You've gotten a lot of good advice here. I personally subscribe to a high fat, low carb diet and I practice intermittent fasting. Up to this past week I did a 20:4 regiment, but switched this week to an every other day fasting. I wouldn't concern yourself with sodium intake, that guidance is fast getting debunked by a number of sources such as: http://www.nap.edu/read/18311/chapter/1
I've just found a new website that exposes a lot of scientific papers that formally you'd have to pay for called sci-hub. I read a lot of studies on fasting and it looks like this has been studied since the late 50's with as long as 24 day zero calorie fasting. Everything you commonly associate with fasting is simply not true. Loss of lean tissue does go up in the beginning, but only to a high of 6gram/day and after a week drops to less than 1 g/day. In many of the studies done in 60's, they didn't allow fasting patients to exercise, but in more recent studies they add an exercise component and find the participants respond well to exercise in a fasted state. None reported hunger as being an issue during fasting soliciting one conclusion that hunger strikes aren't really a big deal to those to do them. The common conclusion is summed up in the words, "prolonged fasting in obese persons is well tolerated." Many of the results included weight loss of up to 5 lbs per day, much of it water, but significant portion being fat and very little lean muscle loss.
More studies, again, going back to the 60's, show that a high carbohydrate diet has long been known to increase weight gain and high fat or high protein does not. Your mention of trying to eat more grains is probably what you want to avoid doing. Veggies grown above ground are touted to be the best and to stay away from root vegetables, but I personnally eat a lot of beets because they help with blood pressure due to high nitrogen, which is coverted to nitric oxide in the body (oddly the same effect viagra does to improve erectile function).
This brings me to the phenomenom of mitigating foods. There is new index being developed that measures, not the glycemic response to foods, but the insulin response. Carbohydrates, as expected produce the highest insulin response where fat has the lowest. Protein also has a pretty high response which is counter-intuitive given all the high protein diets that are out there. The primary reason they work is that protein is more often consumed with a lot of fat, so fat mitigates the insulin response of protein. Also, protein is slower to digest, so while it has a high response, it doesn't spike insulin in a short time period. Vegetables are high in carbs, but also high in fiber and fiber is another mitigating element. Finally, vinegar is also a mitigator and some people advocate drinking two tablespoons of vinegar in a glass of water with each meal.
With these mitigating foods, if you do cheat, combine your cheat foods with some mitigators to lower their effect. Look into intermittent fasting. Even 2 days a week offer a lot of benefits and help you to control your food intake over the course of the week.
Good luck you and congratulations on your success so far.
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