Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the nutrition

Divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous. It's January and that

means everyone's on a diet.

Losing weight is the most popular New Year's resolution.

In fact, it's so popular that many of us make it every year,

because chances are good that last year's resolution or diet

eventually failed. How can we work so hard and often at weight loss and yet never succeed?

I think the problem is that we go about losing weight all wrong and today I've got three of the most common myths and misperceptions about weight loss.

Myth number two, faster is better. Most people think that the best diet is the one that produces the fastest weight loss.

They want to get the dieting part over with as quickly as possible.

Why spend six months losing 10 pounds if you could lose it in just two weeks?

I'll tell you why.

Because losing weight that quickly

virtually guarantees failure. Rapid weight loss creates long-term

hormonal and metabolic changes in your body that make it extremely difficult

for you to maintain that hard-won weight loss. Let's say for example that Mary and Sue

both weigh 130 pounds.

Mary has been about the same weight since college.

Sue, on the other hand, has just lost 50 pounds on a crash diet.

Both women are now maintaining their current weight, but in order to do that, Sue, our crash dieter, has to exercise twice as much and eat 15% less than Mary for the rest of her life.

It's horribly unfair, but true.

If you want to spend the rest of your life battling your weight,

...