Weight Loss

I'm trying to lose weight.  I never lost the last 5 pounds after having Sammy and I started that pregnancy a bit higher than I would have liked.  I'm wearing a size 10 instead of a size 8 and I want to get back to a size 8.  After my trip to Florida, I saw how I looked in pictures and I wasn't happy.  And I'm getting older and I know that losing weight will be even more difficult the older I got.  So I decided to act.  Here's my diet plan:

• Eat smaller portions (except for breakfast, where I continue to eat my must-have huge bowl of cereal and fruit).  Sometimes that means eating just a salad for dinner instead of the meal that we've cooked.  This has been working out great - I'm definitely full after eating less.  I was clearly overeating before.  If I'm slightly hungry before going to bed, I will have a handful of nuts.
• I make a big pot of soup on Sunday and I've been eating that for lunch at work.  This means that I don't have to ingest ridiculous amounts of salt from the canned soups.
• I've been exercising again.  I don't want to sacrifice on sleep and so I've been doing 30 minutes on the elliptical at night after dinner and after the kids go to bed.  So generally, I exercise from about 8 to 8:30 pm.  It's long enough after dinner that I'm not overly full when I'm exercising and it's enough time before bed that I'm still able to fall asleep easily.  The only thing I was doing with this time before was sitting on the couch watching TV.
• Eat no or very little dessert (like one square of dark chocolate).

It's been 2 weeks since I started and I went from 148.2 to 145.8 pounds.  I'm pretty happy with that weight loss and am encouraged that my plan is working.  I'd absolutely love to get to 140 pounds (as I don't think it's realistic to maintain a weight lower than that).