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One thing that makes life challenging is that Simple ≠ Easy.
Said another way Simple is "not equal to/not the same as" Easy.
One can describe how to climb a mountain in a simple way. Move the first foot. Move the second foot. Repeat. That is all there is to climbing a mountain, right? Well, that is a simple way to see and to describe doing a difficult thing. But for anyone that has climbed a mountain (or even a large hill), simple may not feel that easy.
From my experience, finding a way to use my bodies excess fat stores (losing weight) is relatively simple, but it does not always seem easy.
The simple part I have described in other places. What has worked for me is simple: Eating 1 or 2 meals a day, reducing most simple carbs, not drinking my calories. Simple, but that does not mean that it is easy.
Why we eat what we do:
Cravings for foods or drinks and how they make us feel (or not feel) is one of the daily challenges that someone has while changing when/what they eat.
If you eat to feel (or to not feel) something, the reason that you are eating is deep. It is not hunger related, it is tied to a psychological hunger. Changing your diet and losing ten pounds will make your pants looser, but will not make the cravings for what eating makes you feel magically disappear. I don't feel that I have anything to say on this topic that would be useful except that I think that the key part of making ANY significant life-style change requires you to examine the WHY of that change. If you know WHY you want something, aligning your WHY with your What and your HOW seems to dramatically increase the likelihood you will succeed. So, if you have made a commitment to stop eating or drinking "X", whatever X is, and now you are holding it in your hands about to consume it, ask yourself "What am I hoping this will give me" then eat it and see if it does.
If your eating is not primarily emotional (or you don't want to consider that), but the physical craving to eat is strong and you have had sufficient calories for the day (if your body wants more but your brain says I have already had enough), then I would suggest that your body is not craving "food" but something else.
My experience is that when I eat certain foods, I feel better. My mood increases or my energy increases. When I eat food for this reason, it is similar to why I drink booze or why someone would take a different type of drug, to change my immediate experience in the now. Food and drink is delicious. We are hard-wired by nature to want to eat delicious foods. Sweets or even better, Sweet and Fats and Salt mixed together in various combinations. What is strange about these mixtures are that they do not satiate one, rather they seem to trigger you to want to eat more. In the survival context of food scarcity, this is an amazing biological adaptation to increase your chances to survive. But in our current environment (if food is not scarce for you), this adaptive behavior will ultimately destroy the host, you.
This is why I stopped eating and drinking simple carbohydrates in order to lose my excess body fat. It's not that I don't think that the foods can be full of nutrition. They are both delicious AND energy dense and if my body needed more energy to be stored then they are the perfect thing to eat. If there ever is a Zombie Apocalypse, and I am under my ideal weight, or I need to store up for Winter, you can be sure that I would eat the Standard American Diet (sorry Americans, that is not a slight at you, just a nod to the power of the AMA in the world).
For me, the rapid release of energy from simple carbohydrates, make me feel great and make me want to eat more of them. Carbs make me crave more carbs. I am not easily satiated when I eat simple carbohydrates, especially if they are mixed with fat and are sweet. This is why I can have a full thanksgiving dinner and STILL have room for pumpkin pie with whipping cream at the end. Logically, after I have the main course, I am no longer hungry, but I want the pleasure that comes with the dessert that I am about to eat.
So, after all that writing, what am I trying to say in this piece?
Based on everything I know (and I could be completely wrong),
Losing weight is hard if I am not willing to understand 'why I want to lose weight' and to couple that 'why' with new behaviors that will allow me to make those changes.
Said in a more accurate way:
"Being unwilling to but my body into the uncomfortable state of caloric deficit, in order to allow it to use up my stores of excess body fat, makes the goal of weight loss unlikely.".
Losing weight is easy if I can embrace that the goal will be worth the temporary discomfort of the journey and that I will need to change how I see the world (and rediscover the why of eating and drinking).
So, if you want to see what it feels like to be 20 pounds lighter, if you are up for the journey why not take the first steps today?