My biggest struggle with losing weight is not knowing how to do it.

I *personally* don't relate eating and exercise, I find it confuses things.

When I was obese and wanted to lose weight, I focused solely on getting my eating on point. I knew what eating pattern had made me obese and I knew my obese weight could not be sustained by a healthy diet.

So that's what I focused on: maximizing the health of my diet.

I did it one step at a time, I started with breakfast and then worked from there. I didn't have a calorie goal, just a food quality goal. I would make small diet change and then stick with it for at least 6 weeks and see how the scale reacted.

I kept making these minor changes systematically and monitoring the results. Over a year, I overhauled my entire diet to be extremely healthy and I lost down to a healthy weight.

Only then did I start introducing exercise, but not to lose weight, I never change my exercise based on my weight. I exercise, again, for my health. And again, I started by introducing very small, incremental exercise changes.

Now, I'm seriously disabled, so I can't do vigorous intense exercise, so my exercise has never contributed meaningfully to my weight loss.

Still, over time I lost even more weight down to a BMI of 20-21 with just a sustainable, healthy diet and moderate, gentle exercise.

From my *personal* experience, I believe that what's needed for substantial and sustainable weight loss is patience and data.

The scale will go up and down and often that has nothing to do with how much fat is on your body. That's why you need to do something *consistently* day in and day out for at least 6 weeks and record your weight daily and look at the trends if you *actually* want to see how a specific lifestyle change is affecting your body.

If you do something for a few weeks and then see a rise in the scale and then do something else and then get frustrated and binge, you have no idea what's actually happening, what's actually working and what isn't. It's just data chaos.

It would be nice if the scale showed in real time what is happening with body fat, but it doesn't. The scale measures water too, and that fluctuates like crazy.

The scale can go up for me for a month just because I've been eating too much broccoli and I can't digest it very well so I bloat. I guarantee you the broccoli isn't making me fatter.

Likewise, back when I used to drink, if I was drinking more than normal, the scale would drop, and again, I guarantee you that alcohol was not making me lose fat.

So again, try something CONSISTENTLY for 6 weeks, see what happens, and then adjust. If something doesn't result in weight loss after 6 weeks, that's AWESOME! That means whatever you are doing *isn't* causing you to gain. That means you're 99% of the way there to losing weight.

For the next 6 weeks, make a minor, sustainable adjustment to your intake and see what happens in another 6 weeks. It could be that all you need to do for consistent weight loss is to maybe cut out the sugar in your coffee, or your usual late night snack.

Once you systematically figure out the sustainable eating that produces weight loss, that's it. You're done. Just keep eating that way until you stop losing. If you stop losing and you are happy with that new weight, congrats, you are now in maintenance.

If you stop losing and want to lose more, then you make another small change, wait 6 weeks, and see if you start losing again.

And so on and so forth.

This is how you run an experiment on yourself to figure out what you need to do to achieve your goals.

Now, added bonus, for me, I wasn't just trying to figure out how to lose weight, I was trying to figure out what way of eating made my body feel it's best. So with each 6 week experiment, I not only logged my daily weight, but how I felt after each meal. This is how I know that broccoli (raw) isn't my friend.

So I not only figured out how to eat to maintain a lean, healthy weight indefinitely, I also figured out how to eat to feel my best.

I've been at this for 8 years, that's a lot of opportunities for 6 week tests.

I eat primarily delicious, ultra healthy foods that make me feel great and keep me lean. I didn't follow any diet in a book or website, I customized my diet according to how my own body responds.

Patience, consistency, and data.