I don't want to discourage you so much as warn you; I too have spent a lifetime dieting and have lost and gained back weight many times. All working diets feel like you to maintain them for ever during what I call "the momentum phase". Your brain is amazing at slowly making diets cease to work over time.
That said, portion control and calorie counting are components of a working weight loss plan and one should be extremely skeptical of diets like the "eat only before midnight diet". I have never been a night snacker and managed to get morbidly obese just fine without it.
I feel that I'm out of "the momentum phase", because I've never maintained a diet for over a year, until now. However, I realize that I may be deluding myself on that point.
I think that the key to my success is eliminating all but portion control. I don't count calories, or anything else that would make more work for me. All of those things are the things that would make my diet cease to work over time. Now I eat whatever I want, but keep processed foods to an absolute minimum.
Growing up, my nickname used to be "Trashcan", because I would finish everything on my plate, and then eat whatever my dining partners didn't from their plate. I still do, but I take it as leftovers, and eat it for breakfast or lunch the next day. I used to relish being stuffed to the point where I couldn't move. I still very occasionally overeat, but now it's more of a sick feeling that I despise.
I rode an exercise bike after dinner while watching netflix until I ran a 1000 calorie deficit and the weight fell off. I also follow his strength training guide for the laziest possible workout that still yields impressive gains. http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/
For motivation I have an instagram account that ghost follows personal trainers and competition athletes to see what they eat, as now I lift a lot. @erindimondfitness is a good one, since that's one of the few trainers I found that doesn't shill 'detox' and other pseudoscience.
I appreciate your warning. It seems worth keeping in mind.
Your "eat only before midnight diet" (which I've never heard of) is related to what I expected to read when I saw the title of the article. I thought this article was going to be about which twelve hours were the best for eating and staying slim.
I strongly suspect that if they followed up this "constrain all your meals to 12 of the 24 hour day and fast the other 12", with tests that compared results of different 12-hour segments, they would end up finding that eating during segments containing lots of daylight, such as 7am-7pm, would be superior to 12-hour segments with a lot of darkness, such as 4pm-4am.
I hope they do this followup, and if my folk-wisdom-derived speculation is correct, then "eat your last meal before X:00pm" wouldn't be a diet, per se, but a sensible constraint to include in any reasonable diet.
That said, portion control and calorie counting are components of a working weight loss plan and one should be extremely skeptical of diets like the "eat only before midnight diet". I have never been a night snacker and managed to get morbidly obese just fine without it.