Have you been struggling to lose weight for a long time without success? Have you lost weight on fad diets, only to regain the same amount, or more, after a little while? The $40 billion diet industry tries its best to get us to purchase its products and services to attain slender physiques. While it's true that most diets do produce results in the short-term, research shows that overall, the majority of people are unsuccessful at long-term weight loss due to failing to learn how to eat properly and prevent weight regain. The No S Diet may be a solution to this problem.

What is the No S Diet? Unlike many other complicated diets, it has only three simple rules: no snacks, no sweets and no seconds, except on days that start with S (Saturday, Sunday and special days such as birthdays and your national and religious holidays). No snacks means no eating between meals, an activity that has contributed the most to our increased calorie consumption over the last 30 years. No sweets means we don't eat foods that have added sugar as their principal source (sugar consumption has also greatly increased in the last century). And no seconds means that each meal is limited to eating the amount of food that can fit on one plate, with no refills.

That's the No S Diet in a nutshell. You eat three full single-plate meals of normal food a day, including pasta, bread, cheese, meat, butter and any other of the usual "forbidden" foods. And best of all, you're not giving up feasts and special treats forever: they're just limited to certain days, where you can plan for them and therefore really enjoy them. Essentially, this is a diet that helps you develop good, sustainable eating habits through building the habit of moderation. Its creator, Reinhard Engels, "a librarian by training and computer programmer by accident", lost 50 pounds in 2002 using this method. He later created a website explaining this diet for free after many people he spoke to wanted to know how he had lost all the weight and maintained the loss over several years, with no yo-yoing. And in 2008, he published a book to help answer many of the questions followers of the diet had asked him on his website.

We all know that weight gain is produced by consuming more calories than we need. Excess is the reason the majority of North Americans have gotten fat over the last 30 years. In The No S Diet, Engels writes that "we're fat because we eat too much and move too little" and that "by following these rules, you get a good enough idea of how much you are eating without having to pay an exorbitant and unsustainable amount of attention", such as counting points or calories. "You can eat anything you want, at the appropriate time."

This diet of moderation is a way of eating that traditional societies, such as France and Japan, still adhere to today for the most part (although they are also now slowly adopting our bad habits). Most of us were naturally thin, as little as 30 years ago, because we didn't snack all day long and reserved treats for special feast days. Now it's big business to promote snack foods by claiming that we need to maintain our energy or increase our metabolism by eating five or six times during the day. While it's true that some research has shown that, in controlled laboratory conditions, eating small amounts of food regularly during the course of the day can encourage weight loss, the truth is that, in the real world, people have difficulty limiting their snacking (both the quality and amount), which eventually leads to creeping weight gain.

But isn't it a bad idea to let loose on "S days" and eat whatever we want? Won't it wreak havoc on all the progress we made from Monday to Friday ("N days", for normal)? Most diets restrict eating certain foods and certain amounts of food for long stretches of time, and Engels writes, "S days are a necessary safety valve, an incentive, a reward." They aren't binge days - although they may be the first few times, as we adjust to the habit of moderation - just days when we can relax a little and enjoy some delayed pleasure. We need those days to be able to avoid feeling deprived or resentful, feelings that many other diets engender, therefore making them hard to stick to in the long-term. A few days per month of more relaxed eating is not enough to undermine any progress made on normal days, according to Engels.

The No S Diet is not a quick weight-loss program. On the contrary, it is a slow, natural, and long-term way to lose excess pounds and keep them off by developing good eating habits. Habits can take you far, according to Engels, and they get easier to maintain over time because they become unconscious. He even offers a system to keep track of your habit-building online through his website, as well as a bulletin board to get in touch with other people who are following the No S Diet.

For almost anybody, this diet is a simple way to lose weight, as there are no exotic ingredients or special shakes required, nor are there certain foods to avoid (except for sweets, and those just on N days) and no time and effort are needed to calculate points or calories. The whole family can eat the same things at the same times and nobody needs to even know you're on a diet. So if long-term weight loss has been eluding you, this may be the way to finally reach your goals and to maintain a healthy weight for life.