1. The first step is to stop eating what you know is bad for you.

2. More Meals  5-8 smaller/healthier meals eaten in a day is much better than 3 large meals! (Keep fuel coming in regularly to keep your blood sugar & metabolism stable.)

3. Protein with every meal

4. Try to eat either Carbs & Protein or Fats & Protein -  Avoid Fats & Carbs together (See Insulin)

5. Two times that you can ingest carbohydrates with little fear of getting fat: during/after TRAINING (Post Workout) & breakfast- Glycogen reserves can be extremely low in the morning.

6. Try to eat Fruits with your first 3 meals and Fibrous veggies( Not Corn or potatoes) with last meals or anytime -Virtually impossible to overeat Broccoli. 

7. Drink mainly non-calorie containing beverages (No sugar sodas or juices) [at least one-half ounce for every pound of your body weight]

8. Ensure that 25-30% of your daily energy intake comes from Fats- Mostly monounsaturates (Nuts) & polyunsaturates (Salmon) - with saturates no more than 5-10% (Animal Fat) - Avoid ALL Trans-Fats.

9. Except for WorkOut/PostWorkout aim for wholesome & nutritious foods (No empty Calories) - Most Carbs Fruits and Veggies.

        Sorry, but just buying packaged foods marked "low-fat" does not a diet make.

Behaviors that lead to the fattening of Americans:

1) Skipping breakfast: This leads to catabolism (muscle loss) and thus metabolism damage. It also leads to binge eating later in the day.

2) Eating lots of unhealthy food and drinking lots of nutritionally worthless calories (soft drinks and alcohol).

3) Eating only two or three giant meals a day.

4) Going to bed right after eating a big, high carb meal. (Get Carbs early in day)

5) Not moving around much.

Diet & Fitness Links We know that leptin levels decrease by about 50% after only one week of energy restriction, but fortunately, it doesn't take nearly that long for leptin to bump back up with a substantial increase in caloric intake. In fact, research has shown that it only takes about 12-24 hours. (27, 55, 61) So, the answer to the fat loss catch-22 lies within strategic dietary cheating.

"What I discovered when I started eating more unsaturated fats? I lost fat! Shocker eh? Why could this be... your body is not going to let go of its precious fat stores, until it 'knows' it's going to get a steady intake of more fat. A bit like drinking water - the more you drink, the less you hold, because the body becomes accustomed to the fact that it can release water, because new water is coming in all the time.

While responsible researchers will tell you the precise cause of metabolic syndrome is unknown, I'm going to go out on a little limb here and tell you it has pretty much everything to do with eating like crap, not exercising, and letting yourself get fat.

Where do you think most females go wrong with diet?

Tania Becht They go wrong by depriving themselves of calories! A lot of women are still stuck in the mindset that to lose weight, you have to cut calories. I didn't realize the importance of eating frequently throughout the day (instead of going hours without eating) until I began competing and saw the major affect it had on my physique and my body's ability to burn fat.
I try to convey the importance of eating to women who say they "just can't lose weight." Just try it and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the result. As long as it's healthy, clean eating every three hours or so can't go wrong!

"The most effective thing to improve body composition is use carbohydrate timing and individualization."   What this means is:

Unless you've exercised in the last 2-3 hours, you DON'T eat starchy/refined or sugary carbs. The rest of the day, eat Protein, Fats, vegetables & complex Carbs (avoid all carbs in evening.)

The reason you want to have multiple meals, is that it takes a lot of energy to digest food. If you're digesting food three times a day verses six, you're selling yourself short on the thermic (calorie-burning) effect of food. So, you'll burn significantly more calories by eating six times a day.
But also, by eating frequent meals, with quality protein of course, you can sustain blood amino acids levels all day long! Research suggests that this hyperaminoacidemia, as scientists like to call it, can in and of itself promote an anabolic response.

Plus you're more efficient in absorbing nutrients if you spread it out. The body isn't very efficient when eating one to three big meals a day. So the benefits are twofold: you burn more calories with six meals a day and you can absorb more key nutrients. This is very important, especially if you're on a low calorie diet. You need to spread out your intake of calories to prime the absorption of potent vitamins and minerals. Of course, you'll also raise your metabolism and burn fat faster by eating more meals per day.

Bristol Stool Chart medical aid designed to classify the form of human feces into seven groups.

Why Eat:

1) as a preventive measure to help stay free from illness

2) for fitness, to ensure optimum energy stores, recuperation, and restoration

3) for bodybuilders especially, to produce a cosmetic effect, i.e. a leaner, harder physique.

When it comes to food volume, it appears that the average volume required for adequate satiety is 3-4 pounds (based on body size) per day.

If you get your 3-4lbs of food per day, hunger should be kept at bay. If you don't it wont. And this is largely independent of calories.

If you're eating only 2lbs of food each day but that food contains 5,000kcal, you'll likely be just as hungry as if you ate 2lbs of food that only contains 1,500kcal.

And that's a good lesson for dieters! Increasing the volume while curbing the calories will help battle hunger and cravings.
 

The leaner you are, the better your body becomes at nutrient partitioning. This means that lean individuals are more effective at storing the ingested nutrients in the muscle (as muscle tissue or glycogen) or in the liver (glycogen), and less effective at storing them as body fat. Simply put, leaner individuals can eat more nutrients without gaining fat.

The fatter you let yourself become, the more fat cells you're adding to your body. This will make it easier to gain fat and harder to lose it in the future, not to mention that the fatter you are, the less insulin sensitive you become. This is one of the reasons why fatter individuals are more effective at storing nutrients in the form of body fat than their leaner counterparts.

Fatty, salt-laden/sugar-laden foods are VERY appetite stimulating, caloric dense and often lead to binge eating. Your chances of controlling your caloric intake will be enhanced with lean meats and veggies as opposed to chips, salted nuts and candy bars.

The currently-fat will never cop to their gluttony, but once they lose weight they'll sheepishly admit they were eating a massive amount of crappy food -- usually on the sly, hiding from family, co-workers and friends. It's the unwritten rule of fat dieters: 'if no one sees you eating it, the calories don't count.'

"Man has been using carbohydrates to fatten up domestic animals for thousands of years.

With all this reliance on carbohydrates, foods became more and more refined. In a matter of speaking, they came to you pre-digested. The fiber was removed, which meant it had to be fortified with vitamins, and only those vitamins that nutritionists deemed important or healthful. The flour was pulverized into dust. This drywall mix masquerading as food was more easily digested than even plain sucrose or glucose. Eating it day after day caused repeated Everest-like spikes in insulin, often leading to Type II diabetes."