If you're content with where you are then that's fine. I won't claim it's going to be easy to change things. But I do think there are few things you could change that will nearly guarantee success:

- There's no good or bad food. The number is the only thing that matters. Don't feel bad about eating chips and candy everyday. That's pretty much what I do. All you need is to hit the number.

- Always keep track of how much you've eaten. A big binge is not an excuse to stop counting. After a year or so, counting will become second nature and can be done purely with mental math. But initially, you want to write all the numbers down. Date | calories in | morning weight.

- Don't tie the counting efforts to any other effort. You mention walking 5 hours a day. That's some other unrelated thing. Don't ever mentally link this to your weight loss effort. If you want to do it, do it, but it should have nothing to do with losing weight. Counting and keeping records is your primary job.

- Your family should know what you're up to. They're there to help you achieve your goals. If you've already eaten, they shouldn't let you have a family meal with them. If they just let you get away with this, let them know you don't appreciate it. When you mess up, they should care and think it's a bad thing.

- Get this idea of a "cycle" out of your head. There is no cycle, every day is a new day. Your behavior only looks like some cycle caused by external forces post facto. Everybody trying to form a habit has a similar experience. There is nothing weight loss specific going on here. When you break a good streak everything can go out of the window. This is why it's important to keep the required actions as simple as possible. The more you couple different efforts the harder it's going to be. When you mess up you have to take the loss and move on. A good streak helps but don't dwell on breaking it.

- You have to have a sense of urgency and importance. Those around you should too. "I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point" - just think how ridiculous that sounds. You know you can potentially prevent a serious disease (most people never have that opportunity) but you're just gonna sit there and let some cycle run its course. I mean, come on! How can you wake up everyday and not want to stop it today? What about your children? Perhaps they will inherit your eating habits (stats do show high heritablity), perhaps it would be nice to show them how to keep it under control? You owe it to them. Why doesn't your spouse think that's a huge deal?

It's one of the few things in life where you are literally guaranteed to get a good result if you do what you're supposed to do. There's a lot of advice on how to do this or that, get rich or whatever. But you can never prove these things are guaranteed to work so I can understand if people have a hard time motivating themselves. With weight loss you have a 100% guarantee of success. Personally, I don't see it as some random little problem. Pretty much any effort in life looks like this. You want an outcome, you think of the necessary actions and then the entire ballgame is about actually implementing these actions.