I'm in a similar position, but what made the last time different (down 120 lbs in a year) was education.
First step was simple calorie counting. You don't have to do it forever, but there are calories hiding in the most non-obvious places, and I'm convinced this is what sabotages people who think they should be losing weight but aren't.
For example, a breakfast of eggs and whole grain toast sounds healthy... but coat the pan in a little too much oil, and that's easily an extra 50 calories. Butter the toast? Easy to add another 50 calories. Do that 4 times in a week and you could have just ate a double cheeseburger, and the double cheeseburger would have actually made you fuller.
Now multiply small mistakes like that across your other meals and you have a recipe for feeling like you're starving yourself, not seeing results, and rebounding in frustration.
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I also used to think it was just a lack of willpower that caused me to eat out of control, but things like not getting enough protein, eating foods that are designed to be addicting, and multitasking while I ate, were all working against me.
I decided to stop using willpower as an excuse. If I gained weight, I analyzed why I had gained or overate without thinking "I need to be harder on myself" or "I need to be stronger". Often times patterns emerged, like "I didn't get enough protein that day so I ended up overeating at dinner", or even things as specific as "when I started to introduce food X into my diet, my weight loss slowed down" which revealed I was miscounting the calories on them.
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From there you can start to build strategies on your education. Like yesterday, visiting family I had barely eaten all day. They ordered pizza and I knew that was a terrible combination for me: ravenously hungry + delicious pizza felt like a recipe for overeating.
So as soon as they ordered the pizza, I drank a protein shake (150 calories, 30g of protein) and drank as much water as I could. By the time the pizza arrived, that "ravenous hunger" was just a dull hunger, I was able to eat a single slice and feel full.
The old me would have tried to power through that with "iron will", but failed, went back down after everyone fell asleep, and ate every single left over piece.
Sometimes you need to accept that willpower is not enough, and that's especially true in modern times. We've invented foods that simply could not exist before in terms of how addictive they are, and how little nutrition they provide.
That's why people can demolish a box of Oreos and still feel hunger, but try it with that many cookies made from scratch in a home kitchen for example, and those same people will just get sick. It turns out when you don't get to "cheat" with binders and artificial flavors optimized to the Nth degree by highly paid researchers, you can't really recreate the uniquely bad for you foods that these companies can.
My problem isn’t food education. I’ve worked with a dietician program supervised by a bariatric doctor. Whole Foods adequate protein calorie counting etc. works for a while but the need for constant willpower battle is a bitch.
My entire comment is about how I learned to accept that I can't rely on constant willpower, did you read the whole thing or discard it as just being "learn what macros are"?
Having someone else come up with a diet isn't really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about internalizing the stuff, so that it's not just a constant willpower battle.
I used to have the same "etc." mentality about all that "Whole food protein stuff", but actually sitting down myself and learning the underlying concepts rather than the fads was completely different than getting talked down to by a professional or reading some weight loss guide.
Just look at my example about pizza, I didn't have the willpower so I "shortcutted" around my willpower. If I had tried to make it a battle of willpower I would have lost. It's small things like that which make it less constant of a battle.
Same with not multitasking while eating, something I learned was that I overeat when I'm multitasking because it's harder to sense when I cross the line from hungry to full.
tl;dr, I didn't mean just "food education", as in learning to read labels, but learning about your own relationship with food, like the emotional component, the situations where your willpower is tested most, so you can develop strategies specific to yourself.
A dietitian can't do that for you, it's a deeply personal thing.
