Originally Posted by Velo Dog

What everybody else said, with a small addition that worked for me: I've found that exercise is really important, maybe more than diet. I'm your height, and a few years ago I ballooned to 250. I was a newspaper reporter, and the university here did a "celebrity" weight loss thing with me, some TV people and some of their coaches. The deal was that we'd try to lose 10 percent of our body weight and see how it affected cholesterol, glucose, all that stuff. To keep track, they gave us a computer program called BalanceLog (no longer available, but there are similar ones) that recorded intake and exercise. It was fiendishly accurate, and revealed a lot of stuff I didn't want to know, like that I was snatching 250 calories a day from the candy dish on the secretary's desk.
Too late to make a long story short, but I lost 45 pounds and gained big improvements in all the risk factors. Of course you have to work from both directions, but for me, it was always much easier to burn another 500 calories on the bike than to cut 500 calories out of my diet.