I've found tat for me, I have to go totally cold turkey and eliminate ALL the nasties. If I allow one small potato chip, for example, I will keep going. It's easier to refuse it all.
But it's almost impossible, in practical terms, to do this and still eat especially when you're out and about.
So I set some rules, like a priority scale of what to avoid first, etc.
The problems are multiple - carbs in general get used as fuel and any excess is turned into sugar, which then gets turned into fat. Depending on your body and how well it's functioning, the process of all this can be laying down sugar and/or fat in very unhealthy ways, which was happening to me - I was eating a low fat diet (had been for over 12 years) but instead, as is almost inevitable with a low-fat diet, sugar was creeping in instead and my body was turning all this into fat and storing it in my liver, which then began to suffocate and strangle itself. An overloaded liver then can't metabolise toxins properly, which meant more weight was going on. And so on.
Something else to keep in mind - we burn more energy earlier in the day, so a carb-loaded breakfast is tolerable, while a carb-loaded evening meal is not. Similarly, if you're going to reward yourself keep it either very small, or save it for the next morning.
And another thing which can help you - when you eat carbs, your body begins the digestion process in your mouth. Good bacteria plus your own body enzymes immediately begin to break down the carbs into glucose. You then, after about ten minutes or more, get a sour taste in your mouth. For a lot of us, this is almost a signal to get rid of it with something else sweet. Rinsing out with water just won't do it. But if you KNOW it's due to the carbs you just had, it might be easier to avoid it. Also, once you really reduce your carbs you really notice the sour taste when you Do have carbs, and you become even more eager to avoid it.
Before you really go on a diet, do this test - get a piece of bread and chew it. Don't swallow (not just yet). Keep chewing. You will soon notice tat it starts to taste sweet - this is your saliva breaking the carbs down to glucose - it happens that fast. OK, you can swallow now. Point is made.
So, for my sliding scale of what to avoid, in which order:
1) Cut out as much fat as you can, but watch out for the hidden sugars in low-fat processed food.
2) Cut out all sugars. This includes natural sources of sugar such as honey (which has just as many calories per gram as sugar).
3) Now cut out all simple carbs (the ones our bodies can too readily convert to glucose). This means eliminate potato, sweet potato, anything made with white flour or white rice. And pasta.
You can be a bit lax with this one, allow a tiny amount but not too often. It depends on how much you want to cut back.
4) Limit fruit to one serve per day. This can be in the form of frozen fruit or frozen fruit juice. I use a frozen fruit juice as an alternate form of dessert.
Now to what you CAN have - unlimited vegetables. A lump of lean protein, the size of the palm of your hand, for lunch and dinner. Wholegrain carbs (such as brown rice, polenta or other form of corn product other than popcorn, wholegrain bread). Not wholegrain pasta, because it can't be made with only wholegrain flour, it has to have a fair bit of white flour in it.
To drink - low-joule soft drinks, water. Avoid alcoholic drinks, avoid any drinks with sugar. Keep milk to a minimum, although skim milk is OK (unsweetened). Drink plenty of fluids.
But you want something sweet? I allow artificial sweeteners. OK, harsh chemicals (by some people's reckoning). But have you tried isomalt?
You can't have too much of it, because it doesn't get metabolised at all so as it proceeds through your digestive system it takes a certain amount of water with it. In your GI tract, this has the effect of causing things to be a little 'loose'. The more of this you eat, the looser, until you feel like you have a massive belly-ache. But if you can try just a few sweets made with isomalt, they taste exactly like real sweets because to your tastebuds, they ARE real sugar.
Scientifically, isomalt is sugar (sucrose), but the molecule is a mirror image. Literally. If you held up a model of the molecule to a mirror, the image in the mirror would be the one for sucrose.
Because it's a mirror image, it is biologically inert. Chemically it 'reads' as sugar (to our tastebuds, for example) but if we only had this to eat, we would starve.
Ants don't recognise it.
It behaves exactly like sugar in so many ways, but being biologically inert means that when you eat a sweet made with isomalt - no sour aftertaste!
So if you want to get some breath mints, etc look for isomalt ones.
But limit yourself to no more than three every few hours, until you know how much your body can tolerate.
This way you can diet, still get your taste of sweet things, and be healthy.
Oh, one last thing - chocolate is good for you, in moderation. But it has to be GOOD chocolate (like dark chocolate made with cocoa butter, not cheap compounded stuff made with copha). So I buy a block of really good dark chocolate (currently it's a brand with crushed coffee beans mixed in as well) and allow myself ONE square of chocolate a day. That way the coffee beans in it prevent the sour after-taste from the sugar (also the bitterness of the dark chocolate). And if you still get an aftertaste you don't want, such an isomalt sweet.
WHen you follow tihs diet and begin to read labels looking for the hidden carbs and sugars, you will realise just how much secret carbs they shove at us when we are away from home. Even allegedly healthy fast food has hidden carbs. Maybe it's sugar in the salad dressing. Maybe it's hidden rice noodles inside the wraps. Or extra layers of wrapping.
The only healthy takeaway fast food is sushi. And even that is based on white rice!
Good luck!
Marg