IHNRAT – if you are looking for a “gentle” approach then take a look at Noom. At first glance it looks like any other diet app nonsense that just tracks your calories, steps and weight. However, they claim to be based on actual professional psychology and a few of the things you mentioned resonate with their “lessons”.
From the outside understanding what if actually did was quite hard (although you can try if for 2 weeks for free / almost nothing) – what they offer is:
– all the usual calorie tracking, weight, steps tracking [if you just want this MyFitnessPal is free]
– some short daily tutorials to teach better habits and help understand why we eat/eat badly
– a coach assigned to you after a few weeks (I’ve been using it for about 6 weeks and not plucked up the courage to talk to the coach)
– a support group of other people, again I’ve not actually used that yet – but so far I’m following the plan.
– they have recipes but the internet has loads of low cal recipes so not sure that’s a major selling point. There are a few things which they cover early on though which might be helpful that aren’t even recipes, e.g. for a sugar addict some fruit is probably a good option for you (as it feeds your craving!) but is full of water so fills you up, which most self proclaimed diet experts I’ve seen don’t normally promote, often falling into “fruit=sugar=bad”.
It does cost, although I’m probably saving that on biscuits and beer at the moment! There are discount codes around – PM me if you can’t find one free trial+20% off (but I get an amazon voucher too and I don’t want to appear to be promoting it for that reason). I suspect after a few months you’ll probably think “this is all just common sense” and then jump over to myfitnesspal of something unless you actually need the coaching stuff.
