Deciding if and how you should go about trying to lose weight isn't as simple as many people make it out to be -- and it's a lot more tied up with a person's mental health than they might credit. You might want to consider your reasons before you begin; are they based on purely practical, aesthetic or health-conscious concerns all the way down, or is there some part of you that feels like "things will be better" in some nebulous way -- like you'll be happier and more confident if you're thinner?

If you're someone who has struggled with regulating their eating patterns and relationship with food in the past, weight loss attempts might feed into an unhealthy and obsessive way of thinking - something that you will naturally want to avoid. Then there's the matter of whether or not it's a good idea to get thinner at all -- for many people the answer might lie in cultivating a better body image or concentrating on getting more exercise and better nutrients, rather than on trying to reduce the overall mass energy composition of their body. 

It may also be the case, of course, that none of these things apply to you - but that you feel like losing weight is a difficult and incomprehensible task for other reasons, and you're not sure how to go about tackling it even though you'd like to and you don't think it would be a troublesome thing for you to do. You may even have lost some weight already, and be worried about how to keep your motivation together to keep it off.

No matter which of these camps you fall into, a good weight loss counselor can help. Some of the things you might want to talk about with them include:

• The mechanics of weight loss -- what you should be eating, how you should be monitoring your intake and activity levels, and what kinds of tools and gadgets might be helpful for you in your specific case.
• The psychology of weight loss -- whether or not it's a path that will be safe and productive for you to follow, and what you can do to improve your life and self-image if it turns out that it isn't.
• The maintenance of weight loss -- how you can keep yourself on an even keel once you're no longer reducing calorific intake so drastically, and which tricks might help you not to reverse your hard work.