On the road to weighloss and a healthy lifestyle again!

The problem with what I'll call "brand-name diets" like WW, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, etc., is that they have a vested interest in not teaching you anything about how to eat. It's in their interests for you to gain the weight back when you stop giving them money (paying for access to the service, buying the "special" foods, etc). And you will, if you don't learn anything about how to eat in the course of using their system and go right back to the way you used to live before you started giving them money.

The brand-name diets have put a LOT of work and advertising dollars into selling the idea that "dieting" is a temporary thing you do for a certain amount of time until your body is an acceptable size. And they've been extremely successful at convincing the general populace of this. But the thing is, though, that the only way to get fat is to eat more calories than you burn (calories in > calories out), and the converse is also true: the only way to get un-fat is to burn more calories than you eat (calories in < calories out). Additionally, it follows logically that to maintain weight, you must eat as many calories as you burn (calories in = calories out). This is the "CICO" you see referenced a lot around here and in many weight-management spaces online. It's simple biology and simple physics. Literally every brand-name diet works by creating a calorie deficit (CI < CO), because that is how fat loss happens. There is no other way to make fat loss happen. There's nothing magical about cabbage soup, it's just that an entire head of cabbage only has about 200-300 calories of usable energy in it, and if that's all you eat for a week then yes, your calories in will be FAR less than your calories out, since just being alive costs most adults about 1300 calories per day at minimum, give or take 200ish (and that's assuming you're comatose, or otherwise lying perfectly still in bed all day long).