The No Diet Diet

Welcome! This is a good place to start

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1080242-a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants

^This and here is a little more reading material:

http://body-improvements.com/2013/05/24/undiet-your-diet/

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1122891-9-reasons-fat-loss-is-always-slower-than-you-d-like

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1105036-article-on-flexible-dieting-by-armi-legge?page=1#posts-17068746

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/ihad/view/the-myth-of-good-and-bad-foods-by-eric-helms-588801

"Diet" is a tricky word, because we use in two senses in the modern US. The first is "a short-term set of foods that I will eat while losing weight, and then give up when I reach my goal." That's like the Grapefruit Diet, or the Atkins Diet. The second sense is "the balanced set of foods that I normally eat," the way people talk about the "Mediterranean diet" (which is more of an abstraction) or the traditional Inuit diet (very high on protein and fat). People who lose weight on the first kind of diet usually put it back on, because they return to an unhealthy diet in the second sense, and go back to overeating a little bit.

You need a healthy diet in the second sense: a good mixture of foods that provides a balance of macronutrients, with plenty of vitamins and minerals. It has to be something that can sustain you for life.

You need to avoid a diet in the first sense: arbitrary restrictions of foodstuffs.

However, there's no escaping the laws of physics: if you want to lose weight, you have to restrict calories, so that you burn more than you take in; the excess will come from metabolizing your body's fat stores. Don't think of it as a diet; think of it as temporary calorie restriction.

If you want to keep from losing too much muscle while doing this, you'll also need some resistance training.

And if you're like most of us, you'll need to continue to be vigilant for the rest of your life once you've reached your goal; physiological changes caused by weight loss persist some time after you reach your goal weight.

Good luck on your journey!