Now that Kirstie Alley is slim and trim, Jenny Craig needed a new celebrity face for their campaigns. Stepping up to the plate is none other than Valerie Bertinelli. Though I may be dating myself a little, I remember watching her on the sitcom One Day at a Time, plus a huge number of made-for-TV movies.

Valerie is maintianing weight-loss and video blogs on the Jenny website, so if you are interested you can hear about her progress, tips, and updates there. Apparently she has lost 10 of her planned 30 lbs. so far, due to a mix of Jenny food (natch) and 10,000 steps of walking a day. I have to commend Valerie for going public with this though. Weight loss is a very personal issue, and I can't imagine what it takes to have millions of people along for the ride.

On a side note, Valerie's ex-husband, Eddie Van Halen, has been getting a little makeover of his own after his stint in rehab, which, if you haven't seen, is pretty amazing too.

I've done an extensive survey of all of the information about weight loss that you can find on the shelves of Border's and Barnes & Noble, and here are the results.

It seems as if the best way to lose weight and get in shape is a combo of the following: eating a lot of carbs, eating a lot of fat, cutting carbs out completely, drinking a lot of water, not eating any "white" foods at night like bread, rice, and pasta, eating just grapefruit, eating your meals in a mixed-up fashion (lunch for dinner, breakfast for lunch, etc), not eating after 8pm, eating a lot of soups, cutting out all candy, cakes, and processed foods, avoiding diet drinks, eating a Subway sub a couple of times a week, eating foods according to your blood type, eating foods according to color, eating a lot of fiber, training your brain to think like a thin person, eating like they do in France, eating like they do in China, not counting calories, making sure you count calories, taking vitamins and supplements, become a vegan, eating more meat, eat a lot of apples, eating only raw foods, and joining one of the weight loss organizations such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

If you follow the above rules, you should get in shape very quickly. You're welcome.

I don't know about you, but even though I love every sunny, poolside moment of summer, I secretly rejoice when the days start to get shorter and the air a little chillier. The end of summer means the beginning of fall, and that means I get to drop kick my bathing suit and body-baring shorts and tanktops. I don't have to be so conscious of what I'm eating. And not eating.

But "dieting" isn't a seasonal activity. People watch what they eat year-round. According to Forbes, "Americans spent an estimated $46 billion on diet products and self-help books in 2004." If that's the case, why is obesity such a problem in the US? Because, as a government review has found, two-thirds of dieters on "diet regimes" will regain all the weight that they lost within a year. Give them five years, and almost everyone will gain it back.

People gain the weight back for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the popular diet programs are very expensive, especially since many health and nutrition experts believe that they are ineffective to begin with. Forbes examined the weekly menus of the ten most popular diets to find out just how expensive they really are. The results are listed below. The first dollar amount is how much the program costs per week for any associated book, membership fees, and food costs, and the second percentage is how much more that is than the average $55.44 a normal person spends on food.

• Jenny Craig - $137.65, 152.8%
• NutriSytem - $113.52, 108.5%
• Atkins - $100.52, 84.6%
• Weight Watchers - $96.64, 77.5%
• Zone Diet - $92.84, 70.5%
• Ornish - $78.75, 44.6%
• South Beach - $78.76, 44.4%
• SlimFast - $77.73, 42.8%
• Sugar Busters - $69.62, 27.9%
• Subway - $68.80, 26%

Whatever happened to good old fashioned "eat less, exercise more?" I think that's free.

Giant food products company, Swiss-based Nestle, has just purchased Jenny Craig, the weight management company for about $600 million. The acquisition comes after another recent move by Nestle to demonstrate its commitment to nutrition or health. Or rather, translated to "profit" terms, to make money in the enormous diet and weight-loss industry. The largest market for weight-loss is the United States, where Jenny Craig has over 600 centers.

Chairman and CEO of Nestle says that the acquisition of Jenny Craig is an "important step in its transformation process into a nutrition, health and wellness company that sees weight management as a key competence. The rise of obesity and the resulting metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, is a major public health concern." Currently, Nestle makes, among other things, ice cream and candy bars. Now they can make twice the money off you when you buy a KitKat bar, then have to go to Jenny Craig to work it off.

Just about any diet will work if you stick to it, even if your diet consists of eating only banana bread. The problem with diets is that people do not stick to diets and even if you love banana bread, there are so many other good things to eat out there that it would just be too boring. Not to mention, of course, that very restrictive diets are not usually the healthiest ones.

Forbes has worked out their list of the top 10 diets that work. They correctly point out that restriction is the reason that many diets fail. Because most people will only have enough willpower (or interest) to stick to a diet for a short time, a very restrictive diet will produce maximum results quickly and is more likely to be selected by someone looking to lose weight. This is not the right way to lose weight. Diets are also a multi-billion dollar business, so there is a question as to whether the originators of some diets actually want people who try them to maintain their weight loss.