Looking forward to meeting people with the same weight loss journey that I am beginning

I think the social aspect of MFP has kept me motivated--for almost 9 years now. I check in every day because I want to hear how my friends are doing, and I want to do my best to help encourage them. We all succeed together!

I don't stay motivated. I'm not great at being motivated in the first place, as a hedonistic aging hippie type. On top of that, I want to stay at a healthy weight for the rest of my life, and there's no way I can stay motivated enough to do something difficult forever.

Habits. I focus on habits: Specifically, experimenting and finding the easiest and most enjoyable (or at least tolerable/practical) ways for me personally to eat fewer calories and move more (exercise or daily life); then practicing those things until they become habitual. Ideally, the new habits will be able to continue almost on autopilot forever, when other parts of life get challenging . . . because they will.

It's the majority of our days that determine the majority of our results, not that one rare day where we eat too much cake, or work out for 6 hours, or whatever. That puts a premium on the routine, daily habits.

When I started losing weight (at age 59), I decided I wasn't going to do anything to lose weight I wasn't willing to continue forever to stay at a healthy weight, except for a sensibly moderate calorie deficit to trigger the weight loss. I needed to figure out how to organize my daily life around modified habits, how to handle social events with eating, how to handle holidays, etc. It was like a fun, productive science fair project for grown-ups.

Not everything I tried worked for me. When something didn't work, I chalked it up as a learning experience (not a personal failure), and tried something else. Eventually things fell into place.

Within just under a year, I'd lost 50-ish pounds, class 1 obese to a healthy weight, almost 30% of my body weight - that, after around 30 previous years of overweight/obesity, and while menopausal, severely hypothyroid (though medicated), and no Spring chicken. I'm 68 now, still at a healthy weight, approaching 8 years later.

Admittedly, it took an initial commitment to be serious about weight management, and put in the work. I took a little willpower or motivation to figure out a pleasant change in habits and practice it until it was pretty cemented in place. But I could do those things when my limited stock of willpower was in good shape, then coast a bit on the habits if I felt I had less oomph for a while. (Simply not giving up the effort is IMO a key success factor.)

Personally, I think motivation, willpower and even discipline are over-rated, and certainly not things I can rely on any more than temporarily. I needed to find a new, tolerable, practical, pleasant way of running my life. Mostly, it's worked. I still haven't figured out how to handle potlucks yet, for example - but I decided they're not frequent enough in my life to over-stress about it. Between hedonism and FOMO, I tend to eat too much at potlucks. As long as they're not frequent, it works out OK - like I say, the majority of days are the Big Deal.

YMMV on any of this. But I'd encourage you to think about habits, and about how to make your weight management efforts relatively easier, not faster. There is no "over", after which things "go back to normal": For anyone with a lifelong tendency to overweight like me, staying at a healthy weight is a forever endeavor.

Best wishes for success: The results are worth it, in improved quality of life!