Weight loss. It sometimes feels like an unacheivable goal.

Take heart! It is achievable! There are a few things that you need to keep in mind if you are on a weight loss journey:

You are going to feel hungry. Any person, diet or supplement that promises weight loss without ever going hungry, lies. Your body wants to maintain homeostasis. If you weigh 152 pounds, it wants you to give it enough calories every day to maintain those 152 pounds. If you give it less calories, your body will tell you that you need to eat more and you will feel hungry if you don't give it more. Going to bed hungry is a normal thing for anyone who is successful at losing weight.
If you are losing weight incredibly quickly, you will, most likely, gain it all back. Fad diets and diets that are extremely restrictive don't work well in the long run. They usually can't be maintained for long periods of time and when you go back to your normal way of eating you gain back every pound (or more) that you lost. Slow and steady is the way to go for weight loss. You can also be sure to maintain your muscle and only lose fat by taking it slow and aiming for just one or two pounds lost per week.
It has to be a lifestyle change in order for it to stick. Dieting doesn't work, as I stated above, because it is short term. Most people diet until they hit their goal weight and then stop dieting and start gaining weight back. If you make small, permanent changes in the way you eat, when you lose the weight, it will stay gone. A good place to start is concentrating on eating more vegetables. Vegetables are filling, provide lots of micronutrients that your body needs to keep you healthy and are usually very low in calories.
Gaining muscle helps you lose fat. Hit the weight room and you will see an increase in your metabolism and a faster fat burn. Concentrate on maintaining or increasing muscle while you are losing fat and don't just pound the pavement or spend hours on the elliptical. Doing only cardio while decreasing calories pretty much guarantees that you will lose muscle along with fat and decrease your metabolism.
Planning and tracking your food intake is key. I know it's not fun, but it really does make a huge difference in wether or not you are successful at losing weight. It is so easy to misjudge serving sizes and accidently eat three talblespoons of peanut butter rather than the intended two (which is a 100 calorie difference!). Studies show that those who track their caloric intake are more successful at losing weight.

So here is what you need to do every day to be successful at losing weight: Wake up and make a plan of what you will eat for the day (even better if you do it the night before!), then head to the gym for a weight lifting session to get your metabolism revving. Next you will track what you have for breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner making sure that you are eating things that you like and that you can imagine continuing to eat for the rest of your life. Lastly, you will go to bed a little on the hungry side. The next morning when you wake up and get on the scale you may see a quarter of a pound drop, and that's great because a quarter of a pound a day is almost two pounds a week! Stick with it and those pounds will add up, you will hit your weightloss goal and be able to keep it off.