Weight Watchers is another of the old-time standby diet programs, with over forty years in the business and an estimated 1 million followers across the globe at any given time. One of the reasons this weight loss plan has continued success is the focus on overall health: mental, emotional and physical. Weight Watchers provides the tools and support to change the way you eat and live.

The four tenets of the Weight Watchers program are Eat Smart, Move More, Helpful Habits and Get Support. In the Eat Smart category, Weight Watchers provides common sense advice, a Weight Watchers point list program that allows you to choose what you want to eat, and prepared meals available for purchase at supermarkets, online, and in Weight Watcher Diet Centers. There is also an extensive listing of recipes and meal suggestions available in books, at centers, and online.

Your Weight Watchers advisors can help you put together an activity plan which will address the Move More portion of the program. You are not limited to yoga, spinning, walking or swimming, but guided toward activities that will interest you and become part of your daily and weekly routine. It will allow flexibility and work with your lifestyle, whether at home, at work, or on the road.

The Atkins weight loss program is based on the theory that your body needs more protein and less carbs. The Atkins Diet   gives you the tools to change your eating habits, adopting a permanent lifestyle change that helps you lose and maintain your weight without having to count calories  . Dr. Atkins believed that you would feel better, look better, and be re-energized by following the basic tenets of the diet.

While the program is somewhat restrictive in the initial stages, this allows your body to slowly ramp up and adjust to a new way of eating. The food you eat allows your body to target fat stores to be used for energy, rather than carbohydrates. Carbs turn to glucose to fuel your body. If you restrict your intake of carbs, the body will look elsewhere for that fuel, which means that energy will instead come from the fat stores in your body.

This is not a diet where you will starve yourself, by any means. You can have butter, cheese, sour cream, mayo. You will have to restrict the carbs like pasta, potatoes, dried legumes, and the sweets, but not totally. As you ramp up into the different phases  you will be able to add more items to your diet, increasing your carb load. Once you have reached your goal weight, you will maintain it with some restriction on carbs. You will never go back to the old days of bread, pasta, cake and ice cream every day, but you will be able to indulge on a more regular basis.

The Jenny Craig Weight Loss Plan started out in Australia in 1983 and is now available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and Guam. Currently owned by Nestle Corporation and based out of Carlsbad, California, the program is centered on three key components: Food, Body and Mind. The program teaches portion control and healthy eating, promotes physical activity personalized to each individual, and provides consultants to keep you motivated and to make key changes that will serve you for the rest of your life.

You’ve seen all the celebrities touting the Jenny Craig Weight Loss Plan: Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, Queen Latifah, even basketball star Baron Davis. What is the appeal of this program that attracts heavy hitters to espouse its virtues? Jenny Craig is both a diet and lifestyle program, intent on changing the way you eat, exercise, and live your life. The goal is to change the way you think and act, keeping in mind your overall body health.

Probably the biggest expense and complaint amongst followers is the purchase of prepared foods offered by Jenny Craig. There are 17 breakfast choices, 21 lunch choices, 28 dinner choices, and 25 desserts and snacks. The cost is upwards of $100 per week plus grocery items like produce. While the food certainly looks tasty, you are paying for portion control, calorie control and the simple convenience of not having to cook. It can be a godsend to those with busy, crazy, hectic lives or who hate to plan, shop and cook meals.

Serious obesity requires drastic actions, usually surgical in nature. Lap band procedures and gastric bypass have a good success rate but do come with risks associated with surgery.

Finding a non-invasive way to lose weight has been elusive for researchers, until now. Currently in the initial testing stages on rodents, the “magic stick,” a weekly injection to help decrease appetites and increase metabolism, may be the next generation of weight loss remedies.

The injection consists of two natural hormones, glucagon and glucagon like peptide  which are similar in structure but different in their chemical make-up and biological function. Initial results show that subsequent weight loss could be comparable to that achieved through gastric bypass.

Richard DiMarchi, lead author of the rodent study and chairman of the Chemistry Department at Indiana University said, “I’m excited. It is rodent work that’s representative of human obesity.” He added, “What we’re doing is using the proven ability of two hormones to stop appetite and use more calories.”

According to Professor DiMarchi, the mice and rats used for his study were overfed so their body weights were around two times what their normal body weight should be. During the study, the rodents were injected with a single injection containing the two natural hormones and after only a single shot lost 25 percent of their body weight and then after a month of weekly shots the rodents were back to their normal body weight.

While DiMarchi says he doesn’t expect humans to benefit as well as the rodents and it would probably not be healthy if they did. The shot has the potential to reduce weight comparable to the results seen from gastric bypass surgery.