For the first time you realized that eventually you are a bit to small for your weight, you might have thought with horror: "Oh my God! Now it's diet time. Yuck! Crispbread and water everyday for weeks without anything real to eat. Ugh!"

It doesn't have to be that way!

Fact is, there are thousands of diets - effective diets and useless diets. Some are even dangerous. But the most effective diets are those, where you don't have to starve and which are not unbalanced - at least in the long run.

I said "in the long run" because a usual diet is quite pointless, if you intend to keep your weight after a diet. Let's look closer at a typical diet scenario:

Step 1: You realize that you're overweight

Step 2: You decide to diet

Step 3: You choose a diet

Step 4: You adhere rigidly to the diet

Step 5: You have some success (or not)

Step 6: You stop the diet and eat as usual

Step 7: After some time you'll reach step 1 again

Does this make any sense?

I hope you answer with a loud and clear: NO!

This cycle has got his own name, which makes everyone struggling with overweight shudder:

yoyo effect

You only can avoid this, if you don't make a crash diet for some weeks but completely switch to a more healthy and balanced diet forever - and eventually change some habits. This hasn't to be mandatory awkward.

If you look at the recipes of the Hay diet or the method of Montignac, you'll certainly think, that this can't be a diet. They're tasty and you don't need to be hungry. And both methods are very effective. By the way: they don't differ as much as their follower claim.

In principle the Atkins diet is quite similar. If you look at the recipes, you wonder how anyone can lose weight this way. It's high in protein and the fat content doesn't matter. But many studies have proven the effectiveness of this diet.