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I used to weight 180 but now thanks to hospital food and emotional eating i now weigh 220. When I weighed 180 i could eat whatever i wanted as long as i balanced and regulated my intake. People(not professional nutritionist) are telling me "you should completley cut fat, sweets, and most meat out of your diet." That seems a little extreme. I tried that and ended up eating an entire cake! What seems best other than seeing a nutrionist?

jogging along with small meals every 2-3 hours and a dinner 2/3 of what you would normally eat.

Eating broccoli burns more calories eating and digesting than it contains.

Drinking cold water boosts metabolism.

Get a job at UPS or FEDEX, where you'll be paid to work out in trucks that are 100 degrees in the summer time, and the fat will melt away.

Thanks much! I can't get a job like that because i'm only a teenager an live in the boones. I'll try jogging though.

Sorry, but if you're not prepared to get 'extreme', you'll never beat the problem. I'm a big proponent of the Protein Diet. Lean meat and vegetables and nothing else. And plenty of exercise. You don't start burning off fat until you get that heart rate up and keep it up. Sweat is your buddy. Diet like a fiend five days a week, then treat yourself on the weekends, but only for 48 hours, then get right back on that wagon.

As for cake, that sort of stuff shouldn't even be allowed in the house. If its not there, you CAN'T eat it. I know you live with other people, but tell them what you're trying to do and ask them to work with you for a few months. IF somebody has to have sweets, let 'em go out for that stuff, but no bringing any home. If you're dying for something sweet, eat fruit. Apple juice is cheap and will quickly satisfy a sugar craving. Fructose sugars are absorbed and burned off by the body much more easily than processed sugar in sweets anyway.

Don't forget to take a daily vitamin supplement, and even after you hit your goal weight, treat white bread and potatoes like they're poison. They turn straight to fat, almost before you're done chewing them up.

Walking or running are the best exercise (well, actually swimming may be even better, but not everybody has access to beaches and pools), I prefer a treadmill because I can use it even when its raining, but if you don't have or can't afford one, there's always the sidewalk.

Weight benches are not very expensive, and I guarantee if you do just a few sets of bench presses and barbell curls a day, you will start to see noticeable results in six weeks or less - it is an awesome feeling to be able to look in the mirror and see the results of your hard work. Makes you want to keep it up. Then it becomes a routine and you don't want to stop.

I also recommend a workout video with a decent ab crunch routine on it, for flattening up the middle (Tony Little used to have one in a series called 'Target Training' that was very good). Even if you don't care about a sixpack (I prefer to drink them), its nice to be able to tuck a shirt in and let the front of it fall straight down, instead of looking like a sheet over a beach ball.

All in all, a daily workout doesn't have to take more than an hour, and that's if you walk a couple of miles, lift weights for twenty minutes and do a ten minute ab routine. Longer at first maybe, because you'll be moving slower in the beginning. That's the other beauty of the treadmill, you can gradually increase the speed each week, forcing yourself to walk or run faster.

I know its hard to screw up the resolve to get started, and its not unusual to start and fail a time or two before you really get the momentum going, but trust me, its totally worth it. The real trick is, once you get the weight off and go back to a fairly normal food regimen - keep up the exercise - as long as you keep your metabolism up, your body will keep burning calories as you absorb them, instead of storing them as fat. Once you get the weight off you can never forget that if you cease being vigilant about staying fit - the fat will come back, and you'll have to start the whole process all over again. Once you see how much better you look and feel, you won't want that to happen, ever.