I think tracking is super important for weight loss. I lost about 70 pounds before surgery just by doing two things: tracking everything in MyFitnessPal and intermittent fasting. I haven't used the Baritastic app because I really like MyFitnessPal, but I think the two apps have many of the same features (barcode scanner, ability to enter recipes and meals, copy meals from one day to another, etc.). I find it super easy to use -- much easier than calorie counting of the old days where I had to look up everything in a book or calculate the points or something.
MyFitnessPal gave me a calorie goal of 2280, and at first, it was a challenge to stay under that, but tracking everything made me more aware of the calorie content of foods and made me think, "Is it worth eating this?" Like @Uomograsso, I gradually decreased my calories over the course of the 5 months before surgery to the point that I was averaging about 1500 calories per day. Something that worked for me was that I made myself enter the food BEFORE I ate it -- basically like budgeting, to make sure I had enough calories left before I started eating.
Intermittent fasting is a bit controversial, but it really helped me to cut back on snacking by making me get used to going long periods of time without eating. I did 16/8 fasting (fasted for 16 hours per day and had an 8-hour window for eating), fasting from after dinner until lunch the next day. Another nice thing about intermittent fasting is that since I was splitting the calories between two meals instead of three, I felt less deprived because I could eat a lot at those two meals and stay under my calorie goal.
I actually didn't make huge changes in what I was eating, like cutting out sugar or carbonated beverages (I did cut out caffeine a few months before surgery, but it wasn't a huge sacrifice because I don't drink coffee, and I just switched from caffeinated diet soda to caffeine-free diet soda), because intermittent fasting was a big enough change for me! If you can do it, kudos to you, but I think sometimes we fail at diets because we try to change too much, too fast, and it's overwhelming so we just give up. I did make gradual changes to what I was eating, like eating a salad before dinner to fill me up, and switching to light salad dressing because the regular dressing wasn't worth the calories. I also started eating protein bars as snacks and found one I loooooove (Built Bars -- so delicious!), which became a nice, relatively healthy treat for me.