Deciding that you need to lose a bit (or a lot) of weight is easy. Following through is the tough part!

So how to motivate yourself?

A good idea is to write down how you think you'll feel if you succeed in losing however many pounds you want to lose.
Will you feel more energetic?
More confidant?
Happier?
Healthier?
Will people be happier to spend time with you?
Will it be good for your love life?

Whatever it is that you yourself feel will be the results of losing weight, write it in a list and put the list on your fridge.
Then add a 'before' and 'after'picture of you when you were slim and you as you are right now.
Then every time you go to the fridge, look at the pictures and read one of the items on your list.

Now start another list (for the fridge of course) with what you are going to eat to transform yourself back to your slimmer self.
Maybe decide that for one month you will eat nothing but raw foods and that at the end of a month you are going to evaluate whether this has made you closer to the way you want to be.
If that is the route you are taking, then fill the fridge with cantalopes, celery, carrots, watermelon, lettuce, cucumbers, spring onions, tomatoes, all sorts of berries, apples, raw nuts and seed etc. Make sure that there is plenty of all your favourite fruits and veggies and nuts and seeds.
Make yourself fresh juice at least once a day, maybe fresh carrot and celery juice with a little garlic and basil once a day, and an apple juiced with nuts and blueberries at another time.

Whatever you do, don't go hungry. Eat until you are full! Depriving yourself that way is a sure route to failure.

Many people eat too much because it gives them a feeling of being comforted. Maybe this is from when we were a baby and maybe whenever we screamed we were cuddled and fed so we associate food with comfort. Most people know about comfort foods!

Our lives are and always have been full of a mix of good and bad things. Probably some very good things and some very bad things.

If we dwell on the bad things too much, if they are things that cannot be changed then clearly we will want to be comforted. If that means overeating and the overeating makes us way overweight, then we just have one more bad problem with lots of potential health problems.

And just maybe we'll be so upset because we don't look good or feel good that we'll need comforting, and what will we turn to for that but more starchy fatty foods to make us feel better for a short while.

Your body is a finely tuned instrument that knows when it is hungry. When you are hungry eat some healthy food in a reasonable portion. It may take the stomach a bit of time to send a message to the brain that you are full, so eat slowly and thoughtfully. Enjoy what you do eat, and listen to your body. When it tells you you are full, then stop eating. Be busy with something else that you like doing so that you don't obsess about food.

But most of all, look at all the bad things that have happened to you all your life. Write them all down. Be your own good parent - sympathise with yourself for all the bad things. Then tell yourself that that was in the past. The past can't be changed, but there is no need for it to ruin the rest of your life. Look the at all bad things straight on. Tell yourself that they were not your fault and that you are not going to continue to suffer because of them. That this is the beginning of a new happier you.

For a while you will feel different - your stomach is used to being filled up more. But if you don't overeat all the time your stomach will get used to not being filled up so much.

Don't go hungry and starve yourself. That is not going to work in the long run. After a while you'll feel deprived because you are trying to deprive yourself and then you'll quit, and because your body thinks that there was a famine it will have created a pile more fat cells so that when you start binging again you get fatter than ever so that you can survive the next famine.

Well, I've been on holidays for a couple of weeks. Just got back and I haven't had a chance to weigh myself on a reliable scale, but I did have to put a new notch into a belt I had been wearing just before I went away. My waist line was down 3".

Over the 2 weeks I think I had 5 cooked meals (mostly because of the social situation I was in at the time. The rest of my meals were 100% raw and I was eating as much as I wanted to.

Raw means different things to different people. For me it means that the food contains plenty of natural enzymes still - that they haven't been killed by heating etc.

So I have raw live yoghurt (both milk and soymilk yoghurts) in my diet and cheeses. The milk that they are made from has probably been boiled, but then some natural cultures have been grown using the milk or soymilk as a medium, so that these foods have plenty of enzymes alive and well.

I have to say that I feel way more energetic on this diet.