Motivation help?

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I need to get healthy. I need a better body.

I've got apps, knowledge of the right type of foods to eat. But still i eat crap and just never use the apps. I think best i've ever gone is a week -_-

Wanting something so much is just not motivation enough. It's not enough to keep driving myself!

Tasty food is just too tasty, I literally can't stand to not live my life without chocolates, puddings, custard etc.

How do i find the motivation to look after myself better?

Here's the thing, you don't have to avoid those foods at all, you just need to eat smaller portions of them.

As far as motivation goes, I am not sure how to motivate someone. What I do know, is that a flexible approach to dieting has a much higher success rate than going to extremes. I've maintained sub 10% body fat for 3 years, and I have dessert more or less everyday. What it comes down to is portion/calorie control. I also only workout 2-3 times a week at most. Some weeks I don't workout at all.

If you feel like you've done something wrong, or that you will gain weight because you eat a piece of cake, then that's both bad for mental game diet wise, and also scientifically inaccurate. You will only gain fat if you consume more energy than you expend.

Here's how I would go about it:
I don't know how much you weigh, or what your TDEE is, but let's just say your TDEE is roughly 1900-2000 calories.
If you wanted to lose fat, aim for a slight-moderate deficit of 300-400 calories a day, which would mean you would aim for 1600-1700 calories.

Make 1200 of those 1600-1700 calories your foundation. In other words, make sure those 1200 consist of good, healthy food. I would try to get atleast 50-60g of protein, and 20g of fiber, but exactly how you formulate it/what foods to choose is up to you.

The remaining 400-500 calories will be your daily allowance for dessert(chocolate, pudding, ect). This way, you will be able to hit the calorie deficit, lose fat, not compromise your health, and still be able to look forward to a snack at the end of the day.

You can have your cake and eat it too, you just need to not go completely overboard.

Don't listen to all sorts of mumbo jumbo "super secret fat burning diet!" nonsense.

If any of that worked, fitness models would have adopted those strategies ages ago, but they don't. They do what works, calorie control.

Don't listen to the low carbers, or low fat'ers, or whatever else extreme diet is popular. 98% of them achieve zero to poor results, whilst they sit behind their computers and cherry pick studies all day.

Flexible approaches are superior in every aspect as far as I'm concerned, and every person I've ever met who had got great results did exactly that.

That's some great advice.

Is there any way to easily count the calories of meals that are home cooked? I don't want to go around weighing everything i eat, but for example, counting the calories of a sunday dinner sounds like quite a large task. I mean, how do i determine how many calories is in a portion of mash potato? Or the gravy that's been made using water from the potato pan? or the chicken in proportion to the amount of stuffing that comes with it (stuffed inside)? Especially when what you've cooked is being served between two people where the other person will have larger amounts than me.

This is usually where I feel like giving up when counting calories because I think if i can't work out how much is on my plate, then it's just going to throw the whole thing off. And if i'm not doing it for one day when i have a home cooked meal, then why bother for the rest of the week?

This is the kind of path my mind goes down when there's just one thing that can't be controlled

The beginning is the hardest. But the great thing, is that once you've been doing it for a while, you won't really have to count, because you develop intution in regards to energy content of different foods. You just ball park it.
Keep in mind, that the idea is not to hit perfect numbers, that's impossible, and your daily expenditure will vary day by day anyways. The idea is simply to get an idea of how much energy is in the foods you eat. So if one week you had the numbers - 1600 - 1800- 1900- 1500 -2000- 1900- 1600, it wouldn't matter, the caloric trend is still a deficit, so you would still lose fat this week. The alternative to this is relying on luck. A person with good calorie intution who only ate junk food, would know how to lose weight much easier, than a person who only ate healthy, but had no clue how much energy they were taking in.

There are some things that make it alot easier though, like myfitnesspal. You can actually save recipes in it, and just type in roughly how big of a portion you ate. MFP also has a scan function, so if you buy a chocolate bar, scan it before you eat it, done, couldn't be easier. But also, I'm assuming you don't eat 365 different meals in a year, so once you've got an idea of the caloric density of a certain meal, you will know this next time you eat the same meal. MFP will also keep track of what foods you eat regularily, so they're easy to add again.

And in general:
It's mostly the meats, starches and fats that matter. Most vegetables have so few calories that it barely matters. I've never bothered counting veggies. You don't have to track seasonings or that kind of stuff either. And most fruit range from 50-100 calories pr. piece, so unless you eat alot of fruit, they tend to not matter that much either.