Dr. William McCarthy: Hi! I'm Dr. William McCarthy from the North of Virginia Area Bariatric Consultants Weight Loss Centre, and today I'm telling you how to overcome weight loss challenges. Now we'll discuss why diets often fail.

Many people try to lose weight for the wrong reasons, they want to quick fix. Many times people just diet because they see a movie star in ad who lost 30 pounds on such and such program. And then they try it and what happens is they fail to understand what went wrong in the past. We need to understand our strengths. Learn our weaknesses; we need to learn about our habits, our lifestyles, what triggers us to eat, how do we respond to stress? Even the basics like glossary shopping.

For one, don't go shopping when you're hungry; make a list before you go. Don't buy snake foods in large multi-serving quantities. What happens, when we bring it home, we have the best intensions, we're going to keep it for company or we're going to keep it for a good while, but we end up eating it all, and don't buy something because it's on sale, and we pass the ice-cream mile and see our favorite ice-cream just two gallons for $5, pass it by, don't be tempted.

Next, we need a better understanding of even the food we eat. We need to learn how to read a food label. Most importantly serving size, many times when we see on the label the serving size, we shock that it's far less than we ever imagine putting in our mouth. Don't be fooled by labels that say low-fat, low-calorie. Many times these are very misleading; you have no idea of what the serving size is, or really what the nutritional content is. We need to learn about carbohydrates, sugar, protein, fat, and especially the bad fats such as Trans fats and other manmade fats, such as hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Often we view our success that we've had in our diet as failure. As a physician I was elated when one of my patients came in and not only lost 20 or 30 pounds but kept it off, unfortunately we take those 20 to 30 pounds for granted when we don't hit our goal that we have preset in our mind, but 20 to 30 pounds can make a dramatic improvement in one's health. A 5% to 10% weight loss may mean not taking a certain blood pressure medication or reduction in insulin dosage or may be even illumination of insulin.

Weight loss doesn't happen overnight, it's the result of unhealthy choices compounded over time. Weight loss is merely the opposite; it's the result of healthier choices over time, so that's why diets often fail.