Tom's advice isn't bad. There is no real evidence that the type of food you eat is important for weight loss, only the total calories consumed matters. For instance people have lost weight and got healthy even on junk food diets... a twinkie-only diet and a mcdonalds diet have been tried and worked perfectly well. The idea that you need to limit yourself to certain types of food is pure pseudoscience and just too hard for most people to follow anyway.

Also, rather than try to follow the diet all the time, it's much much easier to do it every 2nd day... that is, eat all you want on one day, then follow the diet on the second day... for instance losing weight by eating all you want on one day, then fasting on the second day (every other day fasting) works perfectly well.

Finally, muscle burns fat much faster, so for exercise, you should do some weight training as well. Unless you build up a bit of muscle, exercise won't make much difference unless its vigorous and you do a lot of it.