Pat Barone

More and more food labels are screaming "FAT FREE!" but America's weight is increasing. What's going on?

Eating "fat free" has been one of the most popular trends in recent years, but dieters are finding that adding fat to their diets, provided it is the right kind of fat, is helping them lose more weight than avoiding fat.

Fat is a vital component of good nutrition and necessary in many aspects of body maintenance, repair and sustenance.

There's a lot of talk about fat in the media today. As the U.S. government heightens its "war on obesity", fat is rapidly becoming a hot topic and more attention is being focused on the role body image plays in society.

The Good News

Americans are becoming more aware of the role of a healthy lifestyle and making healthier choices with food.

In the quest for weight loss, the diet industry puts a lot of attention on what we eat but focusing on why we eat may be more important.

After losing over 70 lbs. permanently and becoming a weight loss coach for others, I've found most people have a pretty good idea of what they should eat. We have no problem categorizing foods into healthy and non-healthy lists.

You can have a positive effect on your health with some simple, straightforward guidelines. These are health tips, not necessarily weight loss tips. But making sure your body has the nutrients, vitamins and minerals it needs is the first step to losing weight. A body lacking these essential elements is going to stay hungry and get hungrier the longer it lacks what it needs to thrive.

If your New Year's Resolutions are still going strong, good for you! But, if you are like most of us, your resolutions were left in the dust long ago.

The average resolution lasts less than 72 hours. No surprise, that's the same length of most diets.

Why the short span for decisions so vital to our health?

The very nature of resolutions relies on "a magic moment", the idea that, at 12:01 a.