Ok, you are now sufficiently fired up to make an honest effort to lose fat. So, where do you start? Do you…

a. Get up Monday morning and head to the gym
b. Head to the supermarket and buy a bunch of lean frozen meals
c. Head to the bookstore and get the latest diet book from the N.Y. Times bestseller list
d. Hire a personal trainer
e. None of the above

A is a good choice, and is better than nothing - but you need to do some planning beforehand to avoid making some common mistakes.

B and C are really not the right answers. Frozen meals can be good for an occasional, on-the-go meal, but should not be relied on for long term fat loss. Diet books are obviously not working, because as they increase their sales Americans continue to get fatter.

D could be a good option, but you'll need to know the right things to ask your trainer. Those questions will be covered in a future article.

E could be the right answer, as long as it is NOT "take no action".

So maybe you decide to give it a try, make the commitment to lose a few pounds. You head to your information source of choice - if you're like me you're on the Web (because it's a conveniently sedentary activity to surf the Internet for fitness information). And that is when it starts - this website says I should do this and eat this, this one says the complete opposite, on the news was some research that concluded something different, then you hear from your neighbor who heard from their trainer about what they did. Then, here it comes…wait for it…CRASH! You walk away, less motivated than when you started.

You take another week (because, hey, you've got a dinner outing planned with some friends this weekend anyway). You finally pick a program based on whatever criteria make sense at that time, you start on your "diet" and you head for the gym. You're making good progress (at least that is what the scale says) and then…you hit the wall. The scale gets stuck for what seems like three weeks in a row - even though you are doing the same things that you have been doing. So you go back to your diet book, or website, or magazine and frantically search for the section that tells you what to do if you hit the dreaded plateau…and more often than not, you're not going to find it. And do you know why? Because "diet" books and magazines are written to generate revenue, and there is no conceivable way a publisher would publish a book that says "this may not work for you - if this is the case try someone else's diet". The same can be said for exercise programs - the creators all think that theirs is the right approach and, gasp, how dare you suggest that what they designed does not work for you.

So how is the Lean State University approach, any different? Well, for starters, it is one of the few fat loss programs that focuses on exercise as the primary component. As the noted fitness guru Jack LaLanne says, "Exercise is king, diet is queen, put them together and you've got a kingdom." Secondly, it is a blend of the best approaches to nutrition, exercise and supplementation - based on my personal experience as well as the experience of my clients. Finally, this program recognizes as a universal truth the need to continuously change what you are doing both in the gym as well as nutritionally to prevent your body from adapting. Your body is a pretty complicated machine - more intricate than the finest technology items on the market. And there is one thing that the body is meant to do - recognize the conditions that it is being subjected to, and adjust accordingly. The art is in recognizing when your body is adapting, tweaking your eating and exercise, and blowing past the plateau.