If the basic strategies don't get you to your goal, then you'll need to turn up your precision and dig into your personal food habits.
Counting Macros
Counting calories gives you a good overview of your total energy intake, but looking at the quality and kind of intake will help balance your body's competing needs. Macronutrients are protien, fat, and carbohydrates but how much an individual needs of each kind varies drastically. Once you've figured out your targets (with a personal trainer, coach, or nutritionist), you can keep these in your food log. Generally, you want a small amount of fat, a large amount of protein, and carbs based on your activity level. Eating the kind of calories your body needs will lesson cravings and lead to better health and performance.
Identify Emotional Triggers
Eating is never as simple as being hungry. If so, we'd all be eating steamed broccoli and baked chicken every night. Food can serve as a reward, comfort, distraction, relaxation, energy, bonding, and much more. By now, you should have a lot of experience seeing when and why you didn't stick to the food plan you made at the beginning of every week. If you're honest with yourself, you will notice some of the above roles which food subconsciously takes for you. Now, you have to begin rewiring your brain to eat food as nutritious fuel instead of emotional coping. If you can identify when you want to eat because you're stressed, you can cope with being stressed rather than compensate by cramming an extra snack in.
Avoid Trigger Foods
You've also probably noticed there are certain foods you want to keep eating until you're stuffed because they taste so good. Assumming this is not an indication you're missing something in your diet, your best strategy is to avoid these foods as much as possible. Whether it's pizza or peanut butter, save them for holidays or hold them to once a month. Avoid using them (or any food ) as a reward. If you're a cook, you can also try to make a healthy version. You'll sacrifice some taste, but it will temper your craving.
Cheat meals
In basic dieting, we learned to plan everything and to allow for occasional slipups. Now, we're going to start planning our slipups so that they stay contained. These are called cheat meals and you can eat whatever foods you want but should try to keep the serving sizes reasonable. Don't worry about making up for this meal during the rest of the day or trying to make it healthy. The whole point is to give yourself a mental break from the discipline and a physical break from restriction of taste and satiety.
Start with a cheat meal once every other week. You can do them more frequently if they don't interfere with your goals or less frequently if they do. Some people are so active, they can do entire cheat days or even cheat weeks, but I wouldn't advise this. The amount of calories you can consume at one meal is dwarfed by what you can consume in a whole day and after eating badly for a whole week, you may never get back on your diet.
Meal Timing
Experimenting with when you eat your meals and what size can yield benefits for a person even though the daily calorie count hasn't changed. Some people eat one big meal for the day. Others like to snack all day with 10 tiny meals. Most find they are satisified somewhere in between.
Lifestyle
By now you've probably noticed how your lifestyle keeps subtly conflicting with your goals and you're facing the reality that you may need more changes to reach them.
You may be on a diet, but that doesn't mean whoever you live with is on one. No matter how perfectly you plan and shop, your family or roommates may keep tons of tempting junk right under your nose. If your healthy ways aren't rubbing off, you can try to quarantine everyone's food so you never look in their cabinets or part of the fridge. If that doesn't work and you're just living with roommates, you should consider getting your own place or new roommates who do eat healthy. That's ideal because each of you can help each other with meals and weak times.
Another problem you've run into, especially if you're a social person, is how even the most mundane social events have unhealthy food temptations. Eating beforehand or bringing your own food can work if you have a strong will, but the problem goes deeper. For many, eating out or BBQ'ing IS the event and bucking the food can make you an outcast with some people. Yes, you can get new friends or avoid food-centered events, but the best strategy is to drive people to do non-food events whether that is playing cards or hiking. Develop new interests and help your friends develop some too.
The last thing you'll notice is that to continue losing weight after months of dieting, you're having to eat less as your metabolism slows. Increasing the amount of activity in your life will allow you to not only lose weight, but eat more. Don't just think of exercise, but low energy activities like cleaning, painting, or yard work can greatly increase your energy expenditure if done for several hours. Just make sure the increased activity doesn't lead to increased intake unless you have the free calories for it.
