Tips for losing weight without calorie counting?

I lost quite a bit of weight before MFP and without calorie counting and I've maintained my weight for over a year now without calorie counting. I found counting beneficial in the short run in that it really helped me to just balance things out better...but really, I was doing pretty well without it and I've been just fine in maintenance.

1 ) Portion control. This was probably the single biggest thing for me to learn. I started paying very close attention to what packages and what not said for recommended portions. When cooking for myself and my wife, I pretty much stuck to those portions for the most part....using my food scale for most things and measuring other things. I also became accustomed to what that looked like on my plate for a variety of different foods so it became easier for me to judge visually when I was eating someone else s preparations or out at a restaurant, etc.

2) Better decision making. You're going to be hard pressed to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight without meticulously counting calories if you practice the SAD. Before I started counting calories, I changed my dietary habits to reflect more of a Mediterranean/South-beach type of diet (noun). This meant replacing many of the fattier cuts of beef that my wife and I consumed on a regular basis with leaner cuts (and again, proper portions) and introducing much more chicken and fish and lean cuts of pork into our diet. Does this mean we never eat a good fatty roast or go out for a pizza or whatever? Of course not...it's just much more rare these days.

Additionally, we put a huge premium on vegetable consumption...pretty much heaping helpings of vegetables at lunch and dinner (sometimes breakfast but usually a V8 and fruit there) and we snack on them a lot as well. On average we take in around 6-8 actual servings of vegetables per day. During the summer I also eat around 3 servings of fruit per day...but in the winter I'm pretty much relegated to an apple a day.

I also pretty much dumped soda...I was a 3-5 12oz Mt Dew guy per day back in the day...I have a soda once in a blue moon these days. I also rarely eat candy or cakes or things of this nature...not that they're inherently evil or anything, they're just very easy to over-consume when you're not meticulously counting calories. I eat these sorts of things on occasions like holidays, birthdays, etc.

Note that "cleaning" up your diet isn't going to automatically result in an energy deficit...but it is much more likely that you will, particularly if you're coupling that with portion control.

3) Invest a lot of time in learning actual nutrition and learn how to fuel your body and optimize your nutrition. People know that vegetables and fruit are important to proper nutrition, but beyond that people tend to be lost...dietary fat is very essential and so is protein and a lot of people miss the boat there.

4) Cook more. I never thought I ate out that much until I made it a point to change my diet around...I definitely ate out less than the average Joe/Jane, but I found that I ate out a lot more than what I was perceiving. Not that eating out is bad necessarily...but restaurants tend to serve 2-3 times the recommended servings of pretty much everything (except for the vegetables); additionally, they cook with a lot of oil and use a lot of salt to make the food taste good. Unless you're eating off a 500 calorie or less menu you can pretty much count on most restaurant entrees to clock in anywhere from 800 - 1200 calories and that adds up pretty quick. To boot, the meals don't tend to be very balanced nutritionally speaking.

I still eat out...about 2-3 times per month vs 5-6 times per week that i was eating out before.

5) Move more. You don't have to fly around balls to the wall, but you're going to have better luck losing and maintaining weight if you're moving more. When I first started out, I just made it a point to go walking for an hour every single day...deliberately getting off my butt and moving beyond my day to day stuff. Eventually that turned into more intense exercise (which is about when I started counting calories because I didn't know how much I needed to fuel actual workouts)

When I eat out, or at the home of a friend/family member, I fill my plate with whatever they made (pretty much like I used to before losing weight) but then I eat exactly HALF of everything I want. This is made much easier by sliding half onto another plate & wrapping it up to take home for lunch the next day. Sometimes after tasting an item it's not even worth the calories, so I skip it, other times if I eat slowly I can't even finish the half-plate of food. I also drink a huge glass of water before eating & another one while I'm eating. When I get home, I try to log things as well as I can, but this is purely a guessing game. It can be done, just take it one step at a time. They might tease you, or give you funny looks, but it's worth it when you see the pounds start dropping off!