Do you struggle to stay committed to your food & exercise plan?

I don't "get off track" because eating healthy food is just my normal way of eating. I have junk food occasionally, but I don't want it very often, and when I have it I feel absolutely no guilt because it's not going to trigger me suddenly changing my entire eating habits to be less healthy.

I *like* healthy food. I like the way it tastes, I love the way it makes my body feel. Crappy food makes me feel crappy, so if I have it once, I'm good and don't want it again for awhile.

As for exercise, I only do exercise I like to do, and if I don't exercise for a few days, I get antsy to start moving more.

So for me, the concept of "falling off track" is like asking if I've fallen off track of watching my favourite TV show.

Like Lietchi, I built this lifestyle one little step at a time. It was never about denying myself foods I wanted or punishing myself with exercise. It was just about always adding little things to make my life incrementally healthier and more enjoyable one little step at a time.

I'm in this with a goal of being as fit and healthy as I can be at 75, not to hit some arbitrary weight goal as quickly as possible. If I don't enjoy the lifestyle, I'm not going to maintain it. So I HAVE TO enjoy it, or it's not realistic.

I can't vote, I don't really have an operational definition of "off track". I don't really think of there being a track. (One thing another MFP-er wrote once that I liked, now use sometimes, is "there is no wagon, so you can't fall off".) There's just my life, which is always a cluster of habits.

Like others who've commented, I focused on finding a path in weight loss that would be (relatively) easy and enjoyable (or at least tolerable), and provide a good on-ramp to maintenance. I explicitly decided not to do anything during weight loss that I wasn't willing to continue permanently, other than a sensibly moderate calorie deficit. That put a priority on finding sustainable habits, things that would mostly work on autopilot during future periods when life got demanding in other areas.

I didn't materially change my exercise (I'd long been active while obese, doing mostly things I love so much I'd do them even if they weren't good for me). I didn't change the range of foods I ate, just fiddled with the portion sizes, proportions on the plate, and frequencies of some calorie-dense things. (My overall nutrition wasn't terrible at the start, but it's even better now, and I enjoy what I eat.)

So, I didn't really think in terms of struggle. I thought in terms of experimentation to find those sustainable habits, then some practice to groove in the ones that worked well for me. Implicit in that is the idea that some experiments will be unsuccessful - trying out habits that don't work in one way or another.

To me, that's just a useful part of the process: Trying things, finding some not to work, learning from that, making a different plan, trying that . . . etc. That little cushion of a calorie deficit, during weight loss, was sort of a safety net. Even when something didn't go as hoped, there usually wasn't much negative impact on my overall trend.

As long as one keeps chipping away, trying things, adjusting, etc., long-term results can work out fine, IME. Framing it as "learning something that doesn't work, so I should try something different" helps me, more than framing some aspect as a struggle. YMMV. 🤷‍♀️

P.S. For context, I was overweight to class 1 obese for around 30 years, most of my adult life, and quite athletically active during the final decade-plus of that time. I'd also been severely hypothyroid (properly medicated) for 15-ish years by then. At age 59-60, I lost nearly a third of my body weight, down to the healthy BMI range. Now 66, I've remained at a healthy weight since, BMI 20.9 this morning (up a little bit from holidays, still - which is totally normal for me).