If you try really hard to diet but don’t lose weight, it’s nearly impossible to stay motivated. Our calorie-intensive society is why this can happen and make traditional diets increasingly ineffective. The availability of so many foods with extreme levels of calories creates misconceptions about what it takes to lose weight and stay slim.

Easy to win, hard to lose. It’s easy to gain pounds, but losing them can take ten times as long. For example, on a long Christmas weekend, you decide to eat whatever you want with the promise that you will seriously diet when the New Year begins. Let’s do the math:

• Long weekend: 4 days for 5,000 calories per day promising “I’ll diet after vacation” = 20,000 calories

• Daily energy expenditure = 80 average calories per hour multiplied by 24 hours = 1,920 calories per day. 1,920 calories per day for 4 days = 7,680 calories burned.

• 20,000 – 7680 = 12,320 calories over what you have burned divided by 3,500 calories per pound = 3.52 pounds gained in 4 days.

To burn off the extra 12,320 calories, you need to eat at least 500 fewer calories per day than you burn. Burning 500 calories per day more than you eat should be the minimum goal; otherwise, losing weight can take a long time. Of course, you’ll lose weight faster if you can burn, say, 1,000 calories per day more than you eat, but for this discussion we’ll set the rate to 500.

At this rate, it will take 24.64 days of dieting just to get back to your “before the 4 day food break” event! And this assuming that you only “eat what you want” for only four days. Many people eat whatever they want for a ten-day period around Christmas time. The math of that amount of extra calorie intake can result in months of necessary dieting.

It’s important to understand this framework because to get and stay lean, you’ll need to learn to navigate every day where you need to eat at least 500 fewer calories than you burn. Now that you know the facts about gaining weight, what can you do to get into a plan where you burn 500 more calories than you eat?

There are many strategies for doing this, discussed in dozens (hundreds) of books from popular online booksellers. One strategy is to prepare all foods ahead of time using 95% or more single-ingredient whole foods, and have all foods cooked with you at all times. This strategy can largely eliminate the need for willpower.

There are only two ways to have food with you all the time:

• cook all your food yourself the day before, -or-

• Join a diet program where your food is suggested and/or prepared.

You’ll find incredible amounts of motivation to stick to your diet when you prepare all the food you’ll need to eat for the next day the night before. This technique alone can make your diet successful! If you can find a way to prepare the right foods ahead of time and always have them with you, you will lose all the weight you want and keep it off.