Starting again

dol2200

Hi
I have been a yo-yo dieter. Lost over 50 lbs and gained it all back
Now I'm older and it's harder to lose. My doctor wants to put me on diabetic medication but said she will wait if I want to give losing weight on my own one more try.
I have too the middle of April to lose 10 lbs or in will be prescribed a pill.
Wish me luck.

nossmf

Welcome, @dol2200! Luck is the combination of opportunity with preparedness. By joining MFP, you are taking the right steps to become better prepared, learning information, strategies and discipline. As long as you put in the effort, I predict you will be pleased with the results.

Corina1143

That's doable. I hear mild exercise is good for sugar regulation, too. Go shopping! That's mild exercise. 🤣
A friend once told me that the absolute best way to shop is to put enough money for coffee in your pocket, leave your purse, credit cards, etc at home. Go to the mall, window shop, people watch, and get your exercise. She was right!

AnnPT77

You can do this! If an undisciplined aging-hippie flake like me can lose weight (at age 59-60, while severely hypothyroid (medicated)), I think many others can, too.

I'm not sure it's age per se that makes it harder to lose. Recent research suggests that our metabolism is quite stable from our 20s to our 60s, with decline after that quite gradual.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8370708/

What can make it harder to lose, I think, is yo-yo dieting, especially if the loss phases involved extreme tactics and fast loss.

I don't know how old you are or whether you're male/female, but in my social circle among women around my age (I'm 68), it's been common to lose weight fast for a while eating mostly salad/veggies and doing intense cardio (no strength exercise, not enough protein), then regain eating mostly treat foods and filler carbs (baked goods, fried foods, lots of pasta and rice, etc.) with little or no exercise (strength or cardio) and still inadequate protein.

By doing that on repeat, we lose unnecessarily much muscle mass during the loss phases, and regain almost entirely body fat. Body composition degrades over multiple cycles, i.e., less muscle mass, more fat mass as a percent of any given body weight. That's in addition to the usual thing of muscle mass decreasing with aging simply because we don't challenge our strength to remind our body we want to keep up our muscle mass.

People who tend toward overweight (like me) also tend to have more . . . placid? . . . daily life movement patterns than always-slim people. Even fidgeting can burn up to low hundreds of extra calories daily compared to an otherwise similar placid person, so that's meaningful. On top of that, as muscle mass decreases, movement becomes harder and less fun, so we do less of it. That can become habitual, permanent unless we work to change it.

The good news is that that stuff is reversible: We can build back muscle mass (albeit very slowly!) via progressively challenging strength exercise, and increase our daily life intentionally (in routine humdrum ways as well as exercise). Many MFP-ers share their ideas here for increasing daily life exercise without requiring noticeably more time in our day:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

It won't require luck. It will require work, patience, analysis, problem solving, adjustment of tactics, and more than anything else just sticking with it. If you try something that isn't working well for you, that's not "a failure". Learn from it, drop the un-useful tactic, and try something else. As long as you keep working at it, you'll eventually succeed. Only giving up leads to non-success, ultimately.

I'm cheering for you to succeed: IME, the results are very much worth it!