Introduction!

Lindyloo05

Hello! I have had this account for a while but just haven’t had to willpower to do anything with it. I’m 52 menopausal & struggling so badly with motivation. I’m going to try my hardest to make a note of everything I eat on here this week…….I also think I’m addicted to sugary things, when I’m sad, happy, annoyed, literally any emotion I reach for a biscuit/chocolate!

AnnPT77

Hello, and welcome!

I started here at 59, had been menopausal since age 45 (caused by chemotherapy), and I completely stink at motivation, will power, and all that kind of stuff. If constant willpower and motivation were essential, I wouldn't be at a healthy weight today . . . but I am, and have been for 6+ years, now age 66, after previous literal decades of overweight/obesity.

You can do this. One advantage we have with age, IMO, is that we know ourselves really well. We've achieved other big, long-term goals in life - getting an education, creating a career, making a home, maybe raising a family - and we can apply those same implicit skills to weight loss and health improvement generally. We have experience gaming our own preferences, strengths, and limitations, to accomplish things, in a wily way. Exploit that!

One thing: Menopause is not weight loss doom. Many menopausal women succeed here. You can, too.

Logging food really helped me. I found that quite a few things I was eating, once I saw their calorie "cost", just weren't that important to me for satiation, nutrition, or happiness. I was just eating them because I always ate them! So I cut down on those, and put some on the "infrequent" list. (Some probably went to frequency zero, but I didn't intentionally eliminate anything.)

People use lots of strategies to reduce sugary things. One that helped me was using some temporarily-available honeymoon period willpower to start eating more whole fruit, like 3 servings daily. After a few short weeks, my cravings for more calorie-dense but nutrient-poor sweets (baked goods, candy, etc.) were greatly reduced.

That doesn't work for everyone, but I've seen others here say it helped them, too. It was advice I heard from a registered dietitian. Her claim was that when we're sub-ideal on micronutrients, we can possibly crave generic sweets, and that increasing fruits fills the need. There's an adaptation period, though.

If emotional or stress eating is in the picture, then a thing that can help is to find non-food habits that reduce the stress or vent the emotions. Some people use mild exercise (stretching, a short walk, etc.), prayer or meditation, relaxing music, a nice warm shower or bath with some good-smelling bodywash, journaling, even things like adult coloring books. In some sense, if the root problem isn't true hunger or nutrition, the solution isn't food. See if there's a way to address the root problem.

Well, I'm sorry, I'm rattling on here. Mostly, I just wanted to say "hi" and "welcome" and wish you success!