Hello fitnessPal community, my name is Damian i am 49 and looking for some feedback.

Welcome to MFP!

There's lots of good tools here to help you succeed. It's not that the app works so much; you just have to set goals and stick to them. What are your goals?

As for tips; I have written this before, and it's pretty valid. The best few tips I can think of for starting out are:

• Plan to go slow. If you are trying to lose weight, remember you didn't gain it in a month or a year; take the slow route to help assure success. Then it will be easier to maintain when you reach goal.
• Don't plan any strategies you aren't willing to continue indefinitely. Only do things that are sustainable in the long run.
• Plan on having a reasonable calorie deficit, on average, each week. Best if you can manage a small deficit each day, but if you miss a day, don't fret. Just keep going forward. Stick to it.
• Yeah, that's it's own point: STICK TO IT!
• Set reasonable but challenging goals. Set long-term and short term goals. What are some specific goals you have set for yourself?
• Check in often. Don't stress if the scale is up for the day. Look over the long term trend; weight loss is not linear. You'll have up and down days. Over time, if you maintain a deficit, you'll trend down.
• Exercise is very healthy for fitness. It can contribute to a calorie deficit and aid in weight management. You still must manage your food intake to assure a calorie deficit. Logging your food and your activity in MFP will help you get an idea how to slowly adjust your target for success.

Good advice above. I'd add this:

Habits create expectations, and some of those have physical manifestations. More concretely, if you're used to eating lots of snacks, then your body will tend to tell you it wants food when you're at a time or in a situation where you'd usually snack.

If that's part of it, there are two ways you could look at addressing it.

First, you could think of it like training a puppy. If you give in to what your body is asking for (out of pure habit, not actual need for fuel or nutrition), it will keep asking in those circumstances. If you routinely and consistently tell yourself no, that you need to wait until you've planned to eat on your new schedule, then the cravings will tend to reduce over a period of time, if it's just a habit thing. You retrain yourself with consistency and firmness, just like you'd train that puppy.

Second, you could keep snacking at your usual times, but change your snack choice. You could either allocate calories to the snack to have something nutritious/filling, or try a low/no calorie snack like coffee, tea, flavored water, a diet beverage, very low calorie veggies, or something like that. Eating timing, as long as total calories add up to the same, doesn't have much/any impact on weight loss, except in how easy it make it for you to stick to your calorie goal. (I totally get that you want to save up that limited-budget of willpower and use it in the way that's most effective for you!)

Best wishes!