Losing weight over 50

vvecchio

Hi, does anyone know if age factors in when counting calories with fitness pal. I'm extremely new to watching calories and what I eat and appreciate any advice. Thank you for your time.

MikePfirrman

Not really, you move less as you age typically but there's no formula difference. For full disclosure, I don't track any longer (I did religiously for like three years after reaching maintenance), but I stay active on the forums. I keep my setting at "Sedentary" under the Diet Profile section. Now, I have a desk job, but it's also partly because I'm 56.

BarbaraHelen2013

Being a little older has a truly minuscule effect on the ability to lose weight, all other things being equal.

Meaning that a person of 20, 30, 40, 50....etc of the same weight, height and level of activity/exercise will lose weight at the same rate. The calorie differences in what’s required only differ in the 10’s of calories over the decades.

As part of the set up on MFP it does ask for your age (or birthdate) I don’t recall which now, so any tiny differences are already accounted for in the calorie goal calculation.

yirara

Actually, there is! It's fairly small though. If you want to know how big it is use a TDEE calculator and use it with 20 year and 50. The difference is not that big though

Diatonic12

Don't fall into the 'my metabolism is slowing down with age' trap. I could post some links but you can do your own research. There are many good threads here in the archives, I just read through them.

It all comes down to tracking our data points. Really. It's an accurate picture of where we need to eat more or reel it in a tad. Don't overwhelm yourself. Aim for .5 lb a week.

springlering62

There’s TONS (uh oh, bad choice of words!) of us on here who have lost weight past 50. I started two years ago when I was 56, and have lost 90+.

It’s all about carefully - and honestly- logging, weighing, and commitment.

Exercise helps speed things along, provides more calories to nosh on, and helps shape things up.

Others here have started in their 60’s, 70’s. Check the Succesd Stories threads for inspiration.

Age is simply an excuse.

Deedoyle9721

I'm 56 and I do feel it's a bit harder to lose weight at this age but... it certainly can be done!
(this is just my opinion, not written in stone anywhere. lol)

In 2012 I lost 32 lbs in 1 year with Nutrisystem and I maintained that loss for several years but then the weight slowly crept back on (about 15 lbs). I tried to go back on NS, didn't work, tried many other fad diets out there - didn't work.

In May I decided to try MyFitnessPal and have lost those 15 lbs!

I track all my food here...
I try to eat real food (trying to stay away from chemical-ridden foods although I'm not a fanatic).

I enjoy all food groups:
mostly fish & chicken and some pork but rarely beef
potatoes with real butter & light sour cream
lots of salads or steamed veggies
fresh fruits
whole wheat bread & pasta (I love my cinnamon toast!)
yummy sweets occasionally
Jim Beam & diet coke, or wine occasionally
etc.

I eat mostly healthy real foods and this site helps me with PORTION SIZES - it was quite an eye-opener!
But pretty easy to follow!!!

I also do a 40 min youtube workout 5x a week (mostly strength with some cardio, pilates & yoga)

"Whatever you do to lose weight you must be willing to do the rest of your life" is a great motto!

This IS a "diet" I can easily follow for life!

Diatonic12

Our bodies have a chronological age and a biological age. We can't control how we age with our genetics but we can affect how old we look and act and feel with food and exercise.

It's interesting to see age through someone else's eyes but some of the most dynamic success stories here have nothing to do with age. Let your age eat your dust. You will not be deterred.

sijomial

The calculation of your daily goal does factor in your age, it's part of the BMR estimate from your stats, gender and age which is then multiplied by the activity setting you select to get you a daily target for a non-exercise day aligned with the rate of weight loss you selected.

But it's not a huge difference per year.

Personally I found losing weight in my 50's far easier. Food labelling and tools such as this one took away the guesswork. Now at 60 I'm eating far more to maintain weight than previous decades as I have far more time to indulge in staying active and enjoying a lot of exercise.

Age doesn't define us, it just makes us a bit more wrinkly!

Jthanmyfitnesspal

You start by getting your eating right. Use MFP to figure out how much you really need to eat. Get out the cup measures and buy a food scale. Develop some new meals and snacks that you know are within your calorie budget.

Then add exercise. Depending on your health and fitness level, this could be anything from walking to high-intensity interval training. Start easy if you haven't been exercising for a while.

Team up with a friend who is also interested in weight control and fitness. Nowadays, it can be completely remote. But, I find that it works best with someone you know well and trust.

briscogun

I just turned 51 and I lost 40+ lbs this year. Age isn't a factor.

charmmeth

I think age is a factor for many women (and it is unclear whether the OP is a woman), since hormonal changes can affect one's metabolism. I am 56, also currently losing, but I am having to work harder at this than I did pre menopause. Macros and eexercise type which didn't seem to matter then are making more of a difference now. Menopause for me really stimulated my hunger. My calories as calculated by mfp are about the same as for the same rate of weight loss five years ago, but I am being much more thoughtful about how I use them.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

@charmmeth : Thank you for sharing your experience.

Disagreers: When you clicked that button, you appeared to be denying @charmmeth's personal experience, which makes no sense. If you have a different experience, post it.

charmmeth

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

@charmmeth : Thank you for sharing your experience.

Disagreers: When you clicked that button, you appeared to be denying @charmmeth's personal experience, which makes no sense. If you have a different experience, post it.

Thank you @Jthanmyfitnesspal;c-45363572! Some people's experience here seems to be that hormones and genetics make no difference on the weight loss journey. My own experience and my observations of my family suggest that they do. I am not saying that you cannot lose weight nonetheless (I have myself lost 20lbs in the last four months), but that changes in hormones and metabolism can and do change how you need to approach it. Also that genetics cause different poeple's bodies to change and develop in different ways at different ages.

Of course women's experience of menopause varies hugely, but I took part in a focus group for women going through menopause last year and every single one of us had experienced weight gain and appetite increase despite not having changed our eating and exercise habits.

For those who disagree, it would be great if you would post your own experience and explain what you base your disagreement on.

AnnPT77

I didn't click disagree with Charmmeth's post, but would have some caveats on the subject, personally. (Before I get into the weeds here, let me say that I'm female, age 64, and about 20 years post-menopausal. I'm not speaking entirely from youthful theory.)

My impression is that hormonal changes around menopause mainly cause weight loss challenges via water retention (weirder), appetite (possibly higher, or more stubborn about accepting calorie deficits), or energy level (lower). The size/extent of any of those effects, IMU, could be individual.

In a calorie-counting situation, only the energy level one is an objective limitation IMO, i.e., one may not notice that daily life activity down-regulation has happened, because it's quite subtle, so needing lower calories may seem mysterious.

Water retention confuses things on the scale, but IMU doesn't affect fat loss, just affects one's ability to realize that it's happening. Appetite doesn't limit weight loss, unless one caves in to it (and I'm not saying it's easy to avoid that!)

IMO, most of the affect of aging on calorie needs comes down to two things: Muscle mass, and activity level (daily life, though exercise may also be affected).

It's pretty clear (from research) that adults tend to lose muscle mass on average as they age. This has two negative effects on calorie expenditure: First, a pound of muscle burns a tiny number of calories daily more than a pound of fat (I think it's something like 4 calories per pound difference, per day). Second, it seems likely that people with better muscle retention find it easier to do things, so they probably move more, in daily life as well as exercise activity, burning more calories that way.

If you go to a TDEE calculator that will use body fat percent in its estimates, and compare the calorie burn of a 20 y/o to a 50 y/o at the same size, activity level and *body fat percent*, the estimated age difference in calories disappears. (Example calculator: https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/) Now, these are only statistical estimates, but I still think that's suggestive.

It's also clear that this muscle mass depletion can be countered to a significant extent, and even reversed. (Strength training works: People into their 80s have been demonstrated, in research, to increase strength and even mass, IMU. At 50, it's for sure possible, for a generally healthy person.) So, we have control over that variable - even though it's a slow thing - and one can play that card to one's benefit. As a bonus, there are a bunch of other reasons why it's good to be strong, beyond calorie burn.

As far as activity level, people obviously differ across the population for reasons other than age. But I think there are factors that differ on average, resulting in younger people tending to have higher activity because:

* Jobs with physical aspects are more common (cartoon example: Wait staff in restaurant vs. office worker)
* Organized sports are more common and available for younger people (IME even adult mixed-age sports leagues have more younger folks (like pre-marriage/kids age) than older ones, especially in very active sports (like softball or basketball vs. bowling).
* Transportation: Younger folks are more likely to rely on walking, biking, or public transport (to which they walk), older folks more likely to have a car parked right at their home.
* Leisure activities differ: Younger folks might be more likely to go clubbing/dancing or play frisbee in the park, older folks might be more likely to go out for dinner and to see a play, for example.
* Finances: Younger folks are more likely to have limited budgets, so rely on DIY work, vs. hiring people to do things for them (cleaning, lawn service, etc.) On the financially more well-off end, the young folks tend to be in a phase where they're doing very active home-making (landscaping, remodeling, decorating), where older folks are more likely to be enjoying what they've created over the years, maybe even down-sizing.
* Family life: Younger people are more likely to have young children, which tends to involve activity for the grown-ups.

Also, when older, any habits we have may be more likely to be pretty wired in. If we watch TV in the evening, we've been doing it for years, and maybe don't have lots of active alternatives in our working vocabulary. If our social life revolves around dinner parties or church potlucks, we may not know much about ultimate frisbee leagues. And so forth. If we've gradually reduced our daily activities, we've gotten used to the current state. On top of this, there tend to be lower expectations societally, IME, about what older folks can or should do . . . things that are mostly myth-based nonsense. (I've had people 30 years younger than me (!) tell me they're "too old" to do some things I routinely do.)

I could go on, but I won't. You get what I'm saying, about *averages*.

Now, none of those are absolutes. There are 50+ folks with very active jobs, with small kids, building their own homes, running marathons, biking to work, etc., etc. But I think that's less common. And even where these things do apply, details vary about what does/doesn't. I'm talking averages.

The good thing is that daily life activity level, exercise, and muscle mass are all things over which most people have nearly complete control via personal choices. Working to improve those, while getting the right calorie level to fuel those things but still lose weight, will result in weight loss . . . at possibly a higher calorie level than would happen if not actively working to optimize those variables.

Just my opinions, as always.

Theoldguy1

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

@charmmeth : Thank you for sharing your experience.

Disagreers: When you clicked that button, you appeared to be denying @charmmeth's personal experience, which makes no sense. If you have a different experience, post it.

Or they could be disagreeing with this statement, "I think age is a factor for many women".

Of course we are all an experiment of 1 so sure doesn't make sense to deny @charmmeth personal experience, but this sounds like a blanket statement for a large population.

ninerbuff

Not really. This March, I was at my highest weight ever 218lbs. My mom passing last year had a lot to do with it. As of now, and because COVID has kept me out of work, I refocused on getting back into total shape and as of this morning I'm 177.4 lbs. Just watched my calories and kept consistent with my walking and workouts. And I'm 56.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

charmmeth

Thanks everyone. I was not intending to extrapolate from my experience as a blanket statement for all women, but to say that age could be a factor for some women. Apologies if it came over differently. I completely agree that other factors play a major role too (grief is a huge one and in my experience - and as a priest, I do have a bit of experience of accompanying people through grief, not just my own - this can work both ways: some gain weight, some lose). But the OP was asking about age, and that was what I was trying to respond to.

@AnnPT77, what you say makes perfect sense, but when I was in the middle of feeling that my metabolism was going mad, it was quite difficult to step back and think about how rational that was and how to deal with it. I did and that's why I am here, but I still have the very vivid experience of realising that had been working for me was no longer doing so. There is a real change for me: I have also for another thread just looked back at my food diary for December 2014, and I can see that I was eating a lot more and exercising a lot less than now but losing at about the same rate. So for me, personally, something has changed over the past five or six year in how the balance of food and exercise in the process of weight loss functions.

durhammfp

When I was 52 I weighed my heaviest at 202, and started with MFP.

In 6 months I lost 35 lbs. It took me 6 more months to lose another 10-12 pounds; I have been stable at that weight (mid-150s) for over a year. Trying to lose the "last 5" now, before the end of the year.

zebasschick

i was 49 at my heaviest in 2006, and a year later, i had lost 61 pounds; it wasn't any harder or different than it was to lose weight in my 20s. now i'm 63, losing additional weight, and it seems to come off exactly as i'd expect for my amount of calories per day, exercise and muscle mass. while my muscle mass is lower, i don't know that it's age related - i work at my desk and had injuries that kept me inactive for a while. now i'm working out hard and muscle is increasing.

everyone is different, so your mileage may vary.

sgt1372

Personally, I don't think age or sex or genetics are major factors in whether youcan lose or maintain wt because the way you lose and maintain wt is the same regardless: control of your food intake.

Call it CICO or whatever you like, if you are eating more cals than your body burns, you will gain wt and the "trick" is to figure out for yourself how to manage that.

For me, it's eating whatever Ilike but
counting all of the food/cals consumed on MFP and weighing myself daily and cutting back when my wt creeps up.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to do it but regardless of what method you use, it all boils down to calorie control and how you manage it given your specific needs and differences.

kshama2001

My mother is 82 and struggles to stay above Underweight because she is so active and eats a lot of high volume, lower calorie food. Also, because she is so busy, it is not unusual for her to skip lunch.

She has a 250 year old house that requires a lot of work, plus extensive vegetable and flower gardens. She walks, swims (seasonally), and practices yoga. Before the coronavirus, she was also strength training twice a week with a personal trainer.

springlering62

@kshama2001

I want to be your momma when I grow up.

lgfrie

There isn't really anything to add to the above insights, but my personal observation as a 57 year old male is that it's lil bit harder (but not much) to lose weight at 57 than when I was 25, but waaaay easier to gain weight than when I was younger.

I've been dieting for 16 months, most of the time pretty consistently but with a few periods of a few days to a week of gaining some back, here and there, and have recently been in a maintenance time-out for 3 weeks. During these 3 weeks, in which I haven't gained or lost any weight (by intent), I've now reconfirmed my NEAT as 2350.

When eating at a calorie deficit, it all adds up nice and tidy such that when I've accumulated around 3500 calories of deficit from my 2350 NEAT, I will have lost a pound. I think my NEAT was more like 2450 or 2500 when I was younger, but that isn't a huge difference.

What IS a huge difference is that if I go on a week bender and accumulate, say, 7,000 calories of surplus, I am not 2 lbs heavier (after water drainage, 4-5 days). It's more like 3 lbs. When I was younger, the 7k surplus would've produced a somewhat precise 2 lb gain but not anymore. I can't explain why. It just is.

What I have learned is that at 57, it is very possible to lose weight, and really, not a lot harder than when I was 25, but I have to be extremely, passionately diligent about not going over maintenance or I gain weight - fast, and it's sticky weight, it doesn't just fall off with the overall water drainage, it sticks around and has to be worked off one calorie at a time. It's very frustrating, but at this point I've kinda gotten the message my body has been sending: line in the sand at maintenance level, for me 2350 + exercise cals, nothing over that or I will pay for it with rapid weight gain.