How do you find the best way to loose weight for you and your body? While calories are the ultimate test of whether you’ll lose weight—eat fewer, burn more—the same method of cutting calories doesn’t work for everyone. Chances are that if you ate the exact same diet as someone else and did the same amount of exercise, you’d both lose weight. Though, you wouldn’t lose weight at the exact same rate, for various reasons. But unless you’re going to have your meals served to you in exact portions each day and be prompted to do your exercises, the plan has to be a natural fit for you to stick with it.

The best way to loose weight for 5000 other people might not be the best for you. Even if it’s the healthiest plan on the planet, it might not be right for you. Because even the most wonderful diet plan ever created won’t work if you don’t stick with it. And if it’s not right for you, no matter what the reason, then you shouldn’t try to keep following the plan.

Some diet and even exercise plans are obviously not the best way to loose weight and you know it right in the beginning. If you don’t like olives, for instance, a diet that hinges on eating olives isn’t right for you, no matter how popular it is with other people or how many pounds they’ve lost. A diet that severely restricts meat and poultry might be very healthy and easy to lose weight on, but it does you little good if you don’t follow it and sneak in some meat anyway.

Tip: Add a little daily exercise to your routine. You don't need to exercise for hours to lose weight.

Finding the best way to loose weight isn’t always easy. Sometimes you have to try several different plans and methods of eating before you hit on one that feels natural. You’ll want to aim for a way of eating that you think you can reasonably stick with forever. So fad diets and crash diets are out automatically. You can’t eat soup for the rest of your life with nothing else. And you just won’t want to fast 2 days a week every week for forever! Choose a plan that you feel you can live with for the long run.

Sometimes the best way to loose weight as far as your diet goes isn’t that difficult to find. But finding the best exercise to help speed your weight loss and improve your health is a little harder to find. Running is one of the best cardiovascular exercises around, and many people who’ve lost a lot of weight and kept it off swear by its fat-burning abilities. But if you hate to run, you have bad knees, or some other reason why it’s not the perfect exercise for you, then clearly it’s not the best way to workout.

Tip: It's a common perception that drinking large amounts of water will promote weight loss. But, drinking very cold water can boost your metabolism.

Listen to your body and watch the scale carefully as you experiment with diets and exercise plans. When you’re losing weight steadily and feeling good, you’ve found your best way to loose weight.