If you have tried to lose weight before you may well have been tempted by fad diets or magic bullets: after all they do sound fantastic. They also play on our desire to lose lots of weight very quickly. But we now know that this is unrealistic, and a key reason why people feel a failure when it comes to losing weight is because they set unrealistic goals. Nor can fad diets with complicated or rigid rules be sustained for long, and before you know it, any lost weight piles back on. This can also make people feel they have failed, but in fact it’s the faddy diet that’s the failure, not you.