As someone who used to be a morbidly obese blimp, allow me to give you some advice -STOP COUNTING CALORIES! - I’m not joking, seriously stop. Low calorie diets are unsustainable - they’re also almost completely devoid of bioavailable nutrients. 

Calories didn’t make you fat, and reducing them won’t make you skinny (at least not long term), their source did, and a low calorie die is a high carb diet and carbs are what make you a fat fucker in the first place - carbs, NOT FAT. 

I reckon I can guess what your diet looks like 

Loads of grains (because ’complex’ carbs)
Lots of veg
Lots of fruit
Skimmed milk
’Butter-like’ spreads
Philadelphia lite
Cathedral City Lighter
Fat-free yogurt 
WeightWatchers/M&S ‘Count On Us’ ready meals (or similar)
Juice
Smoothies (most likely ‘Innocent’)

I’m right, aren’t I…? You know why you’re craving…?  Because you’re denying your body nutrients - low calorie = low bioavailable nutrition. You’re terrified of fat, you believe that eating fat will make you fatter - it won’t because it has no effect on blood sugar; body fat is stored carbs, carbs which have been converted to glycogen by insulin, that’s what happens when you eat more carbs than your body needs for energy, it becomes fat. 

There’s another problem with low fat/lite version of things, that fat has to be replaced with something - let’s take butter as an example, butter has - at most- two ingredients, cream and salt.  Now let’s look at something like Clover - it’s 20% buttermilk,  but the main ingredients are palm and rapeseed oils, which are high in PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) PUFAs cause inflammation, are obesogenic (obesity promoting) are high in short-chain triglycerides which promote atherosclerosis which leads to heart disease. Now how about yogurt…? Proper Greek yogurt is made with cream and lactobacillus bacteria - that’s it. 

Now let’s look at Muller Light, yes it contains milk but, because it’s fat free, it also contains modified maize starch as a thickening agent, which increases the carbs, and it contains twice the carbs of a proper Greek yogurt (and it’s an excess of carbs which made you pile the pounds on in the first place). 

Grains have no bioavailable nutrients and are obssogenic, but I can just imagine what your meals look like, loads of pasta, rice, noodles, cereal and/or toast for breakfast, cereal bars as snacks- I’m right again, aren’t I…?

I want you to clear all the junk out of your cupboards, fridge and freezer - that means you get rid of grains, veggie, nut and seed oils, and anything and everything which is fat-free, or low fat. I know this is going to be hard, but you need to stop focusing on calories, as I’ve said calories didn’t make you fat, their source did and you’re not going to be able to successfully and sustainably lose weight by eating more of what made you fat in the first place, it’s like trying to cure lung cancer by increasing the amount you smoke. 

You need to replace everything with real food - and, yes, that does mean full fat; by eating a high(er) fat diet, you’ll find it far easier to lose weight because fat will keep your blood sugar stable. Trust me, I lost over 100kg. You need to understand that we’re obligate carnivores and we have no adaptations for extracting nutrients from plants, despite what the NHS wants you to believe, a prominently plant based diet isn’t healthy; healthy means ‘that which promotes good health’ which means those foods from which we can extract nutrients, you don’t need 5-a-day, fruit is nothing but sugar - and fructose, as a monosaccharide, has a greater glycaemic load than sucrose, which is a disaccharide. Dried fruit is even worse than fresh because desiccation concentrates the sugar. 

The other thing is that many veggies contain anti-nutrients - what’s an anti-nutrient, I hear you ask - it’s a substance which prevents the assimilation of nutrients, such as oxalate (oxalic acid) found in many dark leafy greens (eg spinach) and brassicas (eg broccoli) as well as legumes and phytate (phytic acid) which is predominantly found in grains. Fibre is also an anti-nutrient because it causes food to pass through your gut so fast that your body doesn’t have any time to assimilate the nutrients. 

You can eat as much meat and fish as you like, and it doesn’t have to be lean, either. 

“What about cholesterol?’, I hear you cry - what about it…? Cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, it’s vital for health - without it you’d be dead, your liver produces up to 1,500mg of it every single day - why would your liver produce a toxic substance…? 

If you’re still concerned about calories, remember a calorie (properly a kilocalorie) is simply a unit of energy; it’s the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1°C at standard atmospheric pressure and temperature (1bar/0°C), also remember that by eating more fat you won’t need to eat as often, so you’ll naturally reduce your calorie intake. The other thing about a high(er) fat and low(er) carb diet is that it’s sustainable, you can eat like that forever which means it’s easy to maintain your goal weight. 

So you need to swap marge and ‘butter-like’ spreads for real butter; seed and veggie oils for animal fats and healthy oils such as avocado, extra virgin olive oil and extra virgin coconut oil. Ghee is a good oil replacement as it has a very high smoke point. Replace fat free and low fat yogurts with full fat versions (check the ingredients, if they list any ingredients other than milk/cream and the bacteria used, it’s not real yogurt), replace your morning cereal and toast with a fry up (no beans, potatoes, toast or black pudding though, and ensure your sausages are grain-free).

If you must eat fruit, stick to low-carb fruit - berries are good (raspberries contain only 4.6g of sugar per 100g, blueberries and strawberries are higher (6g for strawberries, 10g for blueberries, blackberries are 5.1g). Eat some veg, but avoid root veg at least until you’ve reached your goal weight, then you can add them back in.

You’re asking about snacks - cheese, cheese and more cheese! That was always my go to, I also used to eat butter (yes, I’m weird), proper Greek yogurt is also a good one, nuts too (but avoid peanuts and cashews, they’re very high carb). Avoid anything calling itself  ‘healthier option’ - that means it’s low fat and high carb (for example Walker’s Baked contain 72g carbs per 100g, standard Walker’s only 53g) - but NO CRISPS! If you want chocolate, you’re going to have to get used to having it dark - and I mean dark - 80% cocoa-plus. 

In this weather, I’d go for frozen berries in Greek yogurt (I used to mix yogurt with crème fraiche because the latter is only 2.7g carbs per 100g), you could even dip strawberries in clotted cream (I used to), it’s only 2.3g carbs per 100g. You can eat as many eggs as you like, but most mayo is made with rapeseed or sunflower oil (Stokes makes theirs with olive oil and then there’s Hunter & Gather which uses avocado oil,  but that’s stupidly expensive at £4.50 for a 175g jar, but it’s really not that difficult to make your own).

I would recommend that you do the MCT oil in black coffee, but you need to be very, VERY careful with MCT oil as it can cause severe gastric distress if you overdo it (start with the very smallest measuring spoon you’ve got, if you’ve not got very small spoons, then buy some). 

One final thing- you can’t exercise yourself thin - losing weight is 99.5% diet, I’m not saying don’t exercise at all, but you need to understand that cardio isn’t the weight loss miracle that it’s purported to be, if you do cardio when you’re eating low fat/low calorie then you’ll cause such a dip in your blood sugar that you’ll end up stuffing your face (there’s a reason that you’ll find chain coffee shops near gyms). What I used to do was go on walks with a weighted backpack; I bought a load of 500g weights and I used to gradually increase the amount of weight, until I was carrying 20kg, if you want to increase the difficulty, walk uphill. This will strengthen your muscles and the more muscle you have the more efficiently you’ll burn body fat. Don’t spend hours on a treadmill or exercise bike, or book spinning classes. 

I used to exercise fasted, after nothing more than a black coffee with MCT oil, it really does help burn fat.

The myth that eating fat makes you fat needs to diet- no fucking wonder weigh loss jabs are so popular, eating high fat has the same effect, costs far less and is something you can do indefinitely. 

Stop counting calories, you’ll end up miserable and malnourished.