This is what works for me, and I had a good idea that it would work for me, because similar methods have worked for me in the past. It may not work for you (heck, it may not work for anyone else!) - you have to take your own body and preferences into account.

I don't have a specific program that I follow, or a specific amount that I exercise. I was enough overweight when I started that just making a conscious decision to eat smaller portions and to minimize refined carbs got me down about 25 pounds in 4 months. At my heaviest, I was having nerve-related foot pain that kept me from doing any standing exercise (including walking more than short distances - I was hobbling everywhere), but that loss got rid of the pain, and since I'd noticed my loss rate slowing down, I added some exercise and calorie counting.

I'm not a super-strict calorie counter (I eyeball stuff, and make educated guesses), in part because my work requires me to eat out a lot. But I do try to make an educated guess, and when I first started, I did try to weigh and/or measure as much as possible, so I'd know what a cup of food looks like on a plate, for instance. And I record everything I eat (using Fitday), even a nibble here and there. (Which reduces the nibbling, because it's a PITB to record nibbles.) I suspect I actually get 10-15% more calories than I record, due to measurement and other error. And that's OK with me, because it's a fairly consistent 10-15%. If I spent half my time eating prepackaged, preportioned food (so was getting pretty exact calorie numbers) and the other half eating estimated quantities of foods other people prepared (so had very inexact calorie counts), it would not work for me.

I have a calorie range goal in mind, but it's a long-term average. So I don't worry about eating less one day or more another, but I do worry if it doesn't balance out over a week or so. If I go overboard, I try to get back on track as soon as possible. I leave enough room for a treat every day. Some days it's a big treat (I've got a recipe for Oatmeal with Pear in the Recipes section, and that's nearly 400 calories for a bowl); some days it's a single square of Lindt 85% dark chocolate (53 calories). I like to snack in the evenings, so I save my calories for evening snacking. I try to get at least 100g of protein and 25g of fiber every day, and mostly I succeed. I drink a lot of water, because I like water.

I do exercise. When I was first starting to exercise, I found a 15-minute-a-day plan I could commit to doing every day. After about 3 months of that, I got bored, so now I'm doing something else. At the moment, it's 10,000 steps a day (which for me means adding about a 2-mile walk plus spending my evening moving around the house, rather than sitting on my rear). When I get bored with that, I'll do something else, either instead or in addition to.

I weigh myself every day, which is very much a personal choice thing. I find that I've never had a problem either losing or maintaining (depending on which was my goal) when I weighed every day. And I've gained weight very, very quickly (to the tune of 40+ pounds in 6 weeks one time, which was in large part related to going off some medication - but I ate every one of the calories to get me there) when I wasn't weighing every day. I've done it long enough that I know when to expect gains, what weeks I'm not going to see any movement on the scale, and what weeks I'll see big losses. So if I'm up or down 2 pounds from the previous day, it's not a big deal. I use the Hacker's Diet software (free online thing) to calculate the long-term trend, and that's what I use to make sure I'm on track.

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