There is, for healthy people, one way to get slim and stay that way. You have to make sure your energy output is greater than your energy intake. In other words, you have to exert more calories (food energy) than calories you take in (food intake). And you have to develop a lifestyle that keeps these energy ledgers in balance.

And of course, the most well known way to decrease you intake is by denying yourself food of various types, This usually means eating raw vegetables, fat-free milk, rice cakes, and other things no self-respecting human would choose to eat on their own. Then do this until you get to the weigh you want.

The other option is to exercise until you drop, day after day, exerting huge amounts of energy and only replacing it with moderate amounts of energy from moderate amounts of foods you really love.

However, there are problems with either of these approaches.

Most people derive a great deal of pleasure from eating and no one is really interested in sitting down to a hearty meal of lettuce, raw carrots, and cucumbers with a fat free dressing. We want something that tastes good, has texture and is, well, enjoyable.

And if you need slimming down, its probably because you have not been that active to begin with. The idea of intense physical exertion, day after day, with no perceptible short term results is, at its very best, discouraging, making the effort to exercise, to inflict pain on yourself, even more difficult to commit to.

One of the facts of life you have to accept is that most changes dont happen overnight. They take time and by implication, persistence. Slimming down is no different.

The first necessity in successfully slimming down is to drop the expectation of massive and sudden weight loss. Understand that any meaningful loss will be over a period of months, not days or weeks.

Once your mind is in the right place, you then have to approach both eating and exercise with a realistic set of goals. Just as you shouldnt try to go from professional couch potato to triathlon, neither should you go from sumptuous dining to eating less than a mouse. For starters, neither of those options is very good for your body. Secondly, you will simply frustrate yourself when you ail to maintain the unreasonable standards you set for yourself.

As with most things in life, moderation will prove to be the key. A regular, but not strenuous exercise program (you could start with walking around the block every morning) and foods with a low glycemic index, over a period of months will do more to help you shed weight than a stop and go pattern of extreme dieting and exercise. And it will be a lot less frustrating.