With many diet plans focusing strictly on cutting pounds there seems to be a willingness of many strategies to ignore the idea of healthy weight loss. Healthy weight loss is the idea that the ultimate success of a diet plan is not a matter only of what a scale says but how we feel. Eating nothing but pine nuts for a month and losing 15 pounds is not successful if over the next month we never look at another pine nut and gain 20 pounds on pizza. In other words for any diet to be considered anything but failure it must enable us to develop healthy habits that we maintain over time.

Healthy weight loss is not any defined prescription of food or exercise but the notion that only by developing healthy habits and lifestyle choices can we achieve our health goals. Diets work as long as we enjoy them but for many people sticking to a strict regime for any length of time is extremely difficult. The notion of healthy weight loss rejects the need for strict diets, instead suggesting we focus on what elements of particular diets work for each of us. Granted this strategy will not be effective if you are looking to jump headfirst into the latest diet craze, drop ten pounds in a week, and then gain back double that. What it will do is provide a framework for a lifetime of healthy living habits that are not only effective but more importantly sustainable.