To control or lose weight, most of us have tried our hand at dieting. And most of us have failed - even with some of the best weight loss tools at our disposal. I have failed numerous times over the years in my dieting attempt. I believed exactly what I'd been taught by the dieting industry. That if I wanted to lose weight, I had to learn to like rabbit food and starve myself.

But dieting isn't about eliminating the foods you love and it's certainly not about eating such small portions it would fill up a Barbie doll. Dieting is about learning to understand the signals your body gives off, not popping diet pills, exhausting yourself with exercise equipment you find intimidating or using other weight loss tools that don't make sense for your personal lifestyle.

When you were an infant you knew when you were done and pushed away the bottle. Infants could hear their hunger cues and they heeded them. But, what happens to make us lose that insight and get on the dieting merry-go-round is we're told to 'clean your plate'. So we do.

We learn while we're young to ignore our bodies. We don't heed the hunger cues. If you've ever left a holiday table feeling full to the point of aching, you've ignored your hunger cues.

Think of hunger as the gas gauge in your car. If I assigned numbers to the gas gauge ranging from one to five, if you were comfortably full, it would a five. At a four, you could eat if food was presented, but if it wasn't something you really liked, you'd pass.

At a three on the hunger gas gauge, you would feel hungry, by the time you hit two, you'd feel a strong need to eat and by the time your body's fuel gauge hit one, you might not feel well physically from lack of food.