Imagine you are on a week-long vacation at an all-you-can-eat resort. At each meal you are surprised at how good it is, so you take the extra couple of bites after being full. You are on vacation after all. Would you gain weight? Yes. There should be no surprise there.

Now imagine the opposite. You completely fast for two days. Don't eat anything. Would you lose weight? Yes.

So we know that eating too much leads to gaining weight and not eating leads to losing weight. The answer to maintaining or losing weight is somewhere between those two extremes. That's it. That's the core of it.

The rest is just figuring out where the balance is for your body and your goals.

Two Terms You Need to Know

The first is calories. Food is labeled with the number of calories it contains. We won't get into the science of what a calorie actually is. Just think of it as a unit of energy. You eat 3 oz of chicken breast, you gain 140 units of energy.

The second is Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This is the amount of energy your body naturally spends each day. It takes energy to breathe, to walk, to move your arms, to read some guy's blog post about weight loss. There are websites that help you estimate this number. For example, a 30-year-old, 6-foot male who is 200 lbs and doesn't do much regular exercise would have a TDEE of roughly 2,620 calories.

The equation is straightforward: calories in (what you eat) - calories out (TDEE) = weight change. If you are the person above and you eat a footlong meatball sub (~960 calories) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (~2,880 calories), you will slowly gain weight.

The general recommendation for losing weight is a deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories per day, which works out to about 1-2 lbs per week. That's it. Nothing dramatic. This is a long game, not a sprint.

The First Two Steps

Here's where I'd start. No dramatic changes. No overhauling your life. Just two things.

Step 1: Weigh yourself daily. You can't improve what you don't track. If you don't have a scale go buy one. They cost ~$20.

Weigh yourself first thing in the morning after going to the bathroom. Track it in an app (MyFitnessPal, Apple Health, whatever is easiest for you). Don't stress about the number yet. Just get used to knowing it. You'll start to notice patterns. Had takeout Chinese last night? The sodium made you retain water and the number went up. That's normal. Had a lighter day? It'll probably show up the next morning.

For now, don't change anything about your habits. Just watch the number for a week or two and see what your normal fluctuation looks like.

Step 2: Start a food diary. Before anything goes into your mouth, it goes into the diary. You don't need to count calories yet. Just write down what you eat. This sounds tedious, but it is eye-opening. Snacking becomes second nature and you can easily forget that you took an extra trip to the kitchen.

After a week, look back at what you ate. For days where your weight went up, look up the calorie counts for some the food you ate the day before. Compare that to your TDEE. In the beginning you are just trying to build intuition around what foods are chaloric or not.

Think of Your Body Like a Car

Your body is a machine. It only needs enough fuel to get you to the next meal. If you put in extra, your body isn't going to pour the extra gas out. It's going to store it in a gas canister in the back seat. The back seat is full? Okay, we'll strap it to the roof. This car will expand.

The thing I had to learn (and re-learn, honestly) is that your body needs very little food to function. Once you start paying attention, you realize that most of the eating you do is out of habit, boredom, or social pressure, not because your body actually needs it.

You don't have to overhaul everything at once. Cut one thing. Maybe it's sugary drinks. Maybe it's the afternoon snack. Maybe it's taking a smaller portion at dinner. Start small. Small changes compound over time.

Changing Your Mindset

Here's the part no one tells you: losing weight is as much a mental game as a physical one. You have built habits over your entire life. You are trying to change those habits. Unless you are intentional about it, it won't happen. No one else will change it for you.

Figure out why you want to lose weight. "Just because" isn't enough. You need a reason that is strong enough to get you through the moment when you are staring down a plate of cookies and your brain is telling you to eat three of them. For me, it was my family. Find yours.

Develop a mantra if that helps. In the beginning, mine was: my goal is bigger than today's desire. I had realized that I got overweight by a bunch of small bad decisions. Each time an opportunity to make a bad decision came up, I had to confront that my goal was bigger than that desire and that following that desire is let to me being overweight.

Where to Go From Here

This post is intentionally short. I'm not going to try to cover everything because I'm not an expert. I'm just a guy who lost 30+ pounds and wants to document the basics for anyone who is in a similar situation as I was.

If you want to go deeper, here are some resources I found helpful:

• Dan Go on YouTube for practical, no-nonsense fitness advice
• r/loseit on Reddit for community support and success stories
• Atomic Habits by James Clear for understanding how habits actually work
• A TDEE calculator like tdeecalculator.net to know your number

Part of changing habits is forming a new identity, which means creating new thinking patterns. Having good content going through your mind helps bring awareness to your actions and builds those new patterns.

If you want to see what this process actually looked like for me over the past year, I wrote about my personal weight loss journey separately. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.