Ready to get in shape and trying to pick your next fad diet? Well some experts are saying if you want to lose weight and keep it off, forget about the "d" word and learn the strategies that will really change that number on the scale. 

"A variety of factors, from biological forces to emotional ones, make traditional diets very difficult for people to follow," explained Michelle May, M.D., author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat. One of the biggest problems is that dieting is, by nature, only a temporary fix. "You follow a prescribed eating plan, reach your goal weight, then go off the diet and regain," Dr. May explains. If you want to get to a healthy weight and stay there, you need to ditch the whole concept of dieting and learn how to make healthy changes you can sustain for the long haul. Check out these ways to change your feeling of dieting doom:

Diets are Stressful. Erase the stressful "good vs. bad food" mind-set and replace it with a more forgiving approach that provides a healthy structure-but with plenty of leeway. "Classify the things you eat as 'usually,' 'sometimes' and 'rarely' foods," suggested Ellie Krieger, a registered dietitian and the author of Small Changes, Big Results. "If you eliminate the idea of forbidden food, you take away the stress and guilt that comes with dieting as well as some of the triggers of overeating and weight gain."