Thoughts About Losing Weight (Again)

Until I was about fifty, I was a jogger, and my weight wasn't a problem at all. We didn't even own a scale. But I got lazy and heavy.
For the past twenty years or so, I have weighed about eight kilograms more than I wanted to, and I somehow thought that I could will the excess weight off very gradually, without making any drastic change in my eating habits. Indeed, my weight fluctuated between two kilograms below my ordinary weight to one or two kilograms above it, but it always settled back to the same number. I wasn't gaining weight, which is apparently an achievement in itself, but I certainly wasn't losing any.
Essentially, I wasn't seriously motivated to put myself on a diet. Sure, it would be nice not to have the paunch I was carrying around, but most men my age have a paunch, usually quite a bit bigger. It goes with the territory. Also, the articles I looked at casually seemed to say that being moderately overweight wasn't much of a health risk. But perhaps that's a tautology: if you aren't so fat that you're endangering your health, you aren't overweight.
A couple of times I did manage to diet and lose those eight kilograms, but, while my attention was directed elsewhere, as it were, my weight crept back up to what it was before I dieted. That's a blow to one's motivation.
But about two months ago I had some alarming results on a blood test, which gave me a strong motivation to reduce the carbohydrates in my diet very drastically. On top of that, my knees have become arthritic, and carrying excess weight isn't good for them. Since then I've lost five of those eight kilograms. Let's see whether this time, once I get down to my target weight, I can stay there.
My strategy is not to count things or weigh things but to eliminate certain foods, especially bread, as completely as possible from my diet, and, when I'm hungry, to eat foods like vegetables, fruit, and nuts, which are good for me. Or I drink a cup of coffee or tea (without sugar or any artificial sweetener, of course).
While subjecting myself to this regimen, I've noticed some things:

• Carbohydrates are habit-forming and eating them stimulates the desire for more. Conversely, refraining from eating them reduces the desire for them.
• In order to lose weight (or change one's diet for any other reason), you must believe what should be obvious, but which most people deny: what you eat really makes a difference. It's so easy to say: "What harm could a mouthful of halva or a couple of cookies do?" (It helps if you congratulate yourself for not giving in to temptation.)
• If you watch what people eat (at a buffet or party, for example) you can generally see a strong correlation between what they eat, how much they eat, and how fat they are. But you have to remember that it's not immoral to be fat, and it's not virtuous to be thin. Eating is fun, and if some people want to enjoy themselves, it's up to them.
• There is a difference between real hunger and simply wanting to put something tasty in your mouth.
• There are times when I feel like eating something in some generic way, but I stop myself and compare my present, dieting behavior, to my former eating habits. So that's why I couldn't lose those eight kilograms!
• Oddly, when I weigh myself in the morning and see those low numbers, I sometimes feel alarmed. A couple of people have noticed that I've shed some weight and have asked my whether I'm ill. We're conditioned in contradictory fashion about weight. We think that slim people are pretty, but we think that thin people are unhealthy.
• Being too strict with yourself is counter-productive.
• Nothing is more boring than listening to someone talk about their food obsessions. Enough of this!