[radar]

Depending on your present calorie consumption you can start reducing calories by really concentrating on the fats you're including in your everyday diet. I'm not saying fats are bad, but that there is double the calories per unit of fat versus carbs and protein. Start concentrating on replacing some of those fats with purer protein and high fiber foods. This way you've already reduced calories, but not how much you're eating. I started with getting out of the habit of always having whole milk on hand at home, for example. You'd be surprised by how much you can curb your appetite by just leaning a bit more on high fiber foods and protein.

I combined this with being more mindful of how much I exercised that day. If I did exercise that day I don't use it as an excuse to binge eat anything.

I also try to push breakfast out until around 10am (I wake up around 7am, and usually stop eating by 8pm the previous day). Not sure if that counts as fasting, but it works for me. I tried 16 hours of fasting (basically no eating until lunch) and I just ended up binge-eating the calories I saved by not eating. Your mileage may vary.

After getting to work I have about a quart of water, then a coffee. If I feel on the edge of "I need a snack" sometimes it can be enough to just have another pint of water in response to that feeling.

Last, I really tried to get an understanding for how many calories are in particular foods and how many calories I really need per day. Use a calorie calculator to get a feeling for how much you burn while doing certain exercises. Learn how many calories are in common items that you eat all the time. Find optimizations if they are particularly high in calories. Then, after you've learned a bit, stop stressing about the numbers, take your newfound knowledge and see how you do.

[bootsz]

My opinion, from my own experience: Sure, that definitely works. But the choice of cutting fat is kind of arbitrary. You can do the same with sugar & carbs and get basically the same result w.r.t weight loss. I think this illuminates the real underlying issue with modern diets which is not that we eat "too much of X", but rather "too much of everything, too frequently". Approaches like this work not because "fat is bad" or "carbs are bad", but because they provide a simple, concrete framework for diet choices that ends up reducing overall calorie consumption.

[radar]

It's just way easier to rack up calories if the thing you're eating is higher in fats. Remember that fats have no fiber (neither does protein, but that's another conversation), so you won't 'feel' as full, which can easily lead to a much higher calorie ingestion rate that you're body won't be able to keep up with.

Another big thing is portion control! You hit on the nose with eating too much of everything. Something else I've done is making myself smaller plates, but also taking much smaller bites and taking a much longer time to finish the plate. I make it take as long as possible. That way by the end of the plate I have a more accurate sense of how hungry I still am or not.

It's tough to summarize all of points of my current regimen since I've pulled bits and pieces from lots of different sources and put some personal experience into the mix.

[bootsz]

Heh... What's interesting is I personally feel the opposite. I can eat thousands of calories of carbs/sugar no problem, but I fill up on fat pretty quick. I did the keto diet for about 4 months and almost never went over my daily calorie budget, basically without even trying that hard. Most days I had to remind myself to eat more because I was way under.

I wonder if this is a case for emphasizing that "one size fits all" doesn't work in dieting, either. It seems likely that satiety for various food sources might vary based on biology and lifestyle too.