Ah, diets. We try them on and throw them off like clothing. They are as disposable and transient as this season's MUST HAVE hand bag or shoes. Research has shown over and over again how often diets fail, how many of them are only designed to work in the short term if they do at all. Yet we keep coming back to them like two people in a bad relationship who just can't let go, setting ourselves up for even more of the same disappointment we've already encountered.

Remember the cabbage soup diet? It was the diet that prescribed making cabbage soup from a specific recipe and eating it at least twice a day for at least a month if not forever. As you can imagine, even for those of us who like cabbage soup, it got old really fast.

Or, how about the high-protein diet, the Atkins Diet, or as some colleagues refer to it, the Diet of Doom? It's the one where you eat relatively little else other than meat--at least, that's how most users of the diet interpreted it. My mom was one such user. Being on the Atkins Diet was her excuse to have bacon--yes, bacon, fried, artery-clogging, bacon--at every meal. Gross. Results? Well, she did initially lose some weight, most of which she appears to have gained back. Miraculously none of her other health issues were resolved and she got really tired of eating so much darned meat. Although she's still obsessed by bacon.

She, and most others who try dieting, "fell off" the diet sooner rather than later. I've been subject to this phenomenon myself. I went in for the whole low-carb thing. I remember sitting at lunch over a bunless veggie burger lamenting the death of my tastebuds. Sure, I lost some weight, but it was more because the food I ate totally lacked in appeal rather than through some miraculous chemical process in my system. Turns out I also wasn't eating enough. I ate probably half the calories I was supposed to be eating, so I was tired and cranky all the time. The low-carb diet should have been named the "thinner but meaner" diet. And naturally I fell off. I think it was around the time I reignited my love affair with Little Italy.

There are many reasons why dieters fall off the dieting wagon. Those can be found here. So what's a person to do? If dieting is an endless cycle of withholding and disappointment, how can we resolve to get back on the wagon to stay, to break the cycle of falling off? My answer is a simple one: we're on the WRONG wagon.

Several years ago I left the dieting wagon for the fitness wagon. It lurks nearby the diet wagon, seemingly in its shadow. The fitness wagon is an oasis in the desert of the diet wagon, able to be seen only by those who are willing to take on the LIFETIME COMMITMENT to being healthy. I found the oasis when I got tired of not being able to eat anything I really enjoyed eating, when rewarding myself for a dieting job done well made me feel guilty. I'd eat "right"--which is to say cabbage soup or basically NO carbs--all week, then treat myself with a scoop of ice cream on Saturday night and feel miserable for having given in. That was just irrational thinking, probably born of having not eaten enough!

I stopped reading about the latest fad diets, or whatever it was Jennifer Aniston was doing to keep so skeletally thin, and started reading about nutrition. I stopped looking at supermodels as my role models and considered how healthy, active and happy all the people running around the park by my house looked. They seemed to truly ENJOY huffing it around those 3.3 miles every day. Yes, they were out there nearly every day. I, feeling miserable, wanted what they had, and realized it was all within my grasp, if only I'd get on the right wagon.

You, too can find the fitness wagon. Start by promising yourself to never, ever, EVER go on a fad diet again. Stop thinking about how you compare to celebrities and whether or not you can run--or even walk--a mile. Stop telling yourself it's a good idea to eat cabbage soup or anything more than once a week and start hunting for healthy recipes you can make yourself. Most importantly, come to grips with the reality that fitness is not something that comes in a week, but is the cumulative work of a lifetime. Commit to fitness, not diets, and experience the oasis for yourself.