Struggling to lose weight. Is my metabolism stuck?

Loridunn55

I have done my fitness off and on for 9 years. With different diet in between. Started again end of January. Lost 8 lbs in 6 weeks, which was slower than I used to lose weight. But I am 65 now and healthy and age may be playing a role. I did not increase my activity at all, it I did count calories. It I got stuck at the 8 lbs and couldn’t drop more. So I switched to Noom Beginning of March. Another calorie counting program. I have lost 5 but I tend to gain a lb, lose a lb. have made no progress in weeks, so I thought maybe my metabolism is stuck, I had this happen 5 years ago and I did a drastic weight loss program Omni, but it worked and after that I could lose weight by counting calories. Now I am at that point again, for the last few weeks I have increased my activity significantly and counted calories and still no weight loss. And I measure everything. Thinking of maybe fasting one day a week, to see if I can lose my last 8-10 lbs. I am 5.1 and started at 144. Now 130.

AnnPT77

IMO, at our age (I'm 64) and your size (5'1"/130), losing weight fast is not a good plan. Losing weight slowly is better, from the perspective of minimizing unnecessary and undesirable health risk.

Half a pound a week would be a good loss rate target. (That was my target for the last 15 pounds or so of my 50-pound-ish loss - I'm 5'5", and weigh around 133 now, in maintenance).

The trouble is, that slow of fat loss is difficult to see amongst routine daily fluctuations in water weight and digestive contents. More about those here:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

What can help a bit is using a free weight trending app, with (ideally) daily weigh-ins. It's not a magical oracle, but can help by using statistical projections to estimate a weight trend in the midst of up and down fluctuations.

Some examples are Libra for Android, Happy Scale for the Apple environments, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account (don't need a Fitbit device), Weightgrapher, and others.

A common problem in our age group is loss of muscle mass vs. when we were younger. Strength training can help with that, though we add new muscle mass only very slowly. However, strength increase can be faster, and that's useful in everyday life, so positive almost immediately. We just need exercise that manageably but progressively challenges our current strength level.

Other than that, you're doing the right thing by increasing activity. That, and accurate logging (adjusting if needed based on experience) should lead to weight loss at any age. Slow loss, with little left to lose, is a good plan.

Wishing you success!