I wrote an answer on Quora I think is worth sharing here.   The question was where to start when you want to lose weight.  1. Drink two glasses of water before every meal, this alone will make you so full you will not be able to eat much.  2. Allow your stomach to shrink.  Hunger pangs means your stomach is shrinking. Once it shrinks be aware. It will take less food to feel full. Pause before you eat that next slice of pizza. You might have eaten 3 slices previously, but if your stomach has shrunk you will be full now after two or even one. Wait 20 minutes. Your satiety signal from your brain doesnt come for at least 20 minutes after you are full.  Dont fall for high carb diets. If you dont eat any fat you will never feel full.  Actually if you really practice just these few tips you will lose weight. Emotional eating is a different problem.  Ask yourself if you are hungry. People are rarely hungry.  We eat out of habit and emotionally. Simply ask yourself if you are hungry each time before you eat, that alone will help you lose weight.   Simple is better.  You will do great if you can incorporate just those few suggestions.  If you want to go more in depth,  Weigh yourself every day. You must have a scale that measure body fat. Because if you are losing fat, ( replacing fat with muscle) because you are working out, your weight will not reflect that.  Those scales are now very inexpensive. You can buy them online or at most retail stores. When you weigh yourself its merely to stay on target a few pounds might be water weight.  Notice how much water you are drinking.  But on the other hand if you seem to have consistently gained a few pounds its time to ramp up your efforts.  Dont unconsciously gain weight.  You need daily feedback.  Weigh yourself with the same amount of clothes or none, at the same time of day with the same amount of water each day.

Visualize.  That is way more important than willpower.  Dream and visualizing how sexy you are going to look in that little black dress and feel wearing that bikini in the first time in years. If you are conversely dreaming how good that slice of pizza is going to taste you lose, not weight but your quest to lose weight.  You need to flood your conscious and subconscious with positive visualizations of how great you are going to look and feel. I would even go so far as to imagine the worst foods ( you should never eat anyway) to taste bad and have the true negative effects they actually have. Imagine.  If you are constantly thinking about how much damage the coca cola and its 10 teaspoons of sugar are doing to your body besides gaining weight.  If you have a look at the pictures of people getting amputations because of diabetes its not going to take much willpower to make a better choice.  Your choices are 100% imagination.  Even when you wife or husband asks you what you want to eat, you actually stop and imagine what you are in the mood for.  How about imagining what is going to get you to your goals of happiness and looking great and feeling great ?