It's hard to believe, but a few simple tests will help you confirm it: anyone can look a lot slimmer than they really are by using a few wardrobe tricks. This is not an encouragement to throw your healthy eating plan out the window and start relying on clothes to make you look slim.

Remember that while clothes won't actually help you lose weight, they can be your best friends when you start feeling that your brand new fitness regime is not working fast enough. Clothes are more of a frustration remedy than anything else. "The body is a sculpture, and you can shape it and visually reshape it, depending on your objectives", stylists say, and we'd do well to pay attention.

The key word is balance. It's essential to play to your strengths and try to give your body a harmonious overall look. "You have to look past the extra pounds and focus on your overall body shape, the proportion between your top half and bottom half, and details of your basic bone structure, such as the width of your shoulders or the length of your neck", celebrity stylist Laura Siebold states for WebMD.

"If your top is decidedly larger than your bottom, then achieving proportion is about choosing styles that simultaneously minimize your top half while accentuating your bottom half", she says. The same trick works the other way around - if you're bottom-heavy, aim to draw all eyes upwards.

This can be easily achieved by playing with light and dark colors. If you want to emphasize your upper body, wear a brightly colored top, a V-neck or anything else with a distinctive neckline, and use dark colors for your pants or skirt. Also, it's important to realize where you carry the most weight - your torso, for example, or your hips. "Any one area of your body that doesn't look right in relation to the rest of your body is the area that you need to address with corrective clothing", the same stylist says.

The easiest way to do this is ensure that the clothes we wear really fit our body, and not just around it. Which essentially means that we have to stop relying on commercial sizes and use them more as a point of departure than as the ultimate shopping guide. Donning a top that's too large for us and makes us look baggy and frumpy is just as big a fashion disaster as wearing a pair of pants that's one size too small. Remember that clothes have to be draped around our bodies - no clinging and no hanging, either. Choose wisely, mix and match according to your body shape and size, and enjoy the results.