The 7 most obese states...

[Silent3]

112. When you do all of that at once, how can you be so sure each and every part of that...

...was essential to your end result?

It's like a baseball player who has a great season after training hard, eating a special diet, and wearing the same pair of lucky socks to every game. Maybe not all of that really contributed to his improved RBI, or the "contribution" was more of a mind game than a direct effect.

I too have lost a lot of weight recently. I started at 263 last April (same 6' height as you). I'm now 179 -- a loss of 84 lbs and 10" from my waist. I improved my diet quite a bit, but I didn't follow any strict plan, I didn't turn into a purist about food ingredients and processing. My wife and I are terrible about cooking, so we eat out a most of the time, and I'm sure many of the restaurants we eat at wouldn't pass muster with the "Oh, God! It's corporate industrial poison!" crowd, but I'm making much better food choices from among the items these restaurants serve.

I think, for instance, eating a lot more vegetables than I used to matters a whole lot more than if those vegetables are certified organic or not. Eating more grilled chicken and less fried chicken matters a lot more than how the chicken was raised.

That I now do a lot more exercise has probably been the most important thing in losing weight. Eating less is a close second, of course. The importance of what I eat in particular has mattered most in helping me control my appetite so eating less is easier to do (that's where more green, leafy vegetable help, lean meats, healthy fats, more whole grains, less sugar). Of course, I don't want to discount other goals apart from merely losing weight, like better overall nutrition for my general health and longevity.

I'm sure there's a lot that is wrong with our modern food supply. What I object to, however, is over-simplified "natural = good, artificial/processed = bad" thinking. Average human life expectancy is, after all, much higher in today's world than back when all natural and unprocessed was the only thing available. Yes, there are reasons outside of food ingredients and processing for that (modern medicine, sanitation, scarcity of food not being a factor for most people), but it's not like "all natural" could be all that magically good and "artificial" categorically, poisonously bad if life spans have dramatically increased against a backdrop of increasingly artificial and processed food.