my 1001 diet approaches and what works

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I've tried everything under the book except the new acia berries and i won't try it because the one that's advertiesed is ripping off weight loss photos and claiming them for their own gain. example is one girl who wrote a book, she lost over 200lbs on her own, through diet and exercise and acia is using her photo saying she did it in 2 months using their products. that's a whole other sounding board though. anyway, onto my methods and what works and what doesn't. I've tried counting calories, weight watchers, diet pills, physician supervised diet, hypoglycemic diet, atkins, south beach, the makers diet, sugar busters, mayo clinic diet, grapefruit diet, cabage soup diet, hypnosis, nutritionist, 6 week body make over, power 90, starvation, water fasts, juice fasts, cleansing diets, and they all end up in what i like to call the 4 hour ice cream diet. which is that i start one of these diets and 4 hours later they end in a pint of ice cream. so what works? what is the quick fix? i'll take them one at a time. counting calories and weight watchers works. why? because you are decreasing your food intake by the amount that you need in order to burn more calories. if you pay attention to what is what, you will make better choices in order to have more food. the cons: constant counting. if you are not a chemist, these diets will not appeal to you. especially if you have a family. you have to figure out the entire contents of everything you put into a dish, divide it into servings and figure your calories or points if it is WW. Diet pills and physician supervised diet on diet pills, again it works. i lost 40lbs in 3 months using a rx diet pill while being monitored by my doctor. why did it work? because it decreased my appetite, dehydrated me so i would consume more water and increased my heart rate so i would want to expend energy by exercising. what happend when i got off? i gained the weight back with a vengence! The cons: though the pills worked, my body grew immune to them and some even have addictive properties making it hard to discontinue use. good if you only have a few lbs to drop for a special event. not so good if you are significantly overweight as i now am. fad diets: some of them work. since every body type metabolises food differently, i can't say what will work for you and what won't. atkins, mayo clinic, south beach sugar busters and hypoglycemic diets limit and severly restric your carb intake. if you can manage for the remainder of your life on limited carbs go for it. since i'm addicted to pasta and potatoes, it wasn't for me and of course at the end of the diets, i gained all my weight back and more. infomercial diets: power 90 and 6 week body make over. both of these methods WOULD work. the problem is that they want you to commit to 6 days of exercise which for me is like asking me to pull all of my teeth with no anesthetic. both include diet plans. p90 is a broad across the board works for everybody type diet and exercise plan. they tell you to limit caloric intake to between 1200-1500 per day but if you use their "meal chart" you can pick foods from that and not have to count calories. My husband did it and saw amazing results in the first 30 days. his abs were more defined, his arms were bigger, his chest was great. YUMMY! lol! I on the other hand, lost interest and could not find the time to get the work outs in like i needed to. he would do them right away after work every day. i would wait until late at night because i didn't want anyone to see me. so onto 6 week body makeover. this is the worst diet and exercise plan ever for me. there is way WAY way too much prep work before you start. there are tests to take, diagrams to build, meal charts to plan and then you have to go through a heap of exercises to find the ones to help your body type. again, they say on the infomercial that you only work out like 3 x a week for 20 min but that's the sculpting part. what they don't tell you is that they want you doing 1 hour of cardio every day with 1 resting day. the food is no salt whatsoever so its completely bland and horrible tasting. they do offer support forums and recipes to help you through it. for some it works, for me, i lost interest. onto hypnosis! does this work? well according to my sister who is in college for nursing and has a psychology class--yes. According to her, everyone can be hypnotised, but not every hypnotist can hypnotise every person. understand? if not here's the break down. one voice might hypnotise you but it may not do it for me. so the "think thin" series, was a bomb for me. it did nothing. the mans voice was annoying and for the most part, i fell asleep because the sessions took too long to start. i got an mp3 player out of it though so it wasn't a total loss. so in a nut shell what works?? well again, everyone is different so you will have to feel it out for yourself. limiting to 1500 calories a day is a good start if you are significantly overwieght as i am. if you like prep work, and hate keeping score, then get a calorie king book and figure out what a 300 calorie meal looks like. you can have 3 300 calorie meals per day. and 3 200 calorie snacks. if you do it right, you can have a lot of food in 300 calories. the best way for me, is that i broke out index cards and wrote what i can have at fast food rest and chain rest. that way i know what i can eat before i get ovewhelmed by the menue. another way is that most of the places i like, don't have meals under 400 cals so i find something that is 600-700 cals and ask the waiter to bring half out and box the other half and bring it with the check. it works really. i lost 5lbs in a week while on vacation doing this. the solution to all weight loss problems: diet and exercise.