I cut out drinks with sugar in them, eating after dinner, and in general just eating healthy meals.

I lift weights about 3 days a week, and am fairly fit strengthwise.

All this lowered my fat levels down to a reasonable level, but still left me with about 23% body fat and a bit of a belly, and that remained consistent. Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.

What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week. This really means just eating one dinner a little earlier (4:30pm) and then skipping breakfast and lunch and drinking water with electrolytes added.

With keeping the rest of the days calorie intake the same, I have shaved off consistently 1 pound a week and 1/2" from my waistline.

This has been going for 5 weeks now, and I have gone from 23% to 19.7% based on navy body fat formula.

What is great is I have no cravings or feelings that I am depriving myself except for the last 8 hrs of the weekly fast. The rest of the week, I eat well.

My plan is to bring myself down to 15% and then continuing to measure. If I get above 15% I fast that week, if I don't then I don't fast, so it basically becomes like a controllable throttle.

> What I found has helped is doing a 24 hour fast once a week.

Another protocol that is sustainable is 4:3, ie 4 days of normal eating and 3 of intermittent fasting.

> Trying to diet didn't really cause any maintainable change.

That's not a surprise. Changing diet composition can in the short-run lead to lower caloric intake than what preceeded (e.g. SAD diet), but doesn't guarantee a sustained caloric deficit, which is why controlling for macros like fat or carbs eventually hits a wall. What are you going to do when there are no more carbs to cut? If you have a lot of excess to lose, you can't "intuitively" eat your way down to your target.

The fasts work similarly owing to deficit: a fasted day lowers the average caloric intake for the week (assuming you don't overcompensate other days). As with macros, here again, what are you going to do to increase deficit further? Fast for 48 hours? If with a fast your caloric intake isn't dropping further week-to-week, weight loss will stagnate.

Whichever approach, one of the pitfalls is steep deficit followed by metabolic adaptation i.e. crashing metabolism. This is why it's helpful to keep a small caloric deficit, and incrementally change your intake target. That is only reliably achieved by tracking calories.