I was thinking about diets and such and it occurred to me that dieting is kind of like sports, but one way in which dieting differs from sports competition is that in dieting there seems to be a lack of gradualization in the preparation.

What I'm getting at is that if you want to run the 100 metres pretty fast, even competitively, you don't just go out to the track and put in a full practice right off the bat. I mean it's just not do-able really, is it? You've got to prepare and train in a systematic way which allows you to get stronger and faster throughout the training, and that can takes months if not, more realistically, years.

Well we all know that, we've all seen the "up close and personal" sports profiles, we all know that it's a long road to the podium, BUT somehow we have all got this belief that the "thirty day diet" will work! And why not, all we have to do is stop eating or at least reduce our intake to about twenty five percent and we're home free. "That sounds like fun! Why didn't I think of that?" But how long will it last?

Now let me clarify, I'm not dumping on the many diets out there that will produce a result, what I am getting at is the fact that you need to combine your diet with thoughtful preparation, you need a plan, you need a horizon greater than obtaining a transitory result in thirty days. It's a bit like the folks strapped to the bike machine in the gym, they put their heart and soul into working those legs in an effort to shed the pounds and then they get off with thighs pumped like an Olympic ice-skate racer. I mean you