You asked what actually worked, so here's the honest version instead of the short one.
It wasn't a food. It wasn't cutting carbs or drinking anything specific in the morning. It was eating a bit less than I burned, most days, for long enough to matter. That's the whole mechanism. Everything else is just what makes the deficit survivable.
The first thing that changed was tracking for two weeks without trying to diet at all — just writing down what actually got eaten. That number was almost always higher than the number in my head. Once it was on paper, cutting 300-400 calories off it was a small, doable edit instead of a guess.
Second thing: I stopped treating exercise as the fix and started treating food as the fix, with exercise as the thing that made the number easier to hit without starving. Two weight sessions a week, a walk most days — that's it, nothing dramatic.
Third thing, and this is the part people skip: I fixed the 4pm slot specifically, because that's where every previous attempt fell apart. Sayer dates went in that slot — a small handful, maybe four, firmer and drier than the wet varieties so they keep for weeks in a cupboard without turning into a sticky mess. Not because they do anything special to fat. Because they're sweet, filling, and a known calorie number, which beats whatever the vending machine has by a wide margin.
Sleep mattered more than I expected. Under six hours and the next day's hunger signals were unreliable — everything looked like a good idea at 3pm. Once sleep got fixed, so did the 3pm decisions.
None of this was fast. Four months, a bit under a kilo a fortnight on average, some weeks nothing at all. Slow is the only version of this that's still going six months later.
If you're stocking a cupboard for the same fix, the Dates Fruit range has the Sayer grade and others, and the Harga Kurma page has current pricing.