This, by itself, is a huge step. I bet that's a significant reason why you're losing weight. It was definitely a huge part of my successful weight loss. Basically I don't eat junk(pretty much means processed foods) and I avoid carb sources like bread/rice/pasta. Success was had. But I won't lie, losing weight and keeping it off is by far the most difficult thing I've ever done(and still doing) in my life. It's no joke and I have a new respect for those with weight issues. It's not a trivial thing to fix and I almost gave up twice. Constant daily battles walking pass the pizza, cookies, etc.

Anyone here who works in a food store and keeps having to put the box of cookies/candies back in the right place when someone left it near the cashier? Sorry, that was me barely fighting off impulse.

I know at the end of the day ultimately we are responsible for our own actions, but there is nothing in this country to make it any easier on ourselves.

Never mind that the only freedom being preserved here is the freedom of marketers to manipulate the public. Nobody asked for the obscenely large sizes of drinks we have available now. Companies just realized they can sell 3 cents of extra soda for an additional 25 cents and went nuts.

Even if science later finds out that soda is super healthy and we should all drink nothing else, I'd much rather have regulations motivated by people asking "Is this healthy?" instead of "Does this make me the most profit?"

That said, portion control and calorie counting are components of a working weight loss plan and one should be extremely skeptical of diets like the "eat only before midnight diet". I have never been a night snacker and managed to get morbidly obese just fine without it.

I feel that I'm out of "the momentum phase", because I've never maintained a diet for over a year, until now. However, I realize that I may be deluding myself on that point.

I think that the key to my success is eliminating all but portion control. I don't count calories, or anything else that would make more work for me. All of those things are the things that would make my diet cease to work over time. Now I eat whatever I want, but keep processed foods to an absolute minimum.

Growing up, my nickname used to be "Trashcan", because I would finish everything on my plate, and then eat whatever my dining partners didn't from their plate. I still do, but I take it as leftovers, and eat it for breakfast or lunch the next day. I used to relish being stuffed to the point where I couldn't move. I still very occasionally overeat, but now it's more of a sick feeling that I despise.

I rode an exercise bike after dinner while watching netflix until I ran a 1000 calorie deficit and the weight fell off. I also follow his strength training guide for the laziest possible workout that still yields impressive gains. http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/

For motivation I have an instagram account that ghost follows personal trainers and competition athletes to see what they eat, as now I lift a lot. @erindimondfitness is a good one, since that's one of the few trainers I found that doesn't shill 'detox' and other pseudoscience.

Your "eat only before midnight diet" (which I've never heard of) is related to what I expected to read when I saw the title of the article. I thought this article was going to be about which twelve hours were the best for eating and staying slim.

I strongly suspect that if they followed up this "constrain all your meals to 12 of the 24 hour day and fast the other 12", with tests that compared results of different 12-hour segments, they would end up finding that eating during segments containing lots of daylight, such as 7am-7pm, would be superior to 12-hour segments with a lot of darkness, such as 4pm-4am.

I hope they do this followup, and if my folk-wisdom-derived speculation is correct, then "eat your last meal before X:00pm" wouldn't be a diet, per se, but a sensible constraint to include in any reasonable diet.

And thank you for providing a nice definition of it, "... if I can't make it at home". I've tried to explain to loved ones the idea of 'whole' foods vs. processed and found it harder than it should be.

It's great that you can eat at 2am.

That being said, I haven't tried calorie counting in years, but the problem was that I was just too lazy to look up each item, guess the weight, and calculate the calories. I think I had a Palm Treo at the time, and was using something on that to track things, but I would always forget to enter the calories.

Basically, after years of figuring myself out, I think I "know thyself" enough to know that that won't work. I do have a knack for remembering non-time-related things, so I've leveraged that to just remember portions. I can look at a plate, and know exactly how much to eat so that I will feel full 15 minutes later after I stop eating. I don't worry about the calories, just the ingredients, so limited processed food.

I suspect most calorie counting methods that are disruptive (require effort and attention) to making the food will have a high failure rate.

I'll briefly describe my workflow, with the caveat that I have not been using it for long.

I have a digital kitchen scale with a "tare" button. Just put the plate on the scale and press "tare". This resets the scale to zero. Then put on some bread: the scale now measures the bread only. Press "tare" again, and spread some butter on the bread: the scale now measures the butter only, etc.

In this way, measuring each ingredient requires very little effort.

MyFitnessPal makes logging easy. I scan the bar codes of the food I buy and the nutrient content is automatically downloaded from the web.

Ingredients that are used before are easily available from a list (your local database), so you don't need to scan bar codes every time you eat. (With vegetables and fruits, the bar code is only available in the store.)

It's also possible to bundle the ingredients into "meals" (a set of ingredients and amounts). So that you can add whole meals to your log with a single click.

Since you can log entries in advance, it's also possible to "budget" future calories, and it's easy to make changes to it.

E.g.: having oatmeal for breakfast. I click the meal "Oatmeal" from the app. The individual ingredients of the meal are automatically logged (80 grams Oatmeal, 300 grams milk, 30 grams strawberry jam).

I put my cereal bowl on my scale. Press tare, and measure out 80 grams Oatmeal. Press tare again, and measure out 30 grams jam. And press tare and measure out 300 grams milk.

If I use something else instead of jam that particular meal, it's easy to change single ingredients. E.g., delete the jam and add nuts.

It's not a perfect method, since it does not work for food bought in a restaurant or from the cafeteria at work, etc.

Btw, congrats on sticking it out for so long! :D

I feel like I make healthy choices, and those can be harder to log.

I also wasn't very confident about what I found in their database or online. Something like an apple can vary greatly in size and while number vary on the Internet, it was hard to correlate that to get a confident result.