FINALLY A DIET THAT WORKS

There are a lot of diets out there.  In fact, if you are ever googling most anything you will see ads for "magic diet drops", "fat blockers", "this one secret that will help you lose belly fat", "build lean muscle - shed fat", "transform your body in 30 days", "sleep yourself thin" just to name a few.  You might have heard of some of the fads that have swept the nation.  We are gullible aren't we?  In our quest to lose weight, stave off aging, feel better about the way we fit into our clothes and look, we will try some seemingly crazy methods to get there.  Maybe there is a bit of a double standard between men and women, but men want to be thinner too.  Remember the Cabbage Soup Diet?  It was some mixture of cabbage, tomatoes, and celery in water.  After cooking up a kettle full - enough for the entire week - you ate it 3 times a day. So practical!  How about the Atkins Diet that allowed you to eat high fat protein only meals?  You could gorge yourself on all the protein your digestive system could hold - which wasn't much without the fiber we need to push it through!  Men especially loved that diet - meat, meat, meat!  What about the Zone Diet which was about percentages of carbohydrates and protein and fat in certain combinations?  It seemed like you needed a timer and a math degree to figure it out.  Then there was the Raw Food Diet.  The premise being that you eat only foods in their raw state - nothing processed. Once in awhile I like a cooked pork chop!   It's probably a clean way to eat, but wow!  And finally, the Starvation Diet, designed to provide you with just enough calories to sustain your life but keep you slightly undernourished - which is said to help extend your life span.  I have seen a few who held to that way of living....they looked like the living dead.  I love exercise.  I love the way I feel after doing it, while I'm doing and believe it or not, thinking about doing it:)  It takes exercise to lose weight and it takes eating moderately (yes even dessert can be eaten - just not the entire pie!).  Hormones in the bodies, collagen in the skin fill out our skin, plumping us up a bit.  Look at pictures of people in their 20's opposed to people in their 40's through 80's. I don't know if it's the loss of hormones, eating less, illness, cells dying in our bodies, but old age usually brings some measure of thinning down.  My middle sister was complaining about the plumpness to her body that she doesn't want or like.  I told her to just ride the wave, "Skinniness is coming Dinah...at about 80 years old!"   "That," I told her, "is the only diet that really works - getting old!".  I'm wondering though if we will really care about that by then?  Hand me some chips please :)