It's the end of my fourth week and I am straying a little from my ediet plan.  I think it's mostly mental fatigue of feeling like I am giving up things I like (such as chocolate chip cookies or beer) and the initial pop of weight loss that comes from moving from a mostly sedentary life to a more active lifestyle has started to cool a bit. 
      In general, I am pretty practical and logical.  Our society makes weight loss and looking good seem like some mystical and magical thing.  Have you ever wondered why you walk through the grocery checkout aisle and seen a rack full of magazines with titles such as "Lose 15 Pounds for Spring by Eating Chocolate" or "The 3 Best Ab Exercises."  This follows having spent 30 minutes to an hour being bombarded by cheaper, more accessible foods that are anything but healthy for you.  The grocery stores are not stupid, they win when you buy the cookies that are on sale and they win when you buy the magazine that is marked up 50%.  My philosophy is that being able to have guidance that continually encourages the right behavior by suggesting the right things to you (especially when you are hungry and when you are shopping), gives you emotional rewards for doing well or punishment for doing poorly (tracks your progress easily), and is easy to access and implement is the path to not just losing weight, but living a healthy lifestyle. 
     Media is more and more powerful in that it has increased in quantity and accuracy of targeting.  Companies know more about you today.  You use a credit card, the internet, take surveys, or buy products with bar codes don't you?  All this information allows companies, pr firms, and marketing agencies to identify our emotional and psychological weaknesses and prey on them.  If we understand this, then we can also use these amazing tools to get information that moves us toward the goals we have deep within ourselves - like being in great shape. 
       The word "diet" has two meanings in our society: 1. to lose weight, 2. the collection of choices we make in selecting food for ourselves.  Definition 2 is an explaination of our lifestyle choices whereas definition number 1 indicates a short term process and encourages the roller-coaster effect of losing and re-gaining weight.  The focus of my diet and the reason I selected the eDiets plan is simply that it asks for my target weight and helps me get there, but it gives me an updated weekly plan based on my weigh-in results that either limits or allows me to eat more food.  This plan can be something that is put into a healthly lifestyle plan and not just a temporary weight loss program like the grapefruit diet or whatever other plans people try.  Do you really want to lose weight only to gain it back because you don't want to eat grapefruit every day for the rest of your life?  My message today is simple:  eat less calories than you burn and you will lose weight.  Use tools that allow reasonable choices in order to lose the weight so you don't have to lose the weight 10 more times in your life because you keep choosing short term solutions.  Is eDiets the perfect plan? -  No, I am not saying that, but I am saying that it provides flexibility, good suggestions, easy access to information, and a simple tracking method that translates to any culture, age group, or craving needs.