hello from a Welsh sheep farm

merchddefaid

Hello, I'm 55 and female, 5' 6", in menopause, starting weight 168 lbs, current weight 162 lbs, goal weight 136 lbs. I've got a small farm with sheep and chickens. I don't work off the farm and I don't do any structured exercise, only physical farm work.

I don't actually use MFP as I'm kind of a control freak and a numbers junkie and I'd rather put in all my own data and not have crowdsourced, but these forums have been by far the best source of information and guidance I found when I went looking, so thank you all for that! Especially the stickied posts explaining all the basics. I've just been using spreadsheets to log and track and calculate everything, and using a food scale for everything, always.

It was very hard to assess my activity level because most guidance out there is for structured exercise not physical labour, and generally I'm either doing something like splitting logs or I'm horizontal on the couch with my laptop, so it was hard to make a guess at how that balances out. So I decided to start with targeting 1400 calorie/day and 57g protein/day as that's what the NHS help pages suggested as reasonable. After a bit I also started tracking for 700mg calcium since that seemed sensible at my age and menopause status, and also for the NHS recommended 5/day for fruits and veg (400g).

That seems to be working very well, I've lost a steady 1.3ish lbs/week since I started in mid May. And if I put my numbers and loss rate into the SailRabbit calculator and work backward, it fits with me being somewhere between lightly and moderately active, which is pretty cool, I thought I was more of a couch potato than that

The weighing and counting and logging with clear targets is working super well for me. I gained my excess weight gradually over the last 10 years or so, eating pretty healthy but what I now know was too much. I think what led to that was 1) I have always worked in male-dominated fields and am married to a man so when I eat in company it's almost always been with people who are bigger than me, and 2) when I've got so many challenging physical jobs to do it's been easy to feel like I'd better fuel up as much as I can to get through them. So tracking and logging gives me confidence that I've given my body what it needs and I don't need more, which is awesome. I haven't been hungry at all, and I already feel much better. Most of my weight was/is in my belly and the visceral fat was starting to affect my liver and my digestion and to be constantly physically uncomfortable, like my organs didn't really fit under my rib cage anymore. So I'm very happy and looking forward to feeding myself like this from now on, and really excited to feel like my old body is coming back.

I'm also a bit of a foodie and I haven't found doing this at all restrictive. I've eaten a lot of pasta and rice+beans, with full fat cheese and whole milk in my coffee and that's worked out fine with the numbers. In the past several days I've had pepperoni pizza and a nice steak and still kept daily calories at 1400 with no problem. It probably helps that I don't have much of a sweet tooth most of the time and I'm not much of a snacker. I'm happiest eating something substantial at lunchtime and at dinnertime and mostly just having my milky coffee aside from that.

What I've found really interesting from a numbers junkie perspective is that the graph of my weight over time has some peaks where I suddenly gained water weight, but I can easily identify the cause in each case and it definitely wasn't what I ate. Here's my labelled graph, you might find it amusing

Lietchi

Welcome, fellow data junkie
You seem to have a good grasp on things. Just a little warning: you might want to slow down your loss a bit as you get closer to your goal (but if you stick to those 1400 calories, it will slow down a bit on its own, since your body needs less calories as it gets lighter).
Personally, I lost weight eating quite a bit more than that (also quite a bit slower, intentionally). While I wasn't hungry at the start (208lbs), I've found that I've gotten a lot hungrier as I've gotten lighter (144lbs now). If the same happens to you, you can increase your calories a bit, you'll just lose a bit more slowly.

merchddefaid

Thank you! I am figuring I will let the rate of loss be my guide. 1400 is about what my sedentary maintenance would be at my goal weight, so that seems convenient. I am guessing that my body is currently having a very relieved clean out of the visceral stuff starting with my liver and I want to let it do that as long as the rate stays reasonable. I think my maintenance will be at least a few hundred calories higher in the end, but it's nice to feel like I'll be fine with it if not.