To begin it is fundamentally important important that one understands that there exist a large difference between weight-loss and fat-loss. I think its important to here this statement because in my own experience with clients to many get caught up on what the scale is reading. Weight is a subjective number and easily manipulated, the truth being that the scale really tells you nothing. Consider the following examples:
If I were to instruct you to fast for an eight hour period and weigh yourself before and after you would weigh less.
If I were to instruct you to not drink any fluids for a complete day you would weigh much less.
If I asked you to cut off your right hand and foot you would weigh less.
In all three scenarios one in fact does weigh less, but does this loss of weigh indicate an improvement in health or wellness? The answer to this being HELL NO IT DOESN'T!
In fact many people would benefit from taking their current mindset about weight-loss and throwing it out of the window and begin thinking in terms of fat-loss. That is one focuses on maintaining and gaining as much muscle mass as possible while systematically eliminating excess body fat. This approach makes perfect sense because physical properties of fat tissue and muscle tissue. A pound of fat is exactly equal to a pound of muscle and don't let anyone tell you differently, but the key difference is that muscle has a great density than fat meaning it requires less muscle tissue than fat tissue to create one pound. This has huge implications because it means one can actually lose body, gain muscle mass, and have a net weight gain yet look much smaller than the day they began their training program.
Now while training properly in such a fashion to elicit incredible fat-loss is important, diet with always be weighted more in terms of importance when considering issues with body composition. YOU AND NOBODY ELSE CAN OUT TRAIN BAD NUTRITION! And while there maybe a multitude of things one needs to change in order to have the perfect diet a much more successful strategy is to identify problem areas and trigger events that create poor food decisions and work to change these particular occurrences. For example cutting out weekend brunches or trips to the local fast food restaurant would be excellent ways of beginning the process of changing behavioral patterns.
In the end its all about restructuring one's cognitive behavioral thinking patterns to produce great results and improve one's health and well being.