However, along the way, you will need measurements to help you monitor how successful you have been.

First, you need to know what NOT to measure...WEIGHT! You'll hear many people exclaim, "I lost 50 pounds!" Weight is not an indication of your healthy lifestyle. It's difficult not to jump on the scale and weigh yourself. It's the American way. But total weight alone doesn't tell the entire story. You need something that measures both your fat and your muscle weight.

It's not your TOTAL WEIGHT that matters, it's the COMPOSITION of your weight that matters. We'll get to this in a moment.

Quick Tip #7: Weight doesn't tell the whole story. You need to understand how much of your total weight is fat and how much is muscle.

Another poor measure of success is total calories. Diets try to keep total calories below a certain amount, usually resulting in some mild level of starvation.. Yes, if you consume fewer calories, you do lose weight, but it's temporary. In a few weeks or months, you will gain it all back again. That's called the yo-yo affect. The reason this happens is that your body lowers the amount of energy it requires if it senses you're lowering your total

calories. It then stores the excess energy as FAT. So the result may be the exactly the opposite of what you intended! In the end, total calories do matter. For example, if in one sitting you eat a bucket of no fat yogurt that contains 2000 calories in one sitting, you will gain fat since those extra calories are converted to fat. But the idea is to NOT starve yourself to lose fat weight.

After all, it doesn't work in the long run since your body self-regulates and lowers your total calorie requirements. More importantly, your focus should be on the COMPOSITION of the calories. Fats, carbohydrates or proteins? By doing so, you automatically regulate your total calories. We'll talk about this in "What you eat."

Quick Tip #8: Counting calories is a poor measure of success. It's a false measure that may eventually result in gaining more weight. Focus on the composition of your calories.

So what is the measure of success? It's called body composition. It sounds complex, but it's rather simple. It's a way of measuring how much of your total weight consists of fat, and how much consists of muscle and bone.