I found this system to be overall pretty easy, but know that if it required nothing of you, everyone would already be doing it.
People would ask me when I first started, "Has it been hard?" My response was, "It's easy and difficult and then it gets easier." The easy part is that you know what you need to do: you've got your nutrition log and you know what you've eaten and what you can still eat at any point on any particular day. The difficult part is that your body will be furious with you when you first start.
Your body right now is the deadbeat uncle/brother/cousin/whatever that is used to eating bonbons on the couch to his heart's content and is never asked to do any work. You can't expect him to have his bonbon supply restricted and being asked to go do some stuff without inciting his rage. Again, depending on how aggressive you set your goals, you can expect your body to react similarly.
Another thing: don't be discouraged because you will have horrible calorie and weight days and weekends where you just can't keep track of what you ate. It happens because life happens. Just write it off with a "Whatever" entry in your log and assign whatever your worst guess of calories of what you ate from that time period. It sucks making those entries, but ultimately, they don't dictate your results. They do, however, reinforce your good habit of logging everything.
The great news is that you wake up every day having already burned several hundred calories before you even get out of bed and with a fresh 2000, 2500, 2700 calorie budget to do with whatever you want.
Late Night Cravings
For me, this was the bane of my existence. I could hit my targets all day long, and then when it was time for bed, I was famished. I literally could not fall asleep until I got some sort of snack - cheese, sweets, a scoop of peanut butter or jelly - SOMETHING.
It's ok. If the hunger is unbearable, eat something but just try to contain the damage. I would recommend trying to sub in my recommended breakfast Cheerios/skim milk/banana, with or without the eggs. It's filling and it'll limit your calorie intake more than if you dig into a bag of chips or a jar of jelly. You should try to satisfy your hunger to the minimum point that you don't hate your life trying to go to sleep.
The reality is the hungrier you can put yourself to sleep, the more quickly you will lose weight. However, I have great news: the late night hunger pangs WILL eventually pass in the coming weeks. Trust me on this.
Carb Addiction
I know I sound like a broken record by now, but I'm never going to tell you what to eat. What I am going to tell you is that it's hard to get full with carbs. I'm convinced that low carb diets mostly work because they hold down your calorie intake so much. It's just extremely hard for your average man to eat 3000 calories a day in meats and veggies (though it's pretty achievable with dairy), but it's extremely easy with carbs.
Passing up the free bread basket at a restaurant was practically against my religion. I loved bread and butter and could eat seemingly limitless amounts of it, and that was the problem. Still, I didn't restrict myself from it - I started out still eating bagels for breakfast and adding them into my food log, but when I started seeing how many calories they were adding in and how relatively little fullness I got from them, I found myself craving them less and started phasing them out. Now, I don't even crave breads anymore. I figured I'd be in the last guy on Earth who'd ever give them up, and now I still have a big bag of frozen bagels in my freezer from August.
I do love my beer. I'm not a fanatic about it, but I love the taste of it and can easily put away 6-8 beers hanging around friends for a night. I figured out early that I just pretty much had to save it for special occasions until I reach my goal weight because I just didn't have the room in my budget for high calorie things that gave me zero fullness. Also, when you do drink, try not to drink so much that you get drunk, since doing so also means you're likely to blow up your diet eating other stuff too.
Fitness Trackers
If you have a new-ish smartphone, you already have a fitness tracker. The problem for me is that I don't always have my phone with me doing stuff around the house, and I didn't want to lose credit for those steps. If you always keep your phone on you, you can probably get by without a separate fitness tracker.
Again, ideally your fitness tracker should be an extension of your body. If you don't always keep your phone on you, either get a watch-like device that you always have charged or something that you can clip onto yourself. I have an older Fitbit One because it lasts almost a week without needing a charge. You can get fitness trackers with heart rate monitors, sleep trackers and all kinds of bells and whistles, but those are strictly optional. Just to make sure you hit your 10,000 step target every day at a minimum, and anything over that is gravy (figuratively speaking, natch).
This system is all about completely digitizing the machine you call your body. My Fitbit dashboard is my body's control panel where I monitor all of its environmentals. I'm a geek, so thinking about my body like I'm some sort of machine keeps me motivated. If you can find your own motivational outlook that works for you, fantastic.
General Motivational Tips
The key to this diet is consistency. You don't have to be perfect all the time. You just have to be pretty good most of the time. Remember all the times when you tried dieting for a hot minute and saw no results? Well, you're not going to undo all your gains with a slip-up here and there on this plan as long as you're logging every day. Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day.
I also created a list of benefits of losing weight - like getting into my old clothes, more general flexibility doing certain tasks. Many of them are silly but meaningful. Create your own list of benefits. Some of them you may not even realize until you start slimming down.
I also created some (pardon the expression) mindfucks to help me get started - future events that are far from certain but possible if you don't do this plan. Like convince yourself that if you don't do it, you'll have a heart attack and keel over before you get to see or do X.
Also, a motivational quote or two really helps drive home the point. I couldn't find one from a famous person that I liked, so I created my own. Feel free to use it if it helps:
"At some point, a man gets tired of looking at the same damn problem every goddamn day when he knows exactly what he needs to do to fix it but doesn't. Today is your day to fix it, and you're going apeshit."
I will say, that by far, the best motivation is the scale every morning. I wake up every morning excited like I'm a contestant on The Biggest Loser. Some days are bad, most days are ok/good and some days are freaking great! The thrill of seeing your continued weight loss will fuel your success, so make sure to get your weight logged every morning after you've used the bathroom and before you eat. Don't get too high or low on one particular weigh-in, but just keep track of those weekly averages and enjoy the ride!
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