What has helped you the most?

Two very important things:
1. Realizing that my issues during my gaining years weren't about the evils of food or even my "relationship with food" but really about my relationship with self and my willingness to knowingly, willingly choose behaviors and habits that I cognitively knew were terrible for my well-being. Working on the reason I was more willing to choose known poor behaviors than I was willing to make the equally, if not easier, choices to do good things for myself.

2. Recognizing that continually asking others for the answers gets you nowhere. In general, we all already have the knowledge we need to be successful in obtaining a healthy weight. Asking for "tips" today gets you very little new information compared to yesterday, or a week ago, or a week from now. The skeleton of the beast doesn't change. My impression is that we ask because we haven't accomplished #1 and thus, the easy healthy choices don't feel easy at all, and we're waiting for that one random person to give us the thing we've never heard before that will give us the excuse as to why it's not working so far... Whether that be because we just didn't have the right knowledge and tools yet, or because we had a sneaking [insert random medical issue] complication.

Nothing that I tell you about my actual habit changes will be helpful because they were constructed around MY issues. But, if you really want to know, my biggest changing factors:

1. Therapy
2. Body acceptance regardless of the scale, recognizing that I deserve love at all sizes I have existed in
3. Scheduled eating; otherwise I forgot more than remembered, I could not rely on hunger (still can't)
4. Not paying attention to the people on here telling me it was okay to eat more than a 1500 cut from TDEE because I was extremely obese. My best weight loss happened when I tracked honestly, ate accurately, and accepted that that meant I needed 4k+ calories a day many days.
5. Using movement and water rather than caffeine and snacks (other than what I needed for goals) to wake myself up during the work day.

I've lost half of the person I once was just about, 250lbs+ gone. The turning point where the numbers started going down was when I accepted the road I had to walk was completely my own and all I have in this world is the body in which I exist. A commitment to myself and who I chose to be; not who I believed I could be, not who I wanted to be, but who I CHOSE to be... that's what made the biggest difference.

Nowadays, I spend a lot of time telling people who ask me for the "secret" what's stopping them from using what it is they already know to make the choices they know they need to make. So what's stopping you?