Please save yourself 15 years of headache so you don't have to struggle like I did.
I would do most anything to hop back in a time machine to give myself the knowledge I needed to have success in my health and body composition goals.
Binge eating, yo-yo'ing with my weight, developing a pretty crappy relationship with diet and exercise...
Here are 3 things I wish I knew:
NEVER depend on motivation. Motivation isn't linear: it's up, it's down, it's ambivalent...in a day, month, and a year picture. Depend on habits. Use motivation to increase the effort to expedite results. Not to just get it done in the first place.
90% adherence does not equal 90% results. What people think they will get results on vs what what it actually takes is wildly different. Hitting macros with 0 gram variance, hitting your workouts consistently, getting 7+ hours of sleep, and decreasing caffeine consumption are hard to do. Now, try doing that 24/7/365 with no exceptions. Your results don't care if you had a hard day or didn't prep your food.
Nutrition isn't binary. There are no "good" or "bad" days or weeks. Nutrition is a continuum. Just because you went over on calories doesn't mean you might as well binge eat another 1,000 calories and skip your workout the next day.
I hope these speak to you. And I know that switching your mentality completely around this will take years. There's still times that my knowledge is overpowered by my emotions.
Love y'all!
-DC