You can starve yourself, you can stuff your face with only fruit, you can run ten miles a day -- but there's still only one successful diet strategy to lose weight. Calories. A lot less of them.

According to a recent study published in the New England [Images] Journal of Medicine, the only way you can successfully drop those stubborn pounds is by cutting down on your calorie intake each day.

The findings concluded that any, but any dietary regime that has low calorie content and considerable cunsumption of fruit, vegetables and whole grains, is bound to work for you. A simple yet suprising revelation, the study is at the centre of a flurry of reports from websites like www.latimes.com and www.usatoday.com.

So all those endless arguments over whether the Atkins Diet is more effective that the Mediterranean Diet or whether cutting out carbohydrates entirely is the key to weight loss may all come to naught. The bottom line is that no matter what routine you follow, if your daily calorific intake is lowered, you will lose weight.

The study, conducted by experts from the Harvard School of Public Health (Boston) and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center (Baton Rouge) over the course of two years, tracked the eating habits of 811 of overweight individuals.

Each participant was put on one of four different diet plans, with the ratio of proteins to fat to significantly different under each plan. The only common rule was that no participant consume less that 1,200 calories per day and that all of them try to cut down on 750 calories from their daily intake. Six months down the line, all of the participants had lost an average of 13 pounds, irrespective of their different diets. Two years later, they've lost an average of 9 pounds each and one to three inches from their waistlines. Again, irrespective of their dietary plans.

In fact, it's not just weightloss that is brought about by cutting down on cals. On website www.msnbc.msn.com, Madelyn Fernstrom, PhD, CNS discussed the possibility of such dietary measures increasing life expectancy. But if that is to be the case, you need to look upon these measures as a lifestyle change, not just a passing phase. The founder of the restricted-calorie diet, Dr Roy Walford, advocated reducing daily calories over time to achieve your target body weight.

So now you know -- all it takes is a little bit of common sense and a little bit of willpower to achieve your target weight!