to require you to fork over money for diet pills. You won’t have to attend weekly meetings and weight yourself. You won’t have to swallow potions or shakes or eliminate the food your family enjoys.

The way to lose weight is to diet your way. You know what you like. You know what you don’t like. You know what works for you and you know what doesn’t work for you. When it’s time to employ the use of weight loss tools, the best expert in the world on your body is YOU.

If a friend says you can lose weight and diet and have the same results but the friend’s plan involves getting up at five AM every morning and jogging for three miles but you hate getting up early and hate jogging, that’s obviously not going to work for you.

Don’t try to lose weight with a diet that’s a one size fits all plan. Because it doesn’t. You’re unique and so is your body. Decide what you enjoy doing for exercise. Do you enjoy skating? Riding a bicycle? Then make those activities part of your exercise plan and don’t worry about how everyone else does it.

To lose weight, have your diet your way.

Did you know that the frozen diet meals touted by one well-known weight loss company are packed with high sodium levels and all sorts of chemicals in an attempt to preserve taste and freshness?

Many diet foods aren’t the weight loss tools they’re made out to be - often high in fat, contain too much sugar and some diet food offers the consumer no fiber value at all. Just because the label says ‘diet food’ doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you and worse, it doesn’t mean you’ll lose weight by eating that diet food product.

If you’ll read the diet food labels carefully, you’ll find that some diet foods are actually higher in calories and sugar than regular foods. One popular snack cracker offers both a regular cracker and a reduced fat one.

Both have the exact same numbers on their labels in the area of sodium, fiber, protein, calcium and iron. The only difference is one gram more of sugar in the regular kind. One gram isn’t much difference.

Are all foods that claim to be a diet food bad? No, but you have to pay attention and read the labels to know what you’re gaining or giving up in nutritional value when you choose to purchase a diet food or other edible weight loss tool.

The word diet doesn’t exactly conjure up warm, fuzzy feelings, does it? That’s because we’ve been conditioned through our experiences to know a diet is a bad thing - something we can never quite be successful at no matter how many hoops we jump through and how many weight loss tools we rely on.

And you know what? That’s exactly right.

The reason the word diet brings up feelings of failure is because by now, you realize diets don’t work. They actually end up making you gain weight-just the opposite of the results you’re hoping for. Why don’t diets work?  Because most diets demand too much time, are too complicated or limit you to such a small group of food choices you end up eating the same way you did when you started the diet.

If you want to lose weight successfully, forget about dieting the way you’ve always done it in the past. Dismiss every single rule you’ve learned about a diet, especially the ones about weighing yourself and not having foods that you love.

Say to yourself ‘No food is off limits.’ Instead of diet, focus on the words ‘lifestyle changes’.When you decide you want to lose weight, remember to keep it simple. Make it fit your personal lifestyle and not the other way around. If you have a busy life (and who doesn’t these days?) keep your diet as streamlined as possible.