Guys
Not sure if this helps, but I recently read a book on Apple shaped dieting (I put weight on around my tummy first - I'm not over wieght right now, more a question of needing to tone up).
It had some interesting concepts but the diet part of it was useless. Basically turn veggie. ANYWAY the useful part was on centralised fat, its realted to stress not nessesarily diet.
Stress induces cortisole which causes the fat cells on our tummy to enlarge due to fight or flight responce to stress. Therefore it's the stress that causes these areas to get fat (although diet contributes).
Anyways having read that book - which main message was be vegg sort your stress - the latter a better message for me personally, because I'm not keen on eatting carboard.
I also read a report in our papers which said that a study in Newzeland reported women who were divided into 3 groups, the first was given stress busting activities, yoga, visulisation and other stress release activites. THe second group a diet and working out regime, and the third group were sent diet tips.
Long and the short of it, is that the first group lost more weight - so sort out your stress releif
If you want a good diet book try Insulin Resistant diet book, it's by miles the only sensible approach to eatting - and you don't need to weight stuff, it's all about proportions of card to protien you eat. Eat more cards to protien earlier in the day and the opposite later in the day
Anyways though it was worth mentioning
Lis