I’ve never been much for gyms. Which is a shame, since the guy in the mirror told me I needed to drop a few marginal pounds that weren’t there last year.

Weight loss has become big business in this country, and people are constantly on the lookout for the weight loss “trick” that will help them to achieve success in meeting their goals.

Metabolism is essentially the speed at which our body's motor is running. The speed at which our body burns calories is called the metabolic rate. It's how fast your "motor" is running when you're still in a reclined position or sleeping.

We learned about the food pyramid in school, in the form of a diagram showing a pyramid with little images of milk jugs and loaves of bread floating about. It told us how many servings of each food group we needed to eat each day for a balanced diet, usually presented with little drawing of loaves of bread and glass bottles of milk.

The new conventional wisdom of losing weight is to eat five or six healthy but smaller meals per day instead of the three squares we are used to eating. By spacing these meals two to three hours apart, and by making sure each meal offers a balance of protein, complex carbohydrates and good fats, the body undergoes a metabolic shift that results in quicker and easier weight loss and a more efficient weight management challenge going forward.

If you have read about some of the latest fitness and diet crazes, your answer to this question might be yes. According to many diet gurus today, the secret to a speedier metabolism and subsequent weight loss may be as close as their latest books or DVD’s.

When you embark on a diet or exercise program, your goal, of course, is to lose weight. But what most dieters don’t realize is that even by following their plan exactly, they are likely to experience plateaus.

Millions of overweight people start a new diet every week not realizing 99% of them will end up heavier than they are now. Learn how to successfully lose weight.

Things have certainly changed when it comes to what we believe about fat calories. It wasn’t all that long ago that fats were considered the primary cause of all our weight problems and heart risks.

It may sound like the latest diet fad, but it’s anything but that. The new science of losing weight has hit the streets, and it flies in the face of everything our mothers taught us about three square meals a day.