If you went into last year's holiday season thinking you could eat like a wolverine and worry about it in January, well, how's that working out? Swimsuit season is right around the corner. It is now time to get your mind right and realize you’re not as young as you used to be, it's going to take effort to get the weight off and you need to put down the cheesecake and go for a walk.

2. Eat exactly what you need

You should aim for a comfortable feeling of satisfaction at every meal. You will be amazed at how quickly this becomes acceptable to your stomach. Besides, you can enjoy your meal and feel great afterwards too. This tip alone can save you hundreds of calories per meal. If you want to try all the courses, have smaller portions of everything you really want.

3. MOVE!

Give up the couch this summer and get out the spandex. If you really can't get to the gym, do a few exercises at home or go for a walk. It won't just burn calories; it will keep you in touch with your desire to get skinny and healthy. Also keep as active during the day as you can. You know the routine; use the steps, park farther away. No matter what you chose remember that a journey of thousand miles begins with the first step!

4. Trash Day

You just had to buy the Doublestuff Oreos because you had a coupon right? Time to clean out the cabinets. This is the single best tip you can put into place today. Why? Let's say you are watching reruns and you get the craving to eat the entire pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia, if you don't have it in the house then you are less likely to get in the car and go get it.

5. Relax!

Stress makes us do crazy things to our bodies like smoking, drinking, and oh yes, eating. You have many reasons to reduce your stress levels as you do drinking your thousand-calorie Starbucks Frap.

If this describes your pattern of eating you are not alone. This is the single highest response given when asked why people eat the way they do, the nervous eater. If you can recognize it and at least alter the foods you are taking in, you can save yourself thousands of calories a week. So, no matter what you chose, just get out there and do it!

The behaviorist will look at the problem in a number of ways. The best approach would be to get into the habit of slowing down a little bit. Some good weightloss tips include waiting ten minutes before grabbing that snack that is calling you from the pantry. You may discover that you are not really hungry. If you wait ten minutes the craving will most likely go away on its own.

You can also opt to go for a brisk walk when the urge to cheat on your diet arises. This is a great way to get much needed exercise along with self-control. You will be less likely to run to the pantry upon entering the home after a jaunt around the neighborhood. You will be more likely to go for a big glass of cold water instead.

Some people laugh at these two weightloss tips but they do work if you take a behavioral approach. You have to focus on your actions. The best way to look at it is making priorities. Do you want the chocolate cake or do you want to fit into those jeans tucked away in your closet? There are times that the chocolate cake will win but not often if you focus on your behavior.

Weightloss tips that involve a behavioral approach also include portions. We often need to train ourselves to understand how much is enough. Getting into the habit of buying single-sized servings or taking the time to measure will increase your chances of success.

You also may find that there are certain “triggers” that cause you to eat. This is a simple stimulus-response cycle that the behaviorists claim can be broken with a little effort. Weightloss tips in the trigger realm include avoiding the kitchen right after a stressful situation, eating only at the dinner table and keeping a diary of what happens right before you get a craving.

1) Eat lots of fiber.
You can get fiber in your life by eating fruits, berries, beans, and many vegetables. Check food labels and do a little research to learn what foods are high in fiber.

Fiber gives you a feeling of being full and it helps regulate you.

3) Exercise regularly.
Regular exercise boosts your metabolic rate and allows you to burn calories. When you build muscle through exercise, you actually continue to burn calories as you rest.

You should include both aerobic exercise and strength training in your exercise routine. Aerobic training can include walking briskly, running, dancing or any activity that brings your heart and breathing into play. You should do aerobic exercise for twenty to thirty minutes or more, four to five times a week. Strength training brings your muscles into play. Weight lifting, pushups, chinups; these build your muscles. Strength training should be done at least three times a week.

4) Eat plenty of green foods.
These foods are rich in vitamins and minerals. Try to eat one or two servings of leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale and broccoli, at least two to three times a week. Juicing is a good alternative.

5) Eat more healthy fats.
All fats are not bad. Eating fish, nuts, flaxseed and other healthy fats can actually increase the rate at which you burn calories.

At the same time, you want to limit unhealthy fats such as cheese, margarine, pastries and such.

6) Learn to read food labels.
You can't always eat fresh foods. By learning to read food labels, you can keep a good eye on your diet.

Check the serving size. Many people look at the calories or the carbs on the label but fail to note that is per serving. Some can labels may read two or two and a half servings per can. That will throw your diet out of whack in short order.

Note how much sugar or salt has been added to improve the taste. Many labels will give you the fat content and/or the fiber content.

Following these six healthy habits on a daily basis will help you get to the weight you desire and help you maintain that weight.

Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it'll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away.

"Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa's Bushmen for thousands of years."

Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.

Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy."

Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. "I really like to eat them when the new rains have come," says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. "Then they're really quite delicious."

When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She described the taste as "a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad."

So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn't hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. "I'd have to say it did work," says Stahl.

Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they have been living off the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.

Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.

The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa's national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.

"What they found was when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight," says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.

Was hoodia's potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?

"No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s," says Dixey.

It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.

Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day less than those in the control group. To put that in perspective, the average American man consumes about 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.

"If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we've seen that very, very dramatically," says Dixey.

But why do you need a patent for a plant? "The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the plant. It's not on the plant itself," says Dixey.

So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? "As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that's correct," says Dixey.

But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it hasn't demonstrated that the product is safe.

Some companies have even used the results of Phytopharm's clinical tests to market their products.

"This is just straightforward theft. That's what it is. People are stealing data, which they haven't done, they've got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle," says Dixey. "When we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they -- does nothing at all."

But Dixey isn't the only one who's felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also called "the San," was appalled.

"The San did not even know about it," says Chennells. "They had given the information that led directly toward the patent."

The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called "bio-piracy."

"You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,'" says Stahl to Chennells. "So what did you do?"

"I wouldn't want to go into some of the details as to what kind of letters were written or what kind of threats were made," says Chennells. "We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it."

Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they were nearly annihilated.

"About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen," says Chennells. "It's well documented."

The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.

"We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San," says Chennells. "Many, many millions. They've talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America."

In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits -- if there are profits. But that's a big if.

The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.

Dixey says it can be made synthetically: "We've made milligrams of it. But it's very expensive. It's not possible to make it synthetically in what's called a scaleable process. So we couldn't make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you'd need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people."

Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.

But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.

60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm's hoodia plantations in South Africa. They'll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.

Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.

"The problem is we're dealing with a novel crop. It's a plant we've taken out of the wild and we're starting to grow it,' says MacWilliam. "So we have no experience. So it's different? diseases and pests which we have to deal with."

How confident are they that they will be able to grow enough? "We're very confident of that," he says. "We've got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of acres. And we'll be able - ready to meet the demand.

This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic. Phytopharm says it's about to announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.

MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. "It's actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted," says MacWilliam.

The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. "Not good," she says.

Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it will be certified safe and effective. They also promise that it'll taste good.