Forget juicing, fasting, and fad diets. Just focus on being healthy and fit. When you eat right and exercise regularly, maintaining a healthy weight can happen naturally. Fill up with High-fiber foods. The good thing about fiber is that it fills you up without filling you out. Getting the right amount of fiber per day can help you lose weight, regulate your blood sugar, and lower your cholesterol — all without counting calories. Make sure you are making the time to move. Cutting calories can help you lose weight, but keeping it off long-term is a different story. Exercise is a must — aim for 200 to 300 minutes of physical activity a week to keep pounds you’ve lost from coming back. There’s more to maintaining your weight than watching what’s on your plate. Calories from soda, juice, and alcohol add up fast. Switch to mostly water to help keep your weight from creeping up over time.

Here are four of the tips I’ve found most helpful, both in my own life and in helping guiding clients lose weight:

1) Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.

The first step in this is to start asking yourself this, when you begin to crave food: Am I really hungry?  You’ll probably discover that, more often than not, you’re eating for emotional reasons—because you’re bored, or tired, or angry, or sad, or lonely, for example. Or, in my case quite frequently, it can simply be a form of procrastination, ugh. Snacking or overeating doesn’t truly help the emotion, because though it feels good in the moment, it actually leaves you feeling worse about yourself afterwards (whether you’ve stuffed your feelings, or used eating to put off doing something more productive that you need to do). Learn to recognize the difference between true hunger and emotional eating, and you may never have to “diet” again.

It isn’t always as simple as just eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you are full, but for most people that’s a great starting point. So many of us are out of touch with the hunger signals produced by our bodies, and it can do wonders to get reconnected with these very important messages.

2) Don’t deprive yourself, or think of it as deprivation.

I guarantee that you can learn to find tasty food choices that serve your body that you will enjoy and look forward to. Make positive changes slowly, if it helps you, and focus on finding healthy food alternatives that you really like. Make that your focus, instead of focusing what you can’t eat. If you don’t like “eating healthy”, you won’t last very long. The whole point is to build healthy practices around food that you can happily enjoy for a lifetime.

3) Forget about the “diet” word. 

If you’d like to lose weight or create healthier food habits, you will do that through a variety of healthy food choices.  Sometimes, you might need a little help—some of my friends subscribe to a meal-delivery service that provides a variety of gourmet yummy meals that are designed to meet a certain calorie level. You can’t do that forever, but it can help introduce you to new healthier food options and get a sense of proper portion sizes and so on.

I’ve also had some of my clients follow popular low-cost, well-balanced, reasonable and realistic healthy eating programs that are designed to help you lose weight (emphasis on reasonable and realistic). I think that’s great, and I’ve seen it work. Sometimes all you need is some community, accountability and good quality information to get you going. Ideally, you don’t want it to feel like a diet, but rather like a wonderful new way of eating that’s not too difficult to do daily.  

Again, the key to maintaining a healthy weight is finding healthy foods, and food habits, that you enjoy.  Living healthy is a way of life—an enjoyable way of life, not about extreme sacrifice and weird tricks or techniques or fads.

4)  It's never too late.

As you get older, your muscle mass shrinks. But you can boost lean muscle mass and keep your body fat down, even in your 80s, studies show. You’ll also have better balance and stability, which will help prevent broken bones.