This is contradictory to the advice I see often in r/fitness, but after many years of failed attempts at losing weight what ended up working for me was weighing myself every day. The reason many people say not to do this is because normal fluctuations of weight might lead you to erroneously believe something isn't working, but I had a system to avoid this; 1) I always weigh myself in the morning because you normally weight less this time of day. Also, to make the measurements as repeatable as possible, I leave the scale in exactly the same spot on my floor, because in that room there is a slight slope. I try to keep it on the flattest part of the floor too. And I always weigh myself to without clothes or jewelry. 2) I weigh myself as many times as I want after that. Sometimes right after the initial daily weigh in (because the scale can be off by a few tenths of a pound) and sometimes at other points in the day (if for some reason I had a late lunch for instance, I mightn weigh in before lunch). 3) I record only the lowest weight for the day in my log (except when the scale is reading like 10 lbs less, in which case I know it's an in actuate reading). 4) I make it as easy as possible to keep up with this system. I bought a wifi scale that automatically sends the weigh ins to my phone, and I have an app that keep track of everything and makes pretty graphs and stuff. I use an Aria scale and the LoseIt! app, but there are plenty of other options to do the same thing. My goal was to remove as many barriers to sticking to this plan as possible, so not having to also manually keep track is one less thing that I can use as an excuse to be lazy and not keep track of my weight.

Ok, so all of this sounds pretty neurotic, but here's why I do it and why it works for me. For one, I understand and expect weight fluctuations due to natural changes in the body and also from measurement error. However, you are able to see the trend over the course of a few days. A day of gaining two pounds might sounds like a lot but it really isn't, but three days in a row of gaining 0.5 pounds is a trend worth working on reversing. And when you weigh in at 0.1 pounds less than the day before it's basically meaningles BUT it still feels good. Also, I set very small goals for myself, no more than 4 pounds at a time. When I reach that goal I set another goal of a few pounds.

Also, to actually lose the weight I tracked my calories. I didn't even work out for the first several months of weight loss and still lost a ton of weight. Again, I made this as easy as possible to remove excuses not to do it by using an app that can scan barcodes or quickly look up foods and calculate the calories for me.

I admit it sounds obsessive. But really I am not thinking about it all day, and actually I almost never feel like "oh I'm starving lets go get food!" like I did back when I didn't have a diet and over ate. And even if it is a little much it's still worth it because I've lost ~55lbs so far since April. Also, I don't rely on others to make my feel happy about myself, but when you start getting complements about how you look it is pretty awesome. And anyway it's hard to get motivated by that when you are stating because people won't notice for a while anyway.