I want to be upfront about something before you read another word: I have not lost the weight yet.
This isn't a "here's how I did it" post. I'm not writing from the finish line, holding up a before-and-after photo. I'm writing from the starting line, lacing up my shoes, hoping that putting this in writing makes it a little more real and a little harder to quietly abandon in three weeks.
Maybe that's the point of this post. Say it out loud (or in this case, in writing) and you're more accountable to it. Maybe someone reading this is standing at their own starting line and needs to hear that you don't have to have it all figured out to start making changes. You just have to quit a few things that aren't working.
Here are the five things I quit doing. Not perfectly. Not overnight. But on purpose.
1. Drinking my calories
For years, my day ran on full-sugar soda and energy drinks. Coffee with syrup in the morning, a soda at lunch, something sweet in the afternoon to get through the slump. 200 calories here.. 160 there.. and then the hunger hits.
That's exactly the problem. Sugary drinks don't fill you up the way solid food does, which makes it easy to take in far more calories than you actually need, and the quick rise and fall in blood sugar they cause tends to leave you hungrier sooner. Harvard's Nutrition Source reports that dozens of studies consistently link higher soft drink consumption with higher overall calorie intake, and one large meta-analysis of 88 studies found the effect was even stronger in women. A separate review led by researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard, covering dozens of studies over the last decade, concluded that sugar-sweetened beverages promote weight gain in both kids and adults.
I'm not going to pretend I'm a monk about this. I love my 7Energy from 7Brew. If you know, you know. But I've been swapping in sugar-free options instead of just white-knuckling my way past the drive-through, and I'll do a full write-up soon on my favorite sugar-free energy drinks that still get me through an afternoon without the crash. Quitting the calories in my cup turned out to be one of the easiest wins on this list, once I actually committed to it.
2. Eating late at night
This one is harder to admit. For a long stretch, I'd wait until everyone in the house was asleep and then eat. Not because I was starving. It became almost like secret eating, something I did quietly, alone, after the day was "officially" over.
Looking back, that habit did more damage than I gave it credit for at the time. And the research backs up why. A study out of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's found that eating close to bedtime, when melatonin is elevated, disrupts the body's ability to manage blood sugar and insulin. A 2024 study on adults with prediabetes found that people who ate 45% or more of their daily calories after 5 p.m. had significantly higher blood glucose spikes than those who front-loaded their calories earlier, even when total calories and macros were matched between groups. Other research suggests that eating your last meal earlier in the evening, rather than right before bed, supports better blood sugar control overall.
Beyond the metabolic piece, there's the sleep piece too, which brings me to the next thing.
3. Staying up super late
I've always been a night owl. My brain doesn't really turn on until everyone else's is winding down, and there are still nights I need to grind out work after 10 p.m. I'm not pretending that part of my personality is going away.
But I've stopped treating "night owl" as an excuse to run on five or six hours of sleep. Health organizations including the National Sleep Foundation and the CDC recommend adults get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night, and the data on what happens when you don't is hard to ignore. CDC analysis of national survey data found that sleeping less than 7 hours a night is associated with a higher risk of obesity, along with diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic conditions. One population study in the subarctic found that people sleeping less than 6 hours a night had roughly an 80% higher risk of having a BMI in the overweight range compared to people sleeping 8 to 9 hours. There's even evidence that cutting sleep during an active weight-loss effort slows down the rate of fat loss specifically, separate from diet.
So I still stay up late sometimes. But I try to build my schedule so that late nights are the exception, not the default, and so I'm actually getting close to that 7-9 hour window more nights than not.
4. Eating out
I didn't quit eating out entirely, and I don't think that's realistic or even necessary for most people. Plenty of people eat out regularly and stay healthy by making smart choices on the menu. For me, though, eating out had quietly become a crutch, and it was working against me on two fronts: health and money.
On the health side, research from Johns Hopkins found that people who cook at home most nights of the week consume less sugar, fewer carbs, and less fat than people who rarely cook, even when they aren't actively trying to lose weight, and that frequent home cooks also ate less on the occasions when they did eat out. Restaurant meals are generally built for flavor and portion size, not portion control, which tends to mean more sodium, more fat, and more calories per plate than the same meal made at home.
On the money side, it's not close. Home-cooked meals typically run somewhere around $4 to $6 per serving, while eating out averages well over $15 to $20 per person once you factor in tax, tip, and delivery fees. That gap adds up fast over a month, let alone a year.
Cutting back on eating out wasn't just a health decision for me. It turned out to be a budget decision that happened to also be a health decision, which made it a lot easier to stick with.
5. Making excuses
This is the one that actually mattered most, and it's the hardest to write about because it's the least concrete.
I stopped making excuses. I stopped sitting around and telling myself this is just the way it is. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I stopped saying it's too hard to wake up early, too hard to watch what I eat, too hard to say no to the drive-through. I stopped saying I didn't have time, or that I was too busy, like busy-ness was some kind of permanent, unchangeable weather system happening to me instead of a set of choices I was making.
None of the four things above matter much if this fifth one doesn't happen first. You can know everything there is to know about sugar-sweetened beverages and circadian rhythms and cost-per-serving, and it won't move the needle if you're still telling yourself a story where change isn't possible for you specifically.
I haven't fully quit making excuses. I'm working on it, same as everything else on this list. But naming it, out loud, in writing, is part of quitting it.
Where this leaves me
Again: I haven't lost the weight. I don't have a transformation photo or a number to show you. What I have is a list of things I've quit doing, some data on why they matter, and a public record of me saying I'm going to keep going.
If any of this sounds familiar, that's the point of sharing it. You don't need to have it all figured out to start. You just need to quit a few things that aren't working, and keep going from there.
