in my experience persistence and consistency is the key. Ive had a lot of bursts throughout my life where i've tried to lose weight but I never really stuck to it. Its only when I forced myself to do it every day and stick it out for the long run I saw results. To help with this what I found helpful was instead of dieting and exercising with a mindset of doing it just to lose weight, I forced myself to see it as a permanent lifestlye change that can never be broken. Obviously, I still had my days where I would crack, but having a mindset as strict as I had made the cheat days feel like a much bigger deal. In terms of what I ate, the only thing I cut out of my diet completely was soda. I never drank a lot of it before, but even the few cans and glasses id have occasionally added up. What really helped me was a calorie counter app on my phone. Its called myplate and it set the calories I was allowed based on my height, age, amount of exercise a day etc. I did that every day up until I got to the point where I could just track it in my head, but it definitely formed a good habit when buying meals and stuff. In terms of exercise, I started off by running around a mile to a mile and a half every other day or so on the treadmill. Once summer hit I made it a mission to try to run at least 1 mile every single day. Again, wasn't 100% faithful to this, but the amount of calories I was intaking on average was based on having a sedentary lifestyle (which just means you dont have any formal exercise routine, not that you physically dont move which is what I thought at first haha). So the exercise really helped shave the weight off . hope you can find some helpfulness from it. At the end of the day, I feel like everyones weight loss journey is very different, so just take any piece of my method that suits you. If runnings not your thing, its not the end of the world, you can burn calories by doing a lot of things. Finding a routine that works best for you will be the best for a long term plan. but even still, you can lose weight without even exercising on a daily basis. Simply tracking calories as much as you can that are calculated so that you lose maybe a pound or 2 a week will give you results if you stick to them.