I lost 27 pounds last year. And I'm no Arnold or Jack LaLanne...All I did was walk 50-60 minutes a day, not eat after 6 PM, no junk food, and eat a somewhat light dinner. My breakfast was as it always was.

I see a lot of very big people, here in Hawaii. I mean really, really big people. Morbidly obese people. People whose weight has become unmanageable for them... At one point I had a night job as a stocking clerk in a local budget foods store and I could see first hand all the things that these big people buy. I put cases and cases of "food" on the shelves that were loaded with calories but didn't seem to have any nutrients. I began calling them "FFD's" or "Flavor Delivery Devices". If you took everything in that store that actually had food value - by that I mean something more than just calories - it wouldn't have filled a single aisle. Judging by what I would see in the shopping carts of these physically distressed people it was easy to guess that they had no idea what they were eating and were driven solely by the experience of eating it rather than by what it meant to them as food. They are either unconscious or out of control.
I live simply. I stir fry vegetables several times a day, eat fresh fruit. Take an occasional bit of fish. Soymilk based fruit smoothies, Coffee... I am at an ideal weight. If I resort to foods that I used to like my body reacts very strongly. The longer I have kept to a simpler diet, the less interested I am in a diversity in my eating habits. I do take supplements and have a lot of variety in fruits and vegies and I train daily. Four years ago I was about sixty pounds over weight and since then I have just focused on being physically active - I swim a lot - and limited my overall intake of calories to about 700 every 12hours until I cut all the excess and then focused on the best nutrition I could find and the right supplemental foods to support my choice in atheletic pursuits.

Wanna lose weight?
Donate your snack money to your desired candidate
and go door to door campaigning to get this regime Outta HERE!

Two things I know
1. When you are depressed - learn something. You cannot think about what is making you sad when you are trying to master a new skill or new information.
2. There is no such thing as taking too much green tea

Let's get animal, animal, I wanna get animal, let's get into animal, lemme hear your body talk....

It's amazing how you guys will post this cheese, but will squelch comments on a story which deals with the war deaths to-date.

That article and its accompanying statistics should be headlines WELL ABOVE any Huckabee/Romney story.......above ANY election story....above any ridiculous fitness story.

Are we already letting the horror of this "war" (shooting/bombing gallery) slip down the priority chain?

The only thing I would contribute to this would be that nearly all of the articles are directed toward women.
Most of the people I see commenting are male. Not by a large margin, but it's there.

I think it''s time for HuffPo to conduct a poll of their visitors.

So how is Olivia Neutron-Bomb anyway? Whatever happened to her?

Gary Taubes's "Good Calories, Bad Calories" was an eye-opener for me. Explains why low-fat has always made me high-fat.

Things I do:
I follow my own previously posted advice.
I walk every day in good weather for 30 minutes to an hour or I do indoor aerobics when it's raining/snowing on an inexpensive step platform while watching dvds.I try to get at least 8 or 9 hours of sleep each night, so I go to bed early/get up early. I keep a non judgmental food diary to make sure I'm getting ENOUGH calories for my needs (not the other way around), which on a very active day can be around 2500-3000 calories and on less active days I will eat less without effort or hunger. Eating for my needs keeps my metabolism rev'd up.
I don't watch commercial TV, but I do enjoy reading and listening to music, or watching movies on dvds.
I eat the best quality wholesome and minimally processed food I can find, organic if I can afford it or not if I can't.
Being healthy is a privilege and a responsibility.
Without reasonably good health we can't do ourselves or this planet any good.

Exercise daily and don't eat junk food. It's not that difficult. People just don't want to work for it. Nifty "plans" and absurd machines can't do it for you.

Do you really want to get the lowdown on what works and doesn't work as far as weight loss and obesity is concerned instead of opinions with no solid randomized, clinical studies to back it up? Then go read "Good Calories Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, who reviews 150 years of scientific and clinical studies on the subject of nutrition in the book and sorts out facts from fantasy.

What works for me is keeping a food diary of everything I eat. I highly recommend that tip to anyone who wants to lose weight. Good luck!