What worked for me: Don’t have too much calorie dense and convenient food around. Track what I eat. Assume I ate 20% more calories withiut noticing. Get exercise doing interesting things like long walks in nature because it keeps me from snacking because I’m bored.

Worked for a few years, then of course I thought it wasn’t necessary anymore and started adding weight back. Starting up again, and really the biggest weak point for me is still the impulsive snacking when I don’t keep myself occupied.

One day, try going the whole day on just water. Pick your day carefully so you are free to do nothing if you choose.

Whenever you get hungry, pause, drink a glass of water, and check in with yourself. Odds are you aren’t that physically hungry, but your mind is going ape shit trying to get you to eat.

You don’t have to go crazy here, if you start not feeling well, then eat.

Try that again a few times at your leisure, but aim to actually go a full day at some point.

The point of that exercise isn’t to lose weight per se, it’s to gain a better understanding of how much of your eating habits are mental/psychological and also to show yourself that you have the ability to go a full day without food, so when a random Tuesday rolls around and you’re slightly peckish, you can grab a banana and get past it rather than going bananas at a Chinese buffet and downloading five thousand empty calories into your gut.

That is an imperfect approach, but it helps you get to know yourself and provide context for how “hungry” you are when it’s two hours past breakfast and two hours until lunch.

Obviously don’t do this if you have any kind of medical condition that requires you to eat. I am not a doctor.

I have definitely used my difficulty starting tasks to help myself lose weight. I find its way easier to just be hungry than to make food. Most of the time.

I still have to make sure I’m not eating snacks without thinking about it. A good option for me has been keeping easy, small, healthy foods, that can get me through hunger pang. My favorite is a pot of Greek yogurt. They’re like 80¢ at Aldi where I live. Fresh fruit works great as well! And for late night treats, I eat frozen fruit. It fills the ice cream niche, without being packed with calories and extra sugar

I don’t notice body signals when I hyperfocus, so if I eat a good breakfast on my days off, and don’t keep s ack food around, I might go all the way to bedtime without another meal. I think that’s called intermittent fasting?

But fr, the main thing that helped me was accountability. I used one of those paid apps that turn tracking and nutrition into a group activity and partially gamify it. I got lucky with a good coach and a good group but it did help. Just knowing that someone was looking over my shoulder to make sure I did the food logging made it easier to remember to do. And the “numbers go bigger” part of my brain turned out to like “numbers go smaller”, so the gamification helped too.

For me, hyper fixate on calorie counting and weight tracking plus going to the gym while listening to a book I can’t get enough of.

From ~260 to 180 over nearly 3 years.

I only have to have willpower at the grocery store. That’s it. I’m too lazy to go get snacks if they aren’t in the house.

Have a calorie tracking app and track everything. You will start to learn how somethings are more calorie dense than others. Don’t have junk food. You will want to snack. Have veggies like carrots or fresh fruit on hand. Drink water first. So many times I “feel” hungry but I am actually thirsty. Load up on broccoli. If you over eat, then have lots of broccoli. It’s filling and not calorie dense. When possible plan your meals ahead of time. It’s brutally hard to make the better diet choice when your hungry. It’s easier to just follow through with a decision you already made.

take all this with a grain of salt

if you don’t need to lose weight immediately for health reasons, focus less on weight loss and more on making healthy habits feel natural

regarding eating, i’d say the following are essential:

• avoid getting hungry
• food should be as tasty as possible. you have to actually like what you’re eating
• no forbidden food. do not try to take anything away from your diet
• absolutely NO strict rules in general. they’re bad enough for neurotypicals, so they’re fatal to us
• introduce healthy food you like. if you can, start with fruits, lots of fruits. fruits are the easiest kind of tasty healthy food
• try to eat on time as much as possible. kind of a corollary of “avoid getting hungry”
• have go-to foods you can eat at each meal/whenever you get hungry without thinking. one of mine is strawberry smoothie
• don’t eat anything you don’t like. it doesn’t matter how healthy it is, if you hate it, it’s bad for you. there’s plenty of healthy food out there
• give a chance to foods you don’t like too much once in a while. maybe you’ll end up liking them eventually, maybe not. just try and you’ll find out
• above all else, make any of these changes incrementally. the point is building solid habits, not having a solid diet from the get go

any of these follow from: eating is one of the most important things in our life; never make yourself feel bad while trying to get healthy.

good luck

When I was in the best shape of my life, I was taking a karate class. We met every Tuesday and Thursday, and the only penalty for missing a class, was the razzing you’d get from the rest of the class. Nothing mean, just stuff like “someone must have been feeling lazy on Tuesday!”

That low pressure accountability made me go every time. If it was any more or less strict, I’d probably would have just ended up never going.

So, how do you recreate that? Find a friend or two with similar goals and set a plan. It’ll be harder to “just skip this one” if you know someone’s expecting you.

Beat saber VR is great cardio. Ring fit has a nice variety of workouts too.

It’s easy if you can hyperfocus on something all day and neglect eating.

Find an exercise you like, and make sure to keep doing it until it’s a habit (8 weeks is usually enough for me). It raises your baseline metabolic rate, so even if you slip a bit, you can usually recover. Personally, that’s hiking or exercising while reading an audiobook which makes the time fly.

The other thing is to religiously count calories. Have an app on your phone, enter the calories every time something comes close to your mouth. Eventually, you’ll reach to eat some snack, realize you don’t know the calories, get up to figure it out from the container, and often forget about the snack while you’re up and doing something.

first: don’t stress it, sustainable weight loss is slow everything else will end up with you regaining the weight when you stop with whatever hyped up diet or hardcore sports program you tried.

find an activity, that burns calories that you enjoy doing, and do it because it’s fun. try new things when something is not fun.

identify a high calorie source that you can somewhat easily eliminate, for many people that’s sugary drinks (including fruit juice).

get yourself to step on a scale every morning. weight is on a downwards trend week to week? you are on the right track. keep doing what you are doing.

weight goes up sometimes? don’t worry that happens we are running a marathon here. if it keeps increasing you’ll either can do more activities that burn calories or find another calorie source you can cut back on.

It might also help, to either eat slower, because “being not hungry” has a delay or drink a glass of water before every meal, so you’ll feel full faster.

and always remember, this is not a sprint, sometimes you’ll gain weight, that does not mean you failed, you don’t start back at zero.

A lot of focus on diet in these comments but almost no mention of exercise.

For me, I found the couch to 5K running program for beginners highly engaging. With a running tracker app I could see my progress and really enjoy fixating on the details. If you do decide to get into running here are some tips:

• Really good running shoes are a must. Take your time trying on shoes until you find the right pair. They should feel extremely comfortable in the store, like a pair of bedroom slippers, and there should be no rubbing of parts of your feet/toes while walking around. They’re expensive to buy but much cheaper than any gym membership
• Other nice to haves are good shorts and shirts made of breathable material
• Don’t try to skip ahead on the C25K program. You really do need to take it gradually or you will feel a lot of pain and give up
• Some pain is normal though but eventually it all clears up and starts to feel amazing (as your distances go up)
• If the pain gets worse and worse then slow down or stop. Some level of soreness / fatigue is normal until you’re an experienced runner. Severe pain is not normal and could indicate or lead to injury
• If you’re running out of breath then you’re running too fast. The goal of running is to run, not sprint, which means staying entirely in the aerobic zone. Learning to regulate your pace and your breathing is challenging at first but soon becomes natural
• If you’re overweight then you probably need to go even slower than the C25K program recommends. Spend a lot more time walking than running and be mindful of your joints. You should not be taking big running strides or striking your heels. Try to be very mindful of your joints and if they hurt then slow down or stop. You can lose weight just by walking a lot while improving your diet but trying to force yourself to run while overweight can harm your joints or cause other injuries

So why run at all? Well, besides the obvious exercise and cardiovascular health benefits, running is a lot of fun. It actually feels amazing to be running on a beautiful morning/evening and seeing the world go by at a rapid pace, the wind blowing gently in your hair. Running releases endorphins which feel amazing and give you a “runner’s high”.

Furthermore, the cardio fitness benefits of running extend to everything else in life. You’ll sleep better, you’ll feel better all the time, you’ll develop a slower resting heart rate which allows you to relax much more deeply, and you’ll feel more awake and better able to focus rather than being in a fog for much of the time.

As others said, the best key to your diet is decision-making in the store, not in the home.

As for exercise, try to find something you actually like doing. These can sometimes be expensive :/. Cycling, rock climbing, swimming, hiking, whatever you enjoy so it doesn’t feel like a chore.