Eliminating My Wases

One of the self-editing tips I got from the writer's conference was in eliminating words that are superfluous. I can't believe just how many words I use in my writing that are superfluous. It's quite amazing.
The thing with eliminating words is that sometimes taking out a word means changing the whole sentence and other times taking out a word just means hitting the delete button and the sentence still functions perfectly fine.
I can't tell you how much my word count has gone down simply by going through the story and finding all those little meaningless words that crop up at least five time on every page. Maybe now I'll have to boost my word count again by adding another chapter?
Of course one can edit too much and come up with a very tight story but totally inhuman. So while I'm zapping my thats, zinging my ings, eliminating my wases and cutting down on my ly words (thanks so much for the tip Amanda). I'm going to have to make sure the flavour of my story still remains the same and doesn't become to sterile.