How I Lost Weight In 6 Moderately-Easy Steps

Please note the title is How I Lost Weight (apply to yourself as relevant) not How To Lose Weight in some universal sense, your mileage may vary.

0. losing (some) weight is a reasonable and fun goal for many people, and a source of enormous suffering for other people, and if you're in the latter camp please ignore this whole post if it causes you any stress whatsoever. I know this is easy for me to say but having a healthy relationship to your food and your body seems on average more important than being a specific weight. As always, if you're struggling with this (or anything in your life) and you feel like I can be helpful, please email me, genuinely.
   
1. It was kind of sad and funny in the end how much changing my diet led straightforwardly to losing weight.
   
   Crucially, I stopped buying/storing bread or cheese in the house; tragically, this seems to be very effective. It turns out 1 normal pita has 10% of my daily calorie needs and is not very filling, and cheese is extremely delicious and not very satiating, and I just can't control myself if I have access to these foods.
   
   I started making sure most of my food was high protein and/or high fiber. I still eat a good amount of fat as long as it's in a food that has high protein as well (e.g. eggs, nuts, etc), but I try not to go overboard. I try to limit simple carbs and sugars. I've tried to cut back on sugary drinks and baked goods like croissants, which bring a lot of calories and little satiety.
   
   That's it! I don't count calories and I still have treats, especially outside the house. At restaurants I will eat bread and cheese and other delicious things, and at friends' houses I eat what I feel like without asking questions, etc.
   
   This all seems very obvious, now, but I genuinely didn't know beforehand it would work, so it feels useful to say that it worked.
   
2. I tried to exercise more: a combination of regular classes + walking more steps.
   
   For walking, I got a $100 under-desk walking pad (not literally this one, but similar) and try to get ~8k+ steps every day, either treadmill or irl. Depending on the day I either try to do a 1000 steps (about 10 mins walk) every hour or two throughout the day, or to knock out 30+ mins while watching a show or listening to a podcast.
   
   I do notice that when I walk around in the city I can easily hit 14k steps without really trying, but that walking on the treadmill feels like a chore regardless of how I do it, I'm not honestly sure why that is.
   
3. I weigh myself every morning, and sometimes later in the day as well. I think subconsciously this causes me to make better eating decisions. However, it's EXTREMELY important to realise that your weight can easily fluctuate up to ~5lb in a single day, let alone over a week or more, and to not take the individual changes too seriously since a lot of them are water etc. (Fun ~fact: you can lose 0.3lb overnight just from breathing out C02, crazy).
   
4. My partner is extremely supportive and wonderful and made it very easy to stock our home with healthy foods. I feel like this is a huge benefit and sometimes underrated by people who have it, but it would be so much harder to eat well if my pantry and/or social life was full of temptations all the time.
   
5. I really prioritize getting sleep. I can't prove it but I'm convinced this is related to weight loss and muscle gain.
   
6. My life is (thank God) not too stressful right now. A fitness influencer I follow says that you need to have 3 levels of fitness plan: one for everyday life, one for weekends and holidays etc, and one for those times when your life is completely falling apart. You can easily gain back a lot of weight / lose a lot of muscle in a short amount of time when the occasional inevitable catastrophe hits you, and he says you need a plan for those times so that you can follow a less-strict regimen that keeps your existing progress even though you won't make more progress right then.
   
   I thankfully haven't yet had any life-falling-apart experiences since I started losing weight again, so I don't honestly know if I'll keep it up when I do, which seems important to acknowledge.

Overall the biggest cost of weight-loss for me has been time: I'd guess I'm spending up to 2h each day on average between exercise, recovery, and extra sleep? A lot of that is enjoyable for me, and it's possible I get some back in terms of extra energy and focus, but it's a significant cost regardless. In some sense it's nice to know that losing weight is yet-another genuine tradeoff in life, you pay a cost and get a benefit, it's not a magic trick.

Still and all, it's kind of crazy to me that you can just... decide to lose weight, and then do the relatively obvious straightforward weight-losing things in a serious but not obsessive way, and that it can work. To the extent you're also surprised to learn this, I hope the knowledge helps.