if you wanna lose weight and love the idea of data: - Start weighing yourself daily (once a day -- smart scale helps, but a notepad to track will work). You st

if you wanna lose weight and love the idea of data: - Start weighing yourself daily (once a day -- smart scale helps, but a notepad to track will work). You start here to build the habit. Do this for a 3 weeks just to understand how much your weight will fluctuate +/-. On any given day I seem to fluctuate 2 lbs or so. You will be similar. if you only weigh yourself once a week you might get encouraged/discouraged while in one of these micro-cycles. - Then after 3 weeks, calculate your macros -- and then understand what in your 'normal' diet is throwing your macros out of wack. If you eat labeled food, look at the labels. If you eat more whole foods, google around for some data. It sounds hard, but you'll build an intuition quick. For my partner and I, we both needed MORE protein. We weren't getting enough. I ate MORE meat, and they added a pea protein smoothie (which sounds lame but they are really good.) My partner started to eat less nuts as well, because they were getting too much fats. - Control for your macros with your normal diet. - Eat whatever you want in your macros, balance yourself by watching the scale. if your macros are off, you will trend up for about 4 days in a row. Anything less in my experience is "expected". I can reverse 3 days of small weight gains (3-5 lbs) in about 1-2 days. Once my partner mastered this, they eat 1 cookie and ice cream every night, guilt-free, to hit their sweet tooth, and we have combined lost close to 40lbs by doing this. - You can work out to firm up, but depending on how much you wanna lose, diet alone could be enough.