Diets are a waist of time
If you're attempting that last push of the summer diet, new research hints that there might be no point to it, as you'll only put the weight back on.
It found that diets usually help in the short term, but a couple of years down the line and you will have most likely piled it all back on and then some.
The long-term study of 25,000 men and women found that once people start to pile on the pounds in middle age, their weight continues to increase.
The followes the lives of 5,362 men and women born in 1946, and 20,000 more born in 1958, who are part pf the Medical Research Council's ongoing National Survey of Health and Development.
Rebecca Hardy, from the MRC, told The Sunday Times: "Both groups began increasing in weight in the 1980s and since then people have been increasing in mass all through life.
"For men it goes up steadily through life. For women it starts slowly and accelerates in the mid-thirties. Once people become overweight they continue relentlessly upwards. They hardly ever go back down."
The research found that while 12 million try a diet ever year, only 10 per cent manage to lose a significant amound of weight. And those that do, most of them will put it back on withing a year.
Rebecca continued to say: "A few lose weight but very few get back to normal. The best policy is to preven people from becoming overweight."
Let's not use the word diet then, but start to make changes to your eating habits and think about the food you are consuming. Do you really need that bar of chocolate mid-afternoon?
Femalefirst Taryn Davies