I have been overweight during many years. I have made several half-hearted attempts to lose weight, which failed. All the time I had the wrong impression that it is really impossible to lose weight.

Eventually, one day I decided that I really must do it, and after about 10 months I lost 36 kg (78 pounds), reaching a normal BMI. That was 15 years ago. Now I still easily gain weight, the next day after a culinary orgy I may gain 1 kilogram, which will need a week of eating less to lose the extra weight and reach again the target weight.

In my opinion, the main secret of losing weight and the one which determined the success of my last attempt, in contrast with all earlier failures, is the permanent use of accurate weighing instruments, one digital weighing scale for your body and one digital weighing scale for your food.

You must measure your body weight once per day, every day, and at the same time and in the same sequence in relationship with eating, drinking or relieving yourself, because all such activities will change your weight by several hundred grams, i.e. by much more than your expected weight loss per day, which should be around 100 to 150 grams.

You must also measure all the food you eat either by weight or by volume (e.g. a certain number of spoons). Eating anything in random quantities, or until you are satiated, guarantees that you will fail to lose weight or you will regain it immediately.

Once you have begun to eat predetermined quantities of food everyday, losing weight is trivial. You look at your weight this day, and if it is not less than in the previous day by about 100 to 150 grams (one quarter to one third of a pound), then you must diminish the planned quantity of food. You must cut calories, i.e. carbs and fat. You must not reduce proteins and vegetables.

The hard part is to form the habit to eat according to a plan, i.e. no spontaneous snacks or sweet beverages at random times. It is likely that in order to reduce enough the number of unwanted calories, you need to eat no more than twice per day.

Otherwise the quantity of food eaten at one time will be too small to satiate you. It is much easier to resist the idea of starting to eat, than to stop eating after you have started. So fewer larger meals are better than more small meals.

Besides the 2 meals, you should not eat anything, but you should drink only beverages with neither sugar nor artificial sweeteners (nor milk or other fatty drink).

The beverages with calories are not only more difficult to count in your eating plan, but they would also increase your hungriness, because they provide some of the nutrients that your body desires, but not enough of them.

After the first difficulty, of making an eating plan and sticking to it, the second difficulty is coping with the hunger. That cannot be avoided, but it can be minimized when eating fewer larger meals and nothing between them, to stimulate the hunger. The hunger sensation is usually periodic, i.e. when it is not satisfied it disappears when you are busy with something else, even if it may reappear some time later.

Usually after a few weeks of continuous slow weight loss it should become easier to cope with the hunger.

Even after you reach the target weight, you must persist in eating preplanned food quantities and not until satiety, otherwise regaining weight is very likely.