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You should be eating lots of vegetables, fruits, beans, and whole grains. Eat the fruits and vegetables raw when possible. Look for whole grain bread and pasta. Use something like I Can't Believe It's Not Butter or Smart Balance in place of butter. Drink water, tea, fruit juice, or vegetable juice instead of soda. Cut out or cut down on meat and dairy, especially red meat.

Get organic food when possible. Avoid things like MSG. Read ingredients labels. The more complex, the worse it probably is for you! If you dont know what most of the ingredients are, look for a more natural alternative.

Make sure you read nutrition labels. Don't just look at calories either. Some foods seem low in calories but are still high in fat. Other foods look ok until you realize that the serving size on the label is very very small. So look at the serving size. Look at the saturated fat, and look at the cholesterol. Saturated fat and cholesterol are things can make you gain weight, increase your risk of diabetes, and clog your arteries. So those are things you want to limit or avoid, even when you are a healthy weight.

The three big traditional meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) are no longer recommended. Now it's recommended that we eat about six small meals a day. When we eat small meals our stomach won't stretch out and want more. And when we eat often it keeps our metabolism running high and burning fat at full speed.

There are a lot of tasty alternatives to junk food. You can eat fruit, cereal, soy ice cream, or frozen yogurt when you want something sweet. You can also look for baked chips or have salsa and tortilla chips if you want something salty. That kind of stuff is a bit better than most types of packaged cookies and chips.

It's difficult to say how long it will take you to lose weight because losing weight depends on so many factors. It depends on how overweight you are, what your natural metabolism is like, how good you are about eating right, how much exercise you can fit into your schedule, whether you're on any medications that increase your weight or slow your metabolism, whether you have a thyroid problem, etc.

But don't rush it. Losing weight the right way usually takes time. When people lose a lot of weight in a short amount of time, it's usually just water weight. In other words, they often lose pounds by dehydrating themselves, not by actually losing any body fat. Besides being unhealthy, they'll just gain that weight back when they start eating and drinking enough again anyway. So stay hydrated and try to lose a small amount of weight at a time. It takes a lot of patience, but you're more likely to keep it off that way because you're more likely to shed fat rather than just water.