Advice on my new food lifestyle please - ommitting ultra processed foods

[MissBeck]

10 years ago or so (time flies...) I was diagnosed with diabetes and I was a lot above my "natural" weight, so I decided to lose weight.
After several Internet searches I decided to keep on eating what I used to eat, only adding vegetables and fruit to my diet and eating between breakfast and lunch and between lunch and diner.

I changed the percentages and quantities of what I used to eat, so instead of adding a lot of rice I started adding some vegetables to replace most of the rice and eat only a small quantity (around a table spoon) of rice, ending up with a plate in which one half was vegetables and the other half split between carbs (usually rice) and meat or fish.

One of the conclusions I reached was that counting calories does not work that well, so I tried to reduce my food intake little by little until I started to get hungry before the time for my next meal, as that would mean that I was eating too little at the previous meal. Adjusting that I reached an amount of food intake that is so close to what I need that, on colder days, I have to eat a little more.

To help the diet I started walking (I only walked from home to work and vice versa, which was less than a kilometre per day) at least during 20 minutes (around a kilometre, at a slow pace) each day, and after a few days I started walking more and more. On Saturdays, sometimes, I do longer walks (my record is 12 kilometres, a 3+ hour walk).

With all that I lost around 30 Kg and (with the help of medication) got my diabetes under control. 

PS: eating too much fruit (and fruit with a high percentage of sugar, like bananas and grapes) could lead to diabetes (that happened to my grandmother), eating the fruit along with some fibre (I usually eat a piece of bread) to slow the absorption rate of the sugar.

PPS: about "natural weight". One thing I found in my searches was that most people talk about the (useless) theoretical weight, as if we were made on a production line. Some people talk about "natural weight", and say it's the weight our body "likes", and for most people is close to the weight we had when we reached adulthood. Obviously things vary from person to person.

Wow! What a great personal story! Thank you! And some great tips.
I must admit, I only eat the fruit because normally at work all I used to eat was digestive biscuits, and my lunch of course, and figured the fruit was healthier than the biscuits, even though I'm aware of the sugar content in fruit. I actually took 2 tiny oranges today, but didn't enjoy them at all. I could eat grapes like sweets, but I'd ran out of all other fruit today. By 10.30am I was actually hungry, so ate half my sandwich!

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Yeah those pesky arms always seem to get in the way.   You figured it out obviously.

Work that core - the core is everything.

Yeah, I've got to find mine first though. It's in there somewhere.