My husband lost 30 pounds in three months by writing down everything he ate and keeping under 1800 calories and eating a balanced diet.
He said writing down everything gave him a shock as to how much he was actually eating.
It has been nine months now and he has been able to keep the 30 pounds off.
That’s actually a really good piece of advice. On some level we do know what’s good and what’s not. I started my change with two weeks of just “watching” (paying close attention to what I was eating and doing, no writing things down I’m too lazy for that), but no changing. It’s very important during your self observation period to not change anything, because then you start lying to yourself by not doing stuff you normally would. After two weeks of cold hard really depressing self evaluation my diet path was pretty obvious: less soda, less snack, healthier snacks when snacking much be done, stop being a plate cleaner and couch potato.