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SarahC comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I'd walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight - the same slow creep. It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I've gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don't know they're metabolically privileged and don't comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you're not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that's fine. Don't tell me how well it's going to work or how easy it's going to be; that just tells me you're clueless.
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.