If, like many people, you said yes, you guessed wrong. Fat loss and weight loss are not the same thing at all. In fact, they are not even close.

If you browse the diet book section of your local bookstore, or surf the Web, you will see that most books and diet programs contain the words weight loss in their title or subtitle. Most diet programs are about weight loss, which is the incorrect approach to this whole area. As a trainer and author specializing in healthy fat loss and fitness, I recommend you only concern yourself with taking off excess fat.

Here is why. Weight is good, not bad; you do not want to lose weight, and most importantly for your health, you do not want to lose muscle. Our weight is made up of tissue, muscle, bone, blood, fat, water, and the rest of our physical body. Muscle, like every other component of our physical make-up, is most important. And fat is also a necessary, vital part of our physical make-up.

It is excess body fat that is the big problem. Having excess body fat, being fat, increases your risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, hypertension and many other serious diseases. And perhaps most serious of all, if you can get more serious than a heart attack or a stroke, is that excess body fat is being linked to many more types of cancers than previously known.

Excess fat is bad news and that is what I urge you to focus on, fat loss. The following is so important it bears repeating: you do not want to lose weight. That is just a convenient way of avoiding the word fat. Fat has ugliness attached to it. No one likes to be called fat or think of themselves as fat, so we say overweight, portly, rotund, chubby and use other phrases like take off pounds, lose weight, or take off inches.

We can play word games, deny it and dance all around the fact that we are fat and we have to lose fat. But it is more effective and realistic to just face up to the job at hand, which is to lose excess fat. And in fact, once they take 100 percent responsibility for doing just that, many people become highly motivated and do the job more quickly and easily.

In my many years working in fat loss and fitness, I have learned what I believe is the best way to take off excess fat fast, healthfully and permanently. And that is through adopting a balanced, plant-based diet of whole, fresh, natural foods, and doing daily exercise.

The type of program I recommend is simple and ferociously effective. It does not include diet foods made with reduced fat. No low carb, no carb nonsense. No fat blaster pills. No processed, packaged foods delivered to your door. No meal replacement shakes or herbal remedies that melt fat away. I strongly urge my clients and readers to stay away from all these bogus and often dangerous weight loss approaches. Unfortunately, they are unending and many people are eager to buy into magic bullets or shortcut ways for losing fat.

It is legitimate to ask why is a balanced, plant-based diet of whole, natural foods so effective at losing fat. The answer is simple and irrefutable: there is no more effective way to lose fat permanently than to cut out all the fat that comes with eating animals and animal food products like dairy and eggs. And permanently eliminating all refined, processed and fast foods from your diet. These are loaded with sugar, salt and added fats, including hydrogenated fats/oil, one of the worst substances you can put in your body. Put even more simply, we are what we eat.

That is the difference between fat loss and weight loss, and the difference between the approach I recommend and all the books and programs touting weight loss.

If you are interested in permanently, healthfully losing all the excess fat you want to lose, I urge you to adopt a balanced, plant-based diet of whole, fresh, natural foods, without meat, poultry, fish, dairy products or eggs.

When you do this, along with getting daily exercise, you will really start to see the excess fat on your body melt away. Healthfully and permanently.