As far as the calorie counting goes, It's not that hard. I just enter the food that I eat into some software, and it counts them for me. It also keeps track of water, body measurements, exercise, etc. It's really easy to enter a new food. And I can enter the info on my treo and sync it back to my mac. The software comes with a large database of foods, including restaurants and fast food in it. So I'm relearning to make the right choices in what I eat.
What software are you using? I used one of the online options for a while last year, The Daily Plate. It's got a great database of prepared and restaurant food, but I don't eat out often, and packaged foods are pretty rare - I spent tons of time entering individual foods. It was good that I did it, because I found out I wasn't eating anywhere near as many calories as I thought - but it didn't take long before I was pissy about all the time it took, as well as being tied to reaching the magic number for the day.
I'm using Lose It on the iPhone now, which lets me plug in the ingredients for a recipe, and get back nutritional information based on the number of servings. I'm using it in place of the stack of books more often, as I'm building up the number of recipes on the phone. It's good to know how much fat/protein/fiber I'm filling the family with, along with the calories. I also have customized exercises to match the data spit out by my heart rate monitor. I used it solid for one month as a calorie counter, but am now using it for the recipe features and an "on the go" exercise log. I'll probably track a few full days at a time, or one week each month, just to make sure I'm on track.
As far as exercise goes, the only things I like to to do are ride bike and walk. That's not hard for me... The weight training and core workouts are the things that I don't like to do. I hate gyms. It's really easy to catch some sort of illness from someone else's sweat.
The more exercise I got outside in the fresh air, the stuffier, germier and smellier the gym seemed. I was completely disgusted last time I went in for weights and a treadmill run on a cold rainy day. Scrubbed down everything before & after use, which meant I spent as much time cleaning as working out. There were so many sniffling, sneezing, scratching people.... just thinking about it, I want to run off to shower.