Many people that want to lose weight have a mindset that they need to diet or eat less. A diet is a period of restriction, suffering, deprivation and a moment to moment battle between willpower and desire. Not something to be recommended as a long term fat loss strategy for life.

Yet the truth of the matter is that at this very moment nearly half of our population is involved in an ongoing struggle with diets and food. You see, dieting as a strategy for losing weight is at best only half the equation. Its focus is on limiting your total food (calorie) intake.

It's got nothing to do with or takes into account the other half of the equation: the energy you use through exercise, movement or your metabolism (the rate your body burns fuel). This is a major flaw of the diet mindset and one of the main reasons why 95% of all diets fail.

Our body needs a minimum amount of energy estimated at between 1500 to 2200 calories a day to perform the metabolic functions of digestion, respiration and circulating the blood. If we consume less than what is needed for these vital processes our body goes into starvation mode, slowing down all its functions to conserve energy.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening; we should be burning more fuel not less if we want to use up stored body fat. We are teaching our body to store fuel as fat and as soon as the diet ends, and it will, our body continues to store more fat anticipating that the famine will continue.

We have known about this for years, this information is available to everyone yet why do so many diet books, diet programs, diet pills, surgery and other so called weight loss aids continue to make millions for the companies that sell them? But we do not need to continue to be misled by them.

The good news is we do not need to starve ourselves to lose excess body fat. Instead, we need to make sure that we eat enough so we have got enough energy to begin and continue to use a proper exercise program to speed up our metabolism naturally. The key - burn more calories (not reduce) than we eat.

Our technology driven lifestyles have removed or eliminated almost every reason to move our bodies and our muscles. If we don't want to get fat we have to replace this lack of movement with an intentional exercise program several days a week. This will keep our metabolic motor running hot burning fuel rather than have it being stored as fat that ends up hanging off our expanding bodies.

The proper exercise program that is needed to reduce levels of body fat contains at least 60% strength training exercise. You will get results from as little as two or three workouts per week, with each session lasting 30-60 minutes. Most people don't think of strength training as a fat burning exercise, but it is now known that the key to body fat loss is raising the metabolic rate and strength training is the only exercise that can do this.

This type of program will jump start your metabolism which will enable your body to burn more fat and in turn create more energy since the burning of calories creates energy. This extra energy is what you can use to power your exercise program.

Muscle tissue is what drives your metabolism, keeps you young and makes you look more physically attractive. Others will notice how good you look, and you will feel better about yourself too. Stick with your program for at least 12 months (ideally for life) and you will be amazed at how you will not only reshape your body but reprogram your metabolism to gobble up every calorie you eat which means no more dieting - EVER!