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I copied these principles from a great post on Mark’s Daily Apple:

I start with these four basic principles to guide my Primal Blueprint eating style:

1) 80% of your body composition will be determined by your diet. Yes, exercise is also important to health and to speed up fat-burning and muscle-building, but most of your results will come from how you eat. I’ll write more on this later, so just trust me on this one for now. Suffice to say, people who weigh a ton and exercise a ton, but eat a ton, still tend to weigh a ton. I think I’ll have that made into a t-shirt…

2) Lean Body Mass (LBM) is the key to life. I’ve said it many times on this site: lean mass (muscle and all the rest of you that is not fat) is directly correlated with longevity and excellent health. Rather than strive to “lose weight”, most people would be better off striving to lose only fat and to build or maintain muscle. Since other organs tend to function at a level that correlates to muscle mass, the more muscle you maintain throughout life, the more “organ reserve” you’ll have (i.e. the better the rest of you will work). Refer back to rule #1 and eat to build or maintain muscle.

3) Excess body fat is bad. Most human studies show that being significantly overweight increases your risk of nearly every disease (except osteoporosis – because ironically it responds to weight-bearing activities). Fat just doesn’t look that great either. See rule #1 and eat to keep body fat relatively low.

4) Excess insulin is bad. We’ve written about it here a lot. Chronic excess insulin may be even worse than excess sugar (and we know how bad that is). All animals produce insulin, but within any species, those that produce less insulin live longer than those who produce a lot. Eat to keep insulin low.

“people who weigh a ton and exercise a ton, but eat a ton, still tend to weigh a ton.” This statement could be a net description of my life up until 2006. I exercised hard 5-6 days a week, but still was carrying too much weight. The clear answer, based on my personal results – too much food, particularly too many carbohydrates…

According to Calorie Lab News:

The August issue of Redbook includes the story of Kristy Martin, a 37-year-old from Kansas who has lost 120 pounds. She gained a lot of weight in college and wore a size 20 wedding dress.

It wasn’t until she read on her medical chart when pregnant with her second son that she was obese that she really thought about having a serious weight problem. When she had her wisdom teeth taken out ate she couldn’t eat to fill the boredom, so she started exercising and eventually dropped nearly half her weight through walking and eating better.

She says it’s critical to get over the guilt of taking time for yourself to exercise, because you’re better able to help others and less stressed if you take that time. Other slimming tips include planning meals in advance and cutting down on grazing during meal preparation, saying no to family members who try to push unhealthy foods on you and celebrating losses by getting great new clothes.

I try to imagine what’s going through the minds of people who would push unhealthy foods on a woman who is 120 lbs overweight – I just keep coming up with a blank…