I am a man with a naturally high metabolism so it is much easier for me to drop a few pounds than it is for you ladies. My wife and I are close to retirement age and have never had to use special diets and exercise to control our weight although I consider them valuable. We both have always eaten "healthy" our whole lives because that is what we like and have gained the benefits even before people started talking about it to control weight problems.
Because my wife has food allergies we eat no "processed" food, everything is bought fresh and cooked at home. It lacks all the additives, sugars and fats that food manufacturers throw in there to make their product taste good. Making dishes a couple of thousand pounds at a time and then freezing, canning or putting enough preservatives into it to give a long shelf life makes the product taste terrible so they add all the stuff that is bad for us. They are getting better at making products healthier because people are demanding it but there is still a lot of bad stuff hidden in the products.
Pkunk35 - Great post on the importance of fiber that we also include in our diet. I believe it is not only the fiber that benefits us but the other nutrients that are contained in high fiber foods. I think that our bodies tell us we need these vitamins and minerals by making us hungry. If we eat something containing these vital nutrients, the hunger goes away. If we eat a hamburger or whatever the hunger doesn't go away so we eat another burger. I have been very hungry and not sure what I wanted until I see a banana. That banana was the best tasting one I ever had (my body encouraging me to eat it) so I ate two. My hunger left, which it would not have if I had eaten two sandwiches, because my body's need for potassium had been filled.
IMO the worst thing we can put into our body is fast food for the same reasons as "processed" food. I developed a "beer belly" (not from beer) in my early 40's as many skinny men do. I simply stopped eating fast food for lunch every day at work and a couple months later the "bad food belly" was gone and I dropped twenty pounds with no other effort on my part. That doesn't mean I never eat fast food, I just avoid it and don't think it hurts me to rarely eat it. Maybe my body needs some grease sometimes. Unfortunately our fast paced society chooses to grab something quickly and run or throw something in the microwave and call it dinner even though there is very little nutrition and a lot of wasted calories in what they eat. Simply thinking about what we eat can improve our general health and drop some pounds as well.
I have worked in food manufacturing for over thirty years and would like to give an example of what happens to improve "processed food" when customers or the government demand it. The bad that is in it will stay there until it is profitable to remove it. About 10 years ago the government decided that "trans fats" are bad for us and required food companies to list the percentage of transfats in their product on the label. Manufacturers did not want to list anything on their label that is "bad" so they removed them from their products which benefits all of us. Believe me, there were lots of transfats that we didn't know about before they were required to reveal them on the label. The majority of transfats develop in our food through the process of "partially hydrogenating" vegetable oils (shortening which is contained in many foods that you would not expect it in). Fats such as shortening are added in very high levels to improve flavor and product texture so the industry scrambled to find a shortening that was not "partially hydrogenated" to use for a zero transfat product. The company I worked for at the time found that all transfat free shortenings not only did not improve the flavor of products but made them taste terrible. This forced the shortening industry to develop products that were not partially hydrogenated, tasted good and functioned properly when used in other products. They did a good job developing new products that worked well before the labeling deadline so the food companies could declare zero transfats on their label when they were required to reveal the levels. We can also email food manufacturers and ask for heathier versions of their products.
