Before you even think about going on a plan or a diet or an exercise program you've got to get clear on your end goal. Most people have a target to lose a certain amount of pounds or to lose some belly fat within a certain time frame. This is not a good way to set your goals.

In fact it sets you up to fail from the beginning for a number of reasons. One of the most crucial reasons is because if you're setting a goal like that, you clearly don't understand the crucial difference between weight and fat.

Don't feel bad - cause most people are in the same boat. In fact, they think they want to lose weight when really they want to lose fat. One of the biggest reasons why people fail in the medium or long term to lose weight in a healthy way is because they don't know this difference.

So let's get clear about this tip:

Weight is not the same thing as fat.

Weight is the amount you weigh, which is made up of fat, plus muscle, water content and all the other parts of your body. So you see, fat is a part of weight. And even though you might have been searching for 'weight loss' when you found this site, I'm pretty sure you really wanted to lose fat.

And that's an area where most diets go wrong.

Most of them focus on depriving yourself of calories - not caring whether those were good or bad calories. But your body cares about this difference. You see, if you don't get enough nutrients, your body will utilize the stores it has kept. Once those stores are depleted, the body has to break down muscle tissue to get the energy and nutrients it needs.

Now this is a major problem. That's because muscle is vital to having a quicker metabolism. In fact, muscle is approximately four times more metabolically active than body fat. You see, 3 extra pounds of lean muscle burns about 10,000 extra calories a month, even if you lay in bed all day. That's right; muscle burns fat even when you're doing nothing at all. That's why it's so important to a permanent fat loss system.

So starving yourself, and causing the breakdown of muscle works against your objective. It will actually accelerate the slowdown of your metabolism rate.

That's why you never want to lose weight without knowing what you are losing - and you definitely don't want to plan to do so. You want to make sure that you are losing fat and not muscle. As an aside you also want to make sure that your weight loss is not due to you losing water. Drinking enough water is very important for long term weight loss and for health.

So a healthy lifestyle is quite important to losing weight permanently. But don't get me wrong here - it doesn't necessarily mean you have to become vegetarian or start eating organic food or something that drastic. Visit the diet section for more information on what is recommended for both your body and your sanity (if you don't want to eat greens all day).