Good luck!

Many years ago I was diagnosed with borderline high blood pressure, and rather than look at medication I decided to lose 40 lbs and, along the way, move toward a high-fiber, low-inflammatory diet.

These are rules that worked for me:

1. Eat all the vegetables you want. Steam 'em, stir-fry 'em, eat 'em raw in salad, stew 'em, bake 'em. Eat all you want!!

2. Strictly limit high-calorie foods: concentrated carbs like bread, cookies, pancakes, etc. Watch out for prepared foods containing high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar.

3. Limit most fats -- no deep-fried stuff, little butter, no lard. Especially, limit saturated fats.

4. Eat still more veggies! Eat all you want! For example, baked sweet potatoes have less than a third the calories of toasted white bread, and far more vitamin A and C. I keep a pan of sweet potatoes in the fridge for quick snacks.

Watch out for saturated fats that come with some meats. Beef has twice as much saturated fat as salmon, while salmon has five times more anti-inflammatory omega-3 oils. Yes, you have to watch out for mercury in fish -- though in general, salmon and herring have much lower mercury levels than tuna and swordfish. But eat fish in preference to beef or pork.

You know all this already, I'll bet. And it's nothing radical -- weight-watchers uses a similar rationale, with some foods "free" due to high nutritional value and relatively low caloric content while other foods are strictly rationed.

The other part is exercise. Do whatever you can to get your heart rate up for awhile each day. When you exercise blood flow increases to your muscles and decreases to your digestive tract, with one side effect being that you don't feel hungry as much.

A story about that -- the day after Christmas I was in Fairhope, Alabama, and thought I would walk to a nearby marina and eat lunch at the Fly Creek Cafe. Well, it was closed. So I decided I would walk north along the road and find a place to eat in either Montrose or Daphne. NOTHING was open. I ended up walking 12 miles round-trip with no lunch, but I found that as long as I kept striding along at a good pace I didn't feel hungry. Of course that only works if you start out well-nourished and don't keep it up for too long -- eventually ya gotta eat! But the point is, vigorous activity can help you resist unnecessary eating.

The common advice for those losing weight through changing diet is, make the diet a lifestyle change meant to last a lifetime. I still follow my dietary rules for the most part, and I like eating my way.

Again, good luck!

Post script -- I wrote the above before reading your post on hypoglycemia. If you have blood-sugar sensitivities (I hesitate to use the word "problems") then perhaps you'll need to monitor your carbohydrate intake and not necessarily cut it as drastically as I did at first.

Oh, and on the subject of fats and oils -- I found a cooking oil in my supermarket that has a blend of olive, soy, and canola oil that yields a 1:4 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 oils. I use it pretty much exclusively for cooking now.