We're almost up to a year of me having had an annual gym membership, and I've since gained a lot of insights about myself and the process of developing one's body. Its been a year of unlearning common assumptions and hard truths. Distilled to a few points.
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Setting a target weight then going about strength training was a terrible idea. As was making it a daily habit of weighing myself each day, your weight fluxuates up to ±2.2 kg each day, and if you're training in a way that builds muscle your weight is going to go up rather than down.
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Making meals from scratch without understanding basic nutrition. Generally this would've been a good way to go about it, but you need to know what the body needs and how much it needs it by, along with sourcing ingredients so eating to achieve ones goals isn't leading to financial ruin.
These were the two fundamental flaws I had with my initial attempt, I was focused results instead of the process, and moral theatre: Adopting habits because it looked like it was the thing to do to lose weight, like people juicing vegetables and wondering why it isn't getting them any closer.
When I changed my line of thinking from results to the process, I saw exercise as something that fit me personally. I made being 'the brawn' part of my personality, strength felt natural, and working out affirming to my identity, doubly so as a recently out butch lesbian who likes model airplanes and tinkering with machinery. The goal now is to simply turn up, put the work in, and see the effort transform me. It simply doesn't matter to me if I'm fat or thin, the appeal now is purely recreation and the metrics: How much can I lift, how fast can I run, for how long, can I do a pull up yet, and so on. I won't show up as I originally planned for three days a week every week, but to do what I can instead of this perfect idealized life I a flawed, imperfect being can't adhere to, so I'm aiming for five days a month and being flexible with what days I can turn up as long as its five, it'll break even price-wise with the day rate.
For diet, its trickier as you need to unlearn that there is no such thing as 'junk food', no food is good or bad. Calories is calories and to lose weight, and gain muscle at the same time, you need to eat while maintaining a calorie deficit. The tricky part is maintaining proportion of your meals, which for me involves weighing things out, and cutting food in half instead of eating it all at once. It's part knowing what actually is in your food and not assuming it's good because it has some dirt on it, and its part will power not to just consume the entire box of cereal bars.
I think there is still some value in weighing yourself to help make goals measurable and to give you some self-awareness, but bodybuilders instead often use other forms of measurement, like a device that can pinch certain areas and spitout a fat percentage or a tape measure to go around the bicep, waistline, and thigh. Just don't do it every day, when you're doing it everyday, people have confided in me the 'hacks' they use to get it to the number they want like they'll weigh themselves twice and take the lower number in that day, weigh themselves after taking a shit or after some strenuous activity. They treat the scales not as a tool for self-knowledge, but something to be deceived.
It's the same for calorie counting, useful in the short-term because it helps you become more knowledgeable of how to read food labels and make judgements about what you want and how much of it you want to eat in one sitting. I'd not recommend it long-term and to remember the map isn't the territory; various diet plans will say the body need xxxx amount of calories a day, that body isn't your body, you might need more, you might need less. If you're eating less than what your body requires, you're going to be malnourished and hit some serious problems.
Fitness as a goal has helped me be more open-minded and ready to admit something I'm doing or I thought I knew turned out to be the wrong way to go about it. It's made me more adaptable and amenable to change.