I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
If you're still interested in weight loss (or any kind of fitness) I have two recommendations.
One: track everything you eat on fitday.
It has calorie contents for most foods. (The calorie expenditure estimates for exercise are shady and I wouldn't trust them.) The data is useful, regardless of what you decide to do with it. I did fitday for a year and I'm not doing it now, because it's a bit of a hassle, but now I'm calibrated with a sense of how calories feel. (An 1100-calorie day means misery and fatigue; a 1300-calorie day is ok, but sooner or later I'll want to eat more; 1600 feels normal, 2000 is especially tasty, 2500 is a giant feast day. Before I paid attention to my diet, every day was a giant feast day, and that was the problem.)
Two: start a log on T-Nation.
This site is a roiling mass of chaos, I should warn you. It is full of idiots. It is full of porn-addicted bros. It is a time-sucking Charybdis. But it is also full of people who are very, very into fitness, and in very, very good shape. Many of them are professional trainers who share a fair amount of usually proprietary advice for free. If you are specific enough about what you are doing, they will tell you what you are doing wrong.
I learned a lot there. Not least, I learned that what looked like minimal progress to me was actually good progress, and evidence that I should keep it up. A public fitness log, with significant click traffic, is really excellent motivation -- intermittent feedback really does work. And it's even better when much of that feedback is knowledgeable advice. And when you have a pseudo-peer group of people who are much better than you, and give you a sense that more is possible.
Like all forums, this one has its own etiquette -- basically, post in the beginner's section if you're a beginner, give as much concrete data about yourself as possible if you're asking for advice (diet, exercise program, weight, strength, age, goals), and always RTFM. If you ever get interested in doing this, I'd love it if you'd PM me your username.
The general issue here is that you're working with some constraints -- the structure of your day-to-day life, and your physiology/metabolism. You would need to figure out what part of your current situation is preventing fat loss, and if that factor can be changed. Gathering way more data and getting regular input from knowledgeable people will make that process faster. Worst case scenario, you find out exactly why you can't lose weight, find out that it's not something you can change or want to change, and rest easy.