I've managed to lose 20+ pounds since August by changing up my diet just a bit, and adding exercise.

The key changes I made food-wise:
Fruit cup for breakfast (with some yogurt and walnuts), or healthy cereal with soy milk (but I like vanilla soy milk, so ymmv).
No fast food lunches. Period.
Pack a lunch (leftovers!), or buy a salad or turkey sandwich.
Snack on carrots or snap peas, instead of everything else.
No soda, and no more caramel lattes (just temporarily)
Any and all dinners allowed, as long as I feel I'm being reasonable. Eat fish for dinner often.

The rest of the changes:
A few sit-ups and pushups before the morning shower.
I bought an exercise bike and parked it in front of the DVR. When I want to catch up on TV, I ride my silly bike. I started at 10 minutes, and now I ride an hour at a time, just a few times a week.

Like you, I would never consider giving up pizza, alcohol, cheese, pasta, chocolate or nuts – but I have cut back my “indulgent” consumption.

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You said "I know that there are times when a person can't drink or can't drink that often, such as when they have certain diseases or diabetes or something, but I think a world without alcohol is a sad world." I assume by "something" you meant the world's second largest religion. (For the record, I'm not muslim, just pointing out a fact.)

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i agree too that giving up certain things is tough. i love cheese and altho occasionally i can manage to go through a month or two without it eventually i always gravitate back to the creamy deliciousness. however, one thing i have done for the last couple of years in order to extremely effectively regulate weight is UPPING YOUR INTAKE OF FIBER. i know its in the news a lot, and very generally many people know they should get more fiber. but until you really do manage to get 20-30 grams of fiber in your diet every day for a while you wont realize the effect. amazing. not to get too specific but youll end up having one to two bowel movements a day. this will constantly keep your body flushing the old while you eat the new, as it were. this cycle is totally effective in regulating your weight. anything 'bad'that you may have eaten will be flushed from your systam that much quicker. realize that when 'bad' or 'good' food just sits and marinates in your body its no good. encourage your body to up the cycle. try it , for real.

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geekpdx has some very good ideas. My current diet his similar:

* Fruit cup for breakfast
* Sliced apples for a snack
* Salad for lunch
* Whatever for dinner, just limit portions
* Here's the key: Whenever I want a snack, I drink a cup of green tea. Every non-meal food craving is satisfied with a nice bitter cuppa for the time being.

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I used to work in a Borders bookstore cafe--actually, I worked at two different ones, for many years.

And I would highly suggest you give up the Borders chai, not only because you would save on fat and calories, but because the stuff it is made out of is just plain icky.

Make real chai instead--it tastes better, and you can control how much fat (from the milk or cream) and sugar it has in it, because you are putting it in yourself.

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I've avoided large quantities of meat and fat for a number of years, but I continued to gain weight this year, especially this summer. It coincided with what appeared to be a summer cold, or flu, or similar infection that was making it harder for me to breathe.

As it turned out, both were just symptoms of the same problem: congestive heart failure, which was caught a month ago in the proverbial "nick of time." Thanks to diuretics and a change of diet, I've lost 44 pounds in one month. (Note: I do not recommend this. A healthy heart is a much better idea.)

Because of this, I'm now under orders to lower my sodium intake, lest I retain more fluids and make my heart work harder, and you know, die (sadly, no exaggeration). It is absolutely critical to me to eat less salt.

The funny thing is that my limit is 2000mg per day, and the USRDA limit for people under 50 years of age is just 2400mg, so you'd think it's not that big a deal. But it's huge. It is all but impossible to get a standard fast-food combo with less than 1500mg of sodium, and that's just one meal in an entire day (and certainly not all the calories you need).

I knew I was probably eating more salt than I should, but I didn't think it was that big a deal, and even as a CSPI supporter, I thought their crusade against salt might be a little bit overblown. (http://www.cspinet.org/salt/) But now that I *have* to know how much sodium is in the food I eat, I'm not so sure.

2400mg is the recommended daily *limit* for sodium intake for good health. One level teaspoon of table salt has 2350mg of sodium.

Yeah.

Sandwiches are all but out - not only are the meats and dressings fairly salty, but most commercial breads have between 200mg and 400mg of sodium *per slice.* Add 250mg for a slice of cheese and 300mg for an ounce of lunch meat and you're talking over 1000mg per sandwich, and who eats just two sandwiches in an entire day?

The "individually sized" CarbTracker 6" Pizza Hut Pepperoni Pizza has 1550mg sodium. The Meat Lover's version? 2170mg of sodium - more than my new daily limit and 90% of anyone's recommended limit.

Taco Bell bean burrito? 1200mg. 7-layer burrito is 1400mg, and the "Southwest Steak Border Bowl" is 2330mg. Even Nachos BellGrande is 1400mg. (Tacos, as it turns out, are not so bad - 350mg each, so 3 of them for a dinner is OK on most days.)

Of course, when CSPI came out with its report, the restaurant industry immediately called them "extremist," just as they do with absolutely any person who suggests that eating 3 meals per day at restaurants might not be the absolute healthiest thing in the world for you (they portray people in favor of you knowing what's in your food as "against freedom of choice," which is the neatest Orwellian trick of the past 20 years). You expect the Salt Institute to object, but the prepared food industry does too - salt is cheap, salt tastes good, and it makes products last longer.

So if you're eating 7000 or 8000mg of sodium per day, maybe you're carrying around 5-10 extra pounds of water weight. When I got put on diuretics after my diagnosis, I shed 22 pounds in 24 hours, all of it fluid. By eating low sodium since then, I've shed another 22 pounds, largely because there aren't that many calorie-dense low-sodium foods, unless I want to eat butter or drink peanut oil.

So on your list of 8 foods you "won't give up," I have to modify at least four of them. I can't eat commercial pizza anymore because two slices may be two days' worth of sodium - but right now, I'm preparing my own crust without salt (it's easy and tasty - just use 1/4 as much yeast and don't expect it to last for days) and adding low-salt ingredients like fresh mozzarella (85mg sodium per ounce), tomatoes, basil, and such.

Pasta is generally fine, but I can't use heavily salted sauces, nor can I salt the cooking water, which does affect the taste somewhat. Cheese I can have as long as it's low in sodium - some of the deli swiss cheeses are quite low, as is fresh mozzarella. Real Parmigano Reggiano cheese has anywhere from half to a third of the sodium as the domestic stuff because they make it in larger batches and more of the brine drains away - and it just tastes better, too. Pre-popped popcorn is out - all of that stuff is way too salty. (Guiltless Gourmet makes unsalted corn chips, which are very bland unless you find a low-salt salsa to go with them; A&J's Lasagna Chips are pretty low in sodium and *very* tasty, at 300mg sodium for most full 5-ounce bags.)

Of course not everyone is experiencing heart failure, but the more sodium we eat, the more fluid we retain and the harder the heart works. If CSPI's charges didn't ring somewhat true, the restaurant industry wouldn't have gone completely overboard in trying to paint the group as people who are "not content knowing that some people continue to occasionally enjoy a meal." (That's a direct quote: http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_detail.cfm?headline=2754 and a ridiculous one since CSPI publishes yummy recipes every month.)

Ornish proved that eating a very-low fat diet can reverse *coronary* artery disease, but we may have gone overboard in ignoring sodium while ditching fat, at least as far as health goes. (Egg Beaters? No fat, but twice as much sodium as actual eggs.)

I don't have any general recommendations, but after my experience, including a good week of really not being able to breathe due to fluid retention, I can damn well guarantee you that I'll give up Pizza Hut before I'll go through that again. We're all going to have to pay a lot more attention to this over the next decade than we have been. One level teaspoon of salt per day is the recommended limit. Yikes.

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