This. Keep track of all calories and keep to a target. Managed to lose a good chunk of weight in six months like that without exercising like crazy, or doing any weird diets.
I used MyFitnessPal to track my calories. A nice feature in that particular app was that it has various integrations to other fitness apps, so if you move a lot during the day, it'll bump up your calorie target for the day.
Another advantage of tracking calories religiously is that you'll start to understand which foods have crazy amount of calories. Like, burn-your-entire-intake-for-the-day amount of calories.
This. it will help with alot more than you think. unironically started losing weight after bumping up my calories since I was going WAY too low thinking 1200 was fine. I was losing just as much and with no plateau with 2000(I'm very tall) until I lost more weight to justify fewer calories.
You need logging to be able to "debug" the weight loss
If you don't have logging you won't have a good idea of why it didn't work if you fail
Logging meaning tracking calories
There are a lot of heuristics like avoiding food X, or intermittent fasting but these are all just proxies for eating less calories