Have you heard about it lately? Everywhere you look, women over 30 can find one hundred excuses for not being able to lose weight and keep it off.

Blame it on your thyroid, cortisol, menopause, your hectic lifestyle or even your genes. But, the real reason you find yourself battling those last 15 or 20 pounds all comes down to how you handle five major issues.

#5 Not Understanding How Diets Work Atkins, South Beach, The Zone, Dr. Phil…You could spend a lifetime trying the over-one-thousand diets on the market. How do you simplify things? How do you know you’ve found the “magic” diet?

Even though this fact may burn the ears of many women, the truth remains that if you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. Ouch! I just heard some lady scream from the pain of realization. But that’s how a diet works.

Just like you can find medical documents that praise and persecute popular diets, you will always find that most medical studies prove that this weight loss formula is just as effective as it was some 3.5 million years ago when Lucy used it - eat less, exercise more.

So don’t put so much power into the name of your diet as to the nutritional content of the diet. In short, each and everyday you need to eat proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

#4 Not Exercising Enough Your personal trainer told you and now the FDA is barking down your throat, “Exercise more!” The only way to divorce cellulite from those thighs is to create a fat deficit. That’s the only way your body will utilize those excess fat globules.

My favorite way of knowing that I am vacating unwelcome cellulite, or encroaching cellulite, is feeling the tingle in my legs as I exercise for 40-50 minutes at a time. You don’t need to run yourself dogged, just exercise smarter as researchers at the University of Pittsburgh suggest.

After monitoring 201 overweight women using various exercise methods from high-intensity and long, to low-intensity and short, this study featured in the Canadian Journal of Health & Nutrition found that women who exercised briskly for at least 50 minutes, five times a week while using a sensible diet, lost an average of 25 pounds in six months.

#3 Giving Up Too Quickly You’ll hear it in gyms and offices all across America. “I didn’t lose 20 pounds in two weeks so that diet obviously sucks.”

As shocking as it sounds, too many women believe that weight loss should be fast. While “Cosmo” and “Star” will promise to divulge the starvation secrets of how models lose mounds of weight in days, don’t buy it.

That stuff might work on Mars, but if you want to see real results, you need to give your body at least eight weeks, or ideally 12. This is because, when you diet, your body wholly resists this change and it is actually going to test your dedication to sticking with the diet.

While you can try to trick your body with get-skinny-quick-diets like ketosis induction or protein diets, you can’t stay on such diets for life. Eventually your liver will exhaust from handling excessive amounts of protein. Plus your breath will stink. Yuck! Remember, patience, while repulsive to some, is a dieting virtue.

#2 No Focus In a world of too much to do and too little time to fit it in after soccer practice, how are you going to stick with a diet? You have priorities. You wake up everyday, maybe go to work, eat somewhere and collect a paycheck somehow. You will only “do” the important things.

Moreover, you will only do what gives you visible pain or pleasure. If your diet is not actively moving you away from pain and etching you closer to pleasure, you’ll relegate you diet to the trash, because the diet proves psychologically useless to you.

Priorities, on the other hand, give you real benefits or punishments if they’re not respected. For example, wouldn’t it suck this weekend if you couldn’t buy those Nine West shoes because you ditched work on Wednesday and Thursday.

The same applies to your diet, won’t it suck when you can’t fit into that $250, two sizes too small dress you caught on sale at Neiman Marcus?

#1 Weak Self-Confidence There’s a great line in Don Miguel Ruiz’s Beyond Fear, “We only need to protect ourselves from ourselves.” This is certainly the case when dieting.

Whether or not you maintain your self-confidence and self-trust while dieting will determine your dieting success. Don’t base your self-confidence on outside events or those mean people that call you “fat” behind your back. Safely house your confidence within, and base it on who you are, not on what you succeed or fail at doing.

Ruiz, penned another cool line, “The normal state of the mind is hell.” I just heard an “Amen!” from the audience. Dieting will be hell if you let your self-confidence slip.

Ok, so go get your pen and jot down these five dieting keepsakes and place them in your purse as a reference.

1. I eat less, and exercise more. 2. I exercise moderately five times a week for 50 minutes at a time. 3. I am giving myself at least six weeks to see results from my diet. 4. My diet is a priority and I know the long-term payoffs of my successful weight loss. 5. I am confident and trust myself to lose weight.

What’s that now? Silence? I don’t hear a single dieting excuse coming from anywhere. My work here is done.