57 year old female, struggling here to regain pre menopause self.

MissTapTap

Interesting how easily weight creeps up on you!
I had made a decision to lose weight and now a week later I'm up 2kg.
Clothes are getting tighter and motivation is waning.

I am 57 years old and feel frail, stiff, sore all over and have achy joints.
I don't wish to continue on like this.
Today I will reset!

1. Track daily- not to list all the bad food choices I made, but as a guide to stick within 1400 calories (Currently eating through 2000+ calories)
2. Walk daily, aiming for 10000 steps most days (currently my steps are up to 5000)
3. Some form of weight training weekly ( I have borrowed light weights from a friend a year or so ago and they have sat in my wardrobe) I have seen a dumbbells' workout I will do on you-tube.
4. I will stretch twice a week (you-tube)
5. I will drink 3 glasses of water a day- currently I don't drink water at all during the day (just coffee)
6. I have a boxing bag hanging up in my garage which I need to use. I will aim for one short workout a week.

Lets start again Miss TapTap, I believe in you x

sammiloveg1

It’s easy to lose motivation especially when it comes to the way we feel and look and want to feel and look, I know what it’s like to go down a few pounds then back up i usually feel it in the pit of my stomach that I shouldn’t keep going, but the desire to be healthier and lose weight and better ourselves is stronger than even when something happens that isn’t moving us in that direction, but at the same time is. Keep going, you can still lose weight in the future even if you gain 2 kg this past week! Don’t give up but don’t be hard on yourself and make yourself sad, you are setting realistic goals. I hope you find your excitement again in your weight loss and remember how beautiful you are inside and out even if you feel discouraged today.

AnnPT77

The first week or two often will have water retention shifts that cause scale-weight weirdness. Follow a reasonable new regimen (eating and activity) for at least 4-6 weeks, then evaluate average weekly results over that whole time. (You might even drop the first couple of weeks if they're very atypical of what follows.) If you had menstrual cycles, I'd say to compare body weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles to evaluate average weekly results . . . but it sounds like you're beyond that.

A week isn't enough to know anything useful, honestly.

Yes, weight creeps on, but menopause (IMO) isn't special in that way. I'm not a 20-something blithely reciting internet platitudes, I'm a 68 y/o woman. I've been at a healthy weight for nearly 8 years now after a year of loss at age 59-60, when I'd already long been menopausal and hypothyroid (medicated for that), and around 30 previous years of overweight/obesity.

Realistically, it only takes averaging 100 excess calories daily to add 10 pounds in a year. That can happen because of a bit more food, or a bit less movement in one's life, or a combination. It's easy to do that without noticing. Often, people will blame aging or menopause.

I don't know your personal story, but many of us are less active in our 50s-60s than we were in our 20s-30s: Less physical job; less physical hobbies; able to afford door to door transportation vs. doing more biking, walking, public transit; no longer DIY-ing lots of home improvement projects, more like enjoying the fruits of that; hiring out more such projects if we can afford it; no longer chasing toddlers all day; and more.

If we don't do anything to keep our useful muscles (work or exercise), they decrease as we age. That burns slightly fewer calories at rest, but more importantly makes it less easy and fun to move, so we may tend to move less and less, hardly noticing because change is gradual. On top of that, many women in my circle have done many rounds of extreme yo-yo dieting, lost unnecessarily much muscle on each round (only cardio, not enough protein, ultra-low calories), then regained mostly fat (little/no exercise, lots of fried foods and baked goods). It's a small effect each round, but it adds up on repeats.

The good news is that we can control and reverse most of that: We can be more active (daily life and exercise), challenge our muscles, improve our nutrition. That doesn't need to be an extreme high-motivation forced march. Gradual progress is easier to sustain, and adds up to a surprising degree IME, with patient persistence.

Your plan includes a lot of good elements to achieve those things: Kudos! The one thing I'm wondering is whether it might be too much all at once, if you're starting from quite inactive. Over-exercise (for one's current fitness level) can be counter-productive, causing fatigue to burn activity (and calorie burn) out of daily life, plus make it harder to stay the course long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight.

Sometimes a more moderate plan can get a person to a healthy weight and improved fitness in less calendar time than a more extreme effort that causes deprivation-triggered bouts of over-eating, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether.

I'm a big believer in striving to make weight loss and fitness improvement as easy as possible, rather than as fast as possible. As a bonus, that can let a person find and groove in new habits, new routine ways of eating and moving, that not only lead to the good goals, but keep us there long term, ideally permanently, almost on autopilot.

I don't know about you, but I can't sustain motivation, willpower or discipline for the whole rest of my life . . . yet I do want to stay at a healthy weight and reasonably fit forever, ideally.

I'm cheering for you to succeed: Being more active and reaching a healthy weight have each given my quality of life a big boost. I love to see other people get those benefits, too.

Best wishes!