If you’re like 90% of overweight people you’ve probably tried loads of ways to slim down, hopefully on a reasonably healthy diet plan You may even have had some success in losing weight from time to time. But the likelihood is, you’ve put it all back on again once you’ve come off the diet -- and maybe even gained more than you actually lost in the first place.

Maybe you go to bed thinking about food. Maybe you wake up thinking about food. Perhaps the stresses of life, emotional upsets and even celebrations cause you to overeat. If so, you know you’re not thinking like your slim friends but you don’t know what to do about it. Well, I can tell you now, the most healthy diet plan of all is simply to learn to listen to what your body is telling you.

Don’t worry if you’ve tried and "failed" at losing your extra pounds. In fact there’s no real mystery to getting slim. The key is to learn how to be in charge of your eating without giving up the foods you love or depriving yourself. How to enjoy being healthier but also how to eat what you want without guilt.

A truly healthy diet plan, if you like, is finding out how to recognise when you’re really hungry or whether your desire to eat comes from a different place. When you are hungry it’s absolutely fine to eat something. Just make sure you’re only eating enough to reach the point of satisfaction -- you don’t need or want to feel over-full.

But there may be emotions that you "push down" with food -- boredom, loneliness, anger and so on. If so, the starting point is to identify the emotion and think about how you can address it. This may be hard at first as you’ve become so used to using food to ignore the feeling. But you know deep down that eating doesn’t actually solve the problem and the emotion won’t go away through you stuffing yourself -- and piling on the calories in the process.

See if you can catch yourself before you eat for reasons other than hunger, and ask yourself what it’s really about. If the feeling is really boredom, for example, phone a friend, go for a walk, read a good book or clear out your wardrobe.

And learn to limit your eating to "just enough" so that you recognise when you’re satisfied (when your stomach is only a little, if at all, distended and you feel reasonably light) and stop at that point. If you only eat enough so that you’re satisfied, you will become hungry more often during the day. That’s fine. Eat little and often (every 3 hours or so) if you need to. Your body will tell you what it needs, if you’ll just trust it a little.

In fact, as time goes on you’ll find that you feel like less food than you did in the past. Your stomach, which has been stretched each time you overate, will re-learn how to feel good at its natural size and you’ll feel uncomfortable taking it beyond that.

Because this new, and truly healthy diet plan says you can eat whatever you like -- no foods are off limits -- you may worry that you’ll only want to eat fatty, sugary or salty foods. This may be the case at first, but as you progress with the system of listening to your body you’ll find that you actually start to crave healthier foods too, and the unhealthy ones will fall out of favour.

In my own case, now that I’ve been following this plan for years, I’ve rediscovered a taste for healthy foods I previously rejected. Apples, for example, now taste incredibly sweet and delicious to me. Cheesecake, on the other hand, I can only eat in a very small slice, and I definitely wouldn’t feel like it every day.

So this is, in a sense, not a healthy diet plan at all but a whole new way of living your life and responding naturally to your body’s needs. I’ve shed my extra 40 pounds through living this way, I have more energy than I ever did, and I look and feel 100% better. Think about how this will work for you. Picture your clothes feeling looser, seeing a slim person smiling back at you in the mirror, and your friends complimenting you on your new figure!