Why I'm Doing Better Now Than Any Attempt Before

I'm not some sort of expert, but I wanted to write a post about what I'm doing this time that seems to be making me so successful for myself in case it helps others. I'm not at all saying this is the only way, I'm not saying if you do these things are it doesn't work for you that something is wrong or anything like that, it's just what is working for me and maybe it could work for you or take what you want from it.
I have yo yo'd pretty well all my life and I feel like for the first time I'm coming at this in a way that is the most sustainable and is the closest to truly working as a lifestyle, rather than as a diet. I'm almost 9 months in to my journey.
Some of the biggest reasons are
1. I don't have some sort of specific goal weight. In fact, I want my weight to be as high as possible, while having the fitness and 'look' that I desire, because then I can keep calories higher in maintenance. And a weight goal or fitness goal or a look goal is never an 'end goal' cause the journey never ends if I want to maintain my fitness for the rest of my life.
2. I weigh once a month and it's only to be used as one statistic to see if I want to make any adjustments to my calories and I usually wait 2 months before making any adjustment to see if that's truly what I want to do. In March and April I lost 5-5.5 pounds a month. I don't need to lose that much weight in a month and would rather have more calories to feel satisfied and fuel my workouts so I upped my calories this month. I raised them by 100 cals and am currently eating around 1900 cals a month (my main focus is calories and protein). I only think of my weight within a day or 2 of my monthly weigh in, the rest of the time my weight is virtually never on my mind. I take monthly progress pictures as well to see the actual changes my body is going through.
3. I don't do cardio at the gym. Cardio is great if you enjoy it, but I don't enjoy doing cardio at the gym so if I was forcing myself to do cardio I would have a much harder time getting myself to the gym. I only do weight lifting and it's very rare that I dread or have a hard time making myself go to the gym. I actually have not missed one of my workouts since early October when I was away on vacation. I have flip flopped some days, and it wouldn't be a bad thing to miss the odd workout, but I generally have the desire to still go and I generally have the time to do so, so I just haven't missed a day. I like weight lifting and working to do heavier weights, or improve my form, or see my muscles starting to show more. This gives me constant non scale victories which definitely adds motivation. I do try to get some steps in with walking and training my dogs, but not doing cardio at the gym has been the best thing for my gym journey.
4. I give myself lots of leeway and I never feel bad if I have a day where I eat over cals and I never try to 'make up for it' on another day by eating under calories, and I never make myself do extra exercise to 'make up for it' either. I want/need to be able to be social and go for food with friends/family for this to be sustainable, I want/need to be able to have days where I don't weigh and track every bite and it doesn't matter if I'm a bit over calories. If I go out to eat I may watch my portions/check calories on the meal I'm gonna eat and work it into my calories, I may share my meal with whoever I'm out with, or I may just order an entire pizza and eat it myself and not care about calories for that day, just depending on what I feel like. As long as I'm still losing the fat I'd like to lose and am doing well with my fitness, I'm still acheiving my goals and in the most sustainable way that is possible. Yes, for the majority of my days I weigh and track my food fairly precisely to hit my cal/protein goals, but that's not sustainable for every single day of my life. If it takes me a year to get to what I want to maintain that's fine if I'm getting there in a way that I see as sustainable for the rest of my life.
The other thing that I'm not doing this time that I have in the past, is that I spend very little time on weightloss forums. Every time in the past I've kept like a 'blog' type post on my weightloss and visited weightloss forums every day. I don't know why but I have no desire to do so this time. I use mfp for calorie tracking almost exclusively and only post on here the very odd time I have a specific question (usually a weight lifting question). (this is why I don't accept any friend requests on here either, cause I'm really only on it for the calorie tracking) I don't post about my journey on my facebook either. Other than close friends/family I am just doing this journey as my own thing. I'm not sure if that something that's 'helpful' to me or just something that's irrelevent but it is a change from past so I thought I'd note it.
I don't know if anything I've said will be helpful but hopefully someone is able to take something from it in a positive way. I'll try to pop back on here a couple times in the next day or 2 in case there are any questions.