The way to lose weight is to change your habits. Those things you do every day that - until now - got you to the overweight condition you may be in (assumed because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this article).

To become thin you must adopt these four habits and do them every day, seven days per week:

1. Cook all your food yourself, in your own kitchen, the night before for the entire next day. Then keep your food with you always, even if you must go to a party or other event where food will be served. As drastic as this sounds, it is absolutely necessary because you must control calories, and food you have not cooked is food with unknown calories.

2. Don't eat any food you haven't planned, calculated the calories in, and cooked yourself. In other words, no "cheating." Cooking all your food and keeping it with you will make this easy to do, and will remove the need for will power.

3. Exercise. You've heard this before and it's a boring diet suggestion, but you've heard it so often because if you are to become thin in your lifetime exercise is absolutely necessary. Running is the most effective, cheapest, fastest and simplest exercise to incorporate into your life regardless of the claims of any infomercial selling exercise programs or contraptions.

4. Meditate. Visualize your thin body daily. Create a goal image of yourself. This can be in the form of an old photo of a thin you, or literally your head pasted on the body of a thin person. Then identify clothes that are too small that you want to fit in - your "goal clothes. Visualize yourself in your goal clothes with your goal image of your head on your perfect body every day. For a recording that will help, search Google for diet motivation secrets mental training MP3.

Do these four simple tasks every day and record your performance on calendars. Every day, seven days a week, do the four tasks or Rules above then make a / |or – mark for each of the four tasks completed. The tasks are simple and won't take much time. These tasks are very, very do-able by anyone.

WHY CALENDARS?

If you are overweight, you are carrying around extra body fat that is the result of your past behaviors. Using calendars to record your behavior in the opposite direction has many psychologically motivating advantages. You can see the effort (or lack of effort) you are putting toward your goal to become thin. You can also use the visual image of your recorded calendar accomplishments as a motivator to not cheat. The calendar shows your daily weight loss accomplishments as opposed to your body fat which has "recorded" your weight gain "accomplishments." By using calendars you provide yourself with a visual record that grows just as your body size grew as you gained weight. This provides balance in your subconscious and changes the concept of dieting from an act that is "taking away" to an act that is building new habits into your life - a healthy, thin and in-shape you. Marking these four tasks on a calendar makes dieting constructive - not destructive. Without using a constructive instrument like the calendar, we tend to think of dieting in negative terms such as deprivation, denial, struggle and effort. Without the constructive mental picture of what you have accomplished it is more difficult to stay motivated to lose weight. This calendar method is so effective that you may find yourself applying the principle to other goals in your life.

TODAY, RIGHT NOW, IS YOUR FIRST DAY.

Note what the date is today. The day that you are reading this - today - should be a day that has no other significance in your life. It should not be your birthday and should not be a holiday. It especially should not be January 1 of any year unless you happen to be reading these sentences on January 1 which is unlikely. Why? Because starting a diet on some special day in the future gives you an excuse to procrastinate - to put off starting. It also will make it more difficult to stay on the diet program because we tend to allow ourselves to fail at goals started on days of significance. The day to start should be a random day like today. And because you've read these words you must start immediately and therefore cannot "gorge" yourself with food before you start your diet. You have started your diet now. If you "pig out" for even a day you can expect your weight loss to take an average of two weeks longer than if you start immediately.

PUT FOUR MONTHS WORTH OF CALENDARS ON THE WALL

Get some form of heavy pen or black marker and note today's date on the calendar. Circle the day and write "First Day" on the square for today. Next, fasten your calendar on the wall in a place you will see it often - that is, some place you walk by regularly. This is extremely important, because the calendar is going to be in your thoughts a lot in the coming days and weeks.

The calendar is the foundation of your resolve to change your life and it is therefore extremely important that seeing the calendar pages and the accomplishments of the four Rules above is "woven" into your everyday activities - every single day. The calendar continuously communicates not only what you've accomplished but what you plan to accomplish, how far you intend to go and how fast you are getting there. Your past successes will motivate you to do even better in the future, and your resolve to do better in the future will lead to more successes. Therefore, make the calendar as noticeable, eye-catching and prominent in your home as possible.

Unless you continuously measure the calories you eat by cooking your own food and the calories you burn by exercising you will keep struggling and yo-yo dieting. Unless you follow a plan such as the calendar method described here and do so without ever cheating even one single day you will not become thin and you will not know why. Cheating and not following the four rules even one day stops weight loss causing you to have to start over. Calendars are absolutely essential to developing diet motivation.