If you?re one of the approximately 67% of Americans that are wired into the internet, there?s a good chance that sometime in the last 24 hours you?ve received at least one spam email promoting the latest and greatest diet pill or weight loss program. These diet products promise fast weight loss results, often without any effort or exercise. The never-ending promise of a weight loss pill that actually works keeps us hoping for eventual success.

At the same time, we?re continually inundated with news of the most recent diet and how this time it?s really going to work for us. The South Beach Diet, the Zone Diet, the Atkins Diet, the Low Carb Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the LA Weight Loss Diet, the Weight Watchers Diet, the Diabetic Diet, the Low Cholesterol Diet, the Prescription Pill Diet, the 3 Day Diet, the Low Fat Diet, the High Protein Diet, the Maker Diet, the Liquid Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the Fad Diet, the Blood Type Diet, the GI Diet, the Vegetarian Diet, the Vegan Diet, the Detox Diet, the Dash Diet, the Candida Diet, the Gluten Free Diet, the Hollywood Diet, the Negative Calorie Diet, the 1200 Calorie Diet, the Raw Food Diet, the Phentermine Diet, the High Fiber Diet, the Macrobiotic Diet, the Science Diet, the Lemonade Diet, the Scarsdale Diet, the Diverticulitis Diet and the Fat Flush Diet are all examples of diet plans that promise to help us achieve quick weight loss.

Crash diets, weight loss pills and get-thin-quick gimmicks are more prevalent than ever, yet two-thirds of our population is still overweight. Even more startling is the fact that approximately one-third of the people in our country are clinically obese.

With all of these ?solutions? available to us, why is it that obesity trends have been alarming enough to prompt the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) to label obesity a national epidemic? Why are we still, as a nation, getting fatter? It?s certainly not because we?re not trying.

On the contrary, as a nation we?re trying harder than ever to lose fat through diet and other weight loss products. As reported by CNN on 1-14-05 ?Americans were expected to spend more than $40 billion in 2004 on weight control pills, gym memberships, diet plans and related foods, estimates Marketdata Enterprises, which studies the weight loss industry.? Furthermore, statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that 80 percent of overweight individuals and almost 87 percent of obese individuals are trying to lose or maintain their weight.

As reported by mygoals.com, 80 percent of Americans made a New Year?s resolution in 2005. A whopping 26 percent of those resolutions were to improve overall health and fitness, making this the top category for self-improvement. This year was no anomaly, either, according to Amy O'Connor, deputy editor of Prevention magazine: "Fifty-nine million people every year resolve to lose weight."

So, is there a healthy diet product out there that will actually work? More than likely, the answer is yes. Although there is quite a bit of fraudulent weight loss merchandise on the market today, there is also (somewhere out there) a diet program and weight loss plan that will work for us. The challenge is to find that diet product or diet plan.

Repeat Business

The diet and weight loss industry is a huge money making machine. According to Marketdata Enterprises, the annual revenue for the diet industry was over $30 billion dollars in 1990. A 2005 report by Stanford University documents that the consumer diet industry is now approximately $44 billion and growing. With all this money flowing around, haven?t we as a country spent enough to fix the obesity problem once and for all?

How can the diet industry keep making more and more money, year after year? After all, $44 billion dollars is a lot of cash! The answer to that question is simple: repeat business. ?98% of today?s dieters gain the weight back in 5 years. 90% of those individuals end up gaining back more than they lost originally, due to the body?s panic and efforts to stabilize metabolic rates over the long term? (Source: Stanford University; stanford.edu).

How do the diet-promoters get all that repeat business? The diet industry is a very unique enterprise in that, when it fails someone, they rarely blame the product. We are hard-pressed to find another business where, if the product doesn?t work, we blame ourselves. All too often, after giving up on yet another diet program, we find ourselves thinking ?Well, I guess I?m just not a good enough dieter.? The tendency is for us to believe that we failed the diet rather than the other way around.

Apply this same logic to the automotive industry, and it soon becomes clear just how faulty this line of reasoning really is. What would happen if we take our car in to the mechanic for repairs and when we returned to pick it up he told us that although we still had to pay the bill, he was unable to fix the problem? Would we willing pay the bill anyway and just say ?Oh well, I guess it?s just a bad car?? Of course not! That would be ridiculous! But that?s exactly what we do when it comes to diets.