Nothing, no single diet or single exercise program, works best for everybody. The only things that are really in common are: 1) Be motivated to change your lif

Nothing, no single diet or single exercise program, works best for everybody. The only things that are really in common are: 1) Be motivated to change your lifestyle. A lot of people are motivated to be healthier (I mean, who isn't?), but not a lot of people are motivated to make deep, fundamental changes to the way they live. Quick recommendations like "no sodas" can give you something to feel good about, but only adopting one or two of these recommendations is unlikely to cause a meaningful difference. If you are motivated then you can develop new habits, and if you develop new habits then you can develop new healthy habits which will keep you healthy. 2) Stop being sedentary. That doesn't mean stop sitting, or getting up and doing push-ups every hour. That also doesn't mean you should quit your job where you sit at a desk and program all day. It means that you need to be engaged in some kind of physical activity that is both personally enjoyable, stringent enough to make you sweat, and that you can commit to doing on a regular (not daily, but not only on the weekends either) basis. Very few of us have hours and hours of free time available to us every week where we sit around bored with nothing to do - part of the lifestyle change is examining where you are spending your time and making a conscious decision to prioritize yourself and your health above whatever else was taking up your time before. 3) Don't conflate weight with health (unless you are severely underweight or obese, in which case your weight actually does impact your health). Adopting a healthy lifestyle may or may not cause your weight to change, depending on the changes you commit to making, and in any case if the changes you commit to making are healthy changes, then the rate of weight change will be slow. If you are making lifestyle changes to improve your weight and not your health, then you are likely to slack off when you get to a weight that you feel better about and regress. If you have issues with your body image, you're better off discussing those issues with a therapist first, before adopting drastic lifestyle changes - the classic dangerous (albeit extreme) example revolves around people who develop eating disorders in an attempt to be "healthy". 4) Adopt a healthy diet. This means different things for different people - different people have different physiology with different activity levels and different energy needs, not to mention that different people find different foods tasty, different foods cost different amounts of money in different places if they are available at all, and different people have different circumstances which dictate how much food they can prepare at home. You should ideally consult an experienced, registered dietitian who can help you make the healthy choices which are right for you instead of trying to make choices about your diet on the basis of diet or recipe books written for the mass-market by authors living in different personal circumstances than you.