The way to do it is to change your taste buds. Stop eating crap sweeteners by eliminating anything from your diet that has high fructose corn syrup. Also eliminate any artificial sweeteners. Instead, accept only sugar as the sweetener.
Sounds strange, but this will eliminate a whole raft of crap food, and your taste buds will change. After a while, you will not be interested cheap quality foods that are sweetened with HFC or artificial sweeteners.
For example, if you drink soda, only drink soda that is sweetened with sugar. After a while, the HFC and artificially sweetened sodas will be disgusting to you. This is progress.
You'll discover that you're eating better quality food, and you'll be less and less tempted to buy crap.
The next step is to eliminate dessert food. This is stuff that purports to be food, but is actually sweetened to be a dessert. The goal is to have dessert be dessert, and food be food.
You expect desserts to be sweetened, but not normal food items. Example: most bread in US grocery stores is sweetened. It's more like cake than bread. Actual bread does not need to be sweetened. Find bread that is actually bread.
The best way to do this is to pick a single meal a day, such as breakfast. Breakfast and dessert are two different things. What can you have for breakfast that is not sweetened? Eat that. You'll find your energy level will even out and you'll start to notice all the other flavors in your food that sugar was drowning out.
I have to walk for an hour around my old dinner time to distract from hunger pangs.
I liked that the app showed the rough calories each meal was, an eye opener for sure. So I cut down on bread and replaced snacks with greek yogurt.
After a month and a bit, my fat/muscle ratio is starting to get back to normal, thankfully. But I can see it's going to take a couple more months to get back to the level I was at a year or so ago.
Being able to climb stairs (with a mask on!) without nearly passing out is a good thing.
It’s a simple habit, but it has had a dramatic effect on my weight loss journey. Level 2 of this habit is to check out the nutritional information of everything before you eat it, but that’s a discussion for another day.