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Michaelos comments on What is your rationality blind spot? - Less Wrong
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Have you tried telling yourself you can have any candy that you want as long as you methodically write down EXACTLY how much candy you have?
That appears to be about half of the approach to the commercial diet plan I'm on (which has been working so far), but you can do that part for free.
I know I snack much less after I started simply because instead of thinking "Free snacks!" I think "Snacks, at the cost of writing it down later/counting exactly how much I'm eating... nah, I don't feel like it." But when I'm actually hungry and want snacks, I HAVE snacks, and then I dutifully log how many snacks I've eaten. It makes the snacks that I DO have taste even more delicious, because I get that indulgent "I'm eating snacks on a diet!" satisfaction, but I'm still losing weight anyway, so I get that indulgent satisfaction without any accompanying guilt.
Now, it is certainly possible that this will fail for me/you later, since I've only been on the diet for the past three and a half weeks, and in general diets get harder after the first few weeks. But the principle of making it just a tiny bit more difficult to eat food seems like a relatively reasonable approach to eating less food, if you haven't already tried it.
I like this suggestion, but like many people I have trouble making precommitments only to myself. If I had someone to turn these logs over to, who had some power to make me feel bad if I didn't or was dishonest about it, then I could imagine this working (at least for a while).
https://www.beeminder.com/
Track it, and post a link. We'll make you feel bad (if that's what you want).
I made an account for beeminder for something else, but I didn't develop a habit of actually recording things on a day to day basis. Starting that, especially during the holidays, is difficult.
I just noticed that I'm making excuses to not do things that I should probably do. I'm going to search the app store for something that does this easily from my phone because I always have my phone on me and am always deedling on it.
Searching the app store I'm finding that the apps probably mostly aren't appropriate for me, in that I don't have specific goals or want to lose weight; I just want to shift my snacking away from things like reese's pieces and towards things like salads. But given that I am already looking for excuses not to do anything I'm just going to download the highest rated free app and start using it as much as I can, and then I'll see what happens. Better than doing nothing.
You can add data to beeminder by sending an email. This may be slightly too cumbersome for "each and every snack" but isn't bad. I'm sure it could be wrapped in something even easier, but... yeah.
EDIT: eh, apologies for the unsolicited other-optimising. I really need to stop doing that.
I've been using Noom recently. It's a weightloss app but I'm finding it to have a decent level of granularity for food logging and it nags you every 4 hours or so if you haven't logged anything in that time, which can be either a good or a bad thing depending on how often you expect to have food to record. I pretty much entirely ignore all the other stuff it wants me to do.
Various studies (that I don't have to hand and couldn't find in a hurry) show that the mere act of taking notice of everything you eat - notebook, phone camera or whatever - will help you lose weight.
In my experience this pattern -- if I take notice of every time I do X, it's easier for me to deliberately influence how often I do X -- generalizes pretty well to all Xes I'm physically capable of influencing.
This shouldn't be surprising. It's easier to deliberately influence things I'm aware of than things I'm not.
Personally I found tracking calories (using myfitnesspal android app) really helpful. Becoming aware that a small amount of sweets has same calories as a pile of bacon subconsciously shifted my behaviour. (Also, whats true is already so, being aware of it can't hurt)