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Don’t dispair if you are one of millions of dieters who have achieved weight loss success only to gain it all back, then repeat the cycle over and over again year after year.

Yo-yo dieting, as it is called, has been blamed for ruining metabolism and making it impossible for some to achieve real and permanent weight loss, however, a new study finds that this old wisdom may not be true.

The key to success is to keep a food journal and aim for healthy eating and exercise habits.

Weigh yourself weekly and don’t skip meals.

Being accountable to friends, family, doctor or trainers help.

Keeping a food and exercise journal keeps you accountable if only to yourself.

At the end of the study, which lasted a full year, researchers found something that they weren’t expecting: The yo-yo dieters fared just as well as the non-yo-yo dieters. There was no significant difference seen in the effect of diet or exercise, body fat percentage or lean muscle mass gained or lost.
“I was very surprised. People who have a history of weight cycling by definition have problems with lifestyle change for weight loss because they gain the weight back again,” McTiernan says. “I was surprised to find that, while many of them weighed more than the non-cyclers, they did just as well at losing weight with our lifestyle-change weight program as did women who did not have a weight cycling history.”

Does eating late make you gain weight?

There are those who would say that calories are calories and as long as you don’t consume more than you use then you won’t gain weight.

But the research has shown that it is a bit more complicated than that.

There are optimal times for our body to burn fat and one is at night.

New studies reveal that to burn the most fat, you need to go 12 hours without eating—say, from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. So it’s smart to time your calorie intake accordingly.

You’re most likely to make healthy food choices when you’re not tired.

Choose nutritious foods and don’t eat when it’s dark outside.

Pretty simple.

The most common weight loss mistakes go against everything we’ve learned about losing weight.

Calories in-calories out, exercise and restriction seem like perfectly reasonable ways to shed unwanted pounds; but that is not the whole story.

Running for hours on the treadmill and eating too few calories could be sabotaging your efforts.

A prolonged calorie deficit causes your metabolism to slow.

This is a survival instinct to prevent you from losing weight in times of famine.

When you do lose weight, you’ll be losing both fat and muscle.

This further slows your metabolism.