The Best Diet: 15 Things to look for and avoid

1. The best diet has a sensible long-term focus to increase the quality of your health.
2. A regular exercise program. The only people who keep the weight off are those who add exercise to their life. Gyms are a good place to start, but lifestyle sports are the best.
3. Balanced nutrition that follows the Food Guide Pyramid. All the experts agree, including: nutritionists, a vast majority of doctors, the American Dietetic Association, the American Heart Association, the USDA, and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
4. Avoid food specific diets. They are unhealthy and purely focus on the short term.
5. The best diet accepts the fact dieting is difficult and has a plan to deal with that fact. All successful long-term dieters will tell you that.
6. The best diet is simple. Avoid technical jargon and lessons of "new" science. The basics haven't changed.
7. Avoid diets that are sold with a slick marketing campaigns.
8. Avoid diets that rely on an obvious gimmick.
9. Avoid diets that appeal to your desperation.
10. Avoid diets that seem too good to be true. They probably are.
11. Avoid diet pills. They only work long-term if you take them indefinitely. Which is not good, considering the worst aspect of diet pills are the side-effects, which are at best, unpleasant, at worst, deadly. They are a bottomless black hole marketing campaign that eventually lead to dependence on "maintaining" and "wellness" supplements.
12. Avoid any program that has a constant stream of upgrades and backend products. Ask yourself, is this a product I am going to have to continually repurchase in order to maintain my weight loss? If the answer is yes, don't do it.
13. Avoid being swayed by before-and-after photographs. All known diets are going to have enough people who ate less and exercised more and will have lots of samples to show you.
14. Avoid diets that appeal to your vanity. "You'll look great and turn everyone's head." Lose weight to be healthy and to enjoy exercise more. Looking great will take care of itself.
15. The best diet provides motivation and deals with your mental demons. That's the really tough part for most people.