It's been almost 6 months since I started my diet, and I'm happy to say: it is working!! I've lost 10% of my starting weight, and my weight loss has been a bit slow but extremely steady. That plateau I thought I'd hit in my first post? When I went back and looked at it in a 3-month context, it was clearly never a plateau at all. Since then, whenever I think I'm hitting a wall, I make a point not to make any changes to my diet or exercise for a whole month. Almost every time, the daily/weekly weigh ins were misleading and my month to month trend is still great. I did truly stall last month, after I got a bit lazy and tried to eat intuitively instead of counting calories. But I still waited about a month just to see what would happen, and I'm glad that I did. Now I know both that I'm able to basically maintain my weight by intuition alone (which is a great sign!) but I'm also confident that the cuts I'm making are truly necessary and making a clear difference.