Dieting is a pain. I think basically everyone would agree that having to adhere to a rigid restriction of your free-flow eating preferences puts a bit of a damper on the whole food experience. And eating should be one of the pleasures of life, right?

In my online diet and weight loss counseling service, I try to get around that big negative by blowing the doors off the conventional diet box. What we need to do here is make what is good for you TASTE GOOD TO YOU.

If you think about it, most of what is not good for you is basically made appetizing with loads of sauces, dips, dressing, salsa or salt and flavour enhancers. So its really just the sauce that tastes great. Dont believe me? Try a burger with no mayo, no ketchup and no salt. Well maybe you still like the burger but my point is, we can make anything taste great with a little dressing, so how about doing that instead, with the good for you foods.

Now, one of the interesting things is that quite a lot of the good foods taste great with very little dressing, so we get an easy win there, no hardship involved. For the rest, we just get a little creative and, as an example of a really simple recipe that yields up the sweetest peppers ever, have a look at the recipe my wife has posted on my website www.gordonblack.com. Just click right there on the first page, and if you try it , e-mail me with your comments; I think its almost like eating candy.

So which are the good foods? Well, I think you can be pretty confident over in the fruit and vegetable area, there is not much there that can do damage to our weight management program; and what tastes better than a really ripe tomato, or papaya or mango?

Fish, shellfish, pasta, yes, pasta is in my plan big-time and with loads of real tomato sauce which means no cans, no jars, no production, no additives, preservatives and chemicals with names we cant even pronounce. Instead we just go with some garlic cloves, some olive oil and some tomatoes and you can even use some salt! In my diet plan we eat a lot, but its WHAT we eat that counts.

Now, at the start I titled this article, Trade In Your Diet For A Lifestyle, and youre probably thinking, wheres the lifestyle part? Well, here it is. You can eat loads of goodies as long as you make a corresponding investment in some form of exercise. Its like a balancing act, as much as you load up one side, you have to balance it out with the other, and in this case the other is the regular exercise. Regular is the operative word, it must be regular even though it doesnt have to be those exhausting burn off the pounds sessions I see so often. Just regular, consistent exercise with something you hopefully like doing, walking, cycling, swimming, golfing and if you really enjoy aerobics, thats fine too.

So its really all about balance, and the freedom to eat as you wish, as long as you stay with the good foods, balanced out with that regular exercise. I think the trade-off is very liberating and certainly worth it.