"You cannot be serious!"  The statement seems as outrageous as John McEnroe's Wimbledon outburst all those years ago. Unfortunately it's true. Diets do make you fat. America spent $35 billion on diets last year and the nation's weight problem got worse not better.

A recent study by psychologists at UCLA in Los Angeles, California found that you can initially lose between 5% â€" 10% of your weight by going on a diet, but then the weight is put back on again, in many cases with interest. These results are worth our attention because they are the result of the analysis of more than 31 long-term studies that followed people on a number of different types of diet. Sustained weight loss was only found to have occurred in a tiny minority of cases. Another study put that tiny minority as low as 1%!

Is the diet industry telling the ‘truth'? Yes it is...up to a point. Diets deliver weight loss, but as the studies prove, it's short term (very short term!) weight loss they deliver. How many of us want short term weight loss? How many of us want to endure the rigours and disruption of a diet only to have all the pounds pile back on again? Anyone who goes on a diet wants permanent weight loss, not short-term weight loss. In this respect, diets are selling us short.

We've developed into a nation of serial dieters. If one diet doesn't work, try another one. It's a never ending cycle. The problem is that serial dieting is bad news. It's bad news primarily because it causes an enormous amount of physical and mental stress. It's a cycle of despair and that's not good. Constantly failing causes a loss of self-esteem and a reduction in self-confidence. The effect on relationships, quality of life â€" and even the nation's state of mind, is probably far greater than we could possibly imagine. Meanwhile the diet industry continues to prosper. Returning customers is good business.

What is the answer to permanent weight loss? Is it about what we eat and how much we eat? To a certain extent it is, but it's fundamentally about learning to change our behaviors. Actually, it's about recognising the behaviors that made us overweight in the first place and then learning new habits. It's about taking charge of our lives and being responsible for our actions. It's about making change and taking responsibility for that change ourselves rather than relying on someone else's idea or plan to do it for us.

Permanent weight loss is an attainable goal for all of us. It's not as difficult as it might appear, but it involves repeating and practicing new habits to hotwire them onto our brain. These habits cover what and how we eat, how we shop, how we exercise and how we behave. It's time to stop passing the buck and take responsibility for our actions â€" and time to ‘get the habit!'