I've only ever been slightly overweight but once wanted to lose 8kg to feel a little less chubby. All those highly complex miracle diets just overwhelmed me, I

I've only ever been slightly overweight but once wanted to lose 8kg to feel a little less chubby. All those highly complex miracle diets just overwhelmed me, I didn't want to limit my range of different food items and I didn't want to set schedules. Counting calories was by far the easiest solution. And it worked! You don't even have to carry a little notebook with you, entering exact numbers to the single digits and making charts. All you have to do is read the labels on footstuff from the supermarket and look up estimates for common dishes. Keep a rough number (+/- 100 calories) of today's calories consumed in the back of your head and try to stay beneath 2/3 of your body's base level and you're golden. It's so easy and often doesn't even feel like a sacrifice since it's usually just leaving out that stupid chocolate bar (reading those labels is half the exercise, it's a constant reminder that all the cliches about fast food and soft drinks making you fat are true). Now there's a lot of healthy things you can do to your diet that have nothing to do with losing weight and there's further optimizations that go beyond calorie counting. But if loosing weight is your singular goal, calorie counting is still the easiest way to do it. It might be inaccurate but you don't really need accuracy to remind yourself that this food fills you up 3 times as fast as that other food.