Starting over at almost 47

JudithAnn7815

I'm Judi. I would like to connect with women who are in my season of life. I am trying to find motivation, but it's hard at times. I'm dealing with a lot of perimenopause symptoms that are horrible, so this is a huge challenge for me. Between pain and exhaustion being the worst, I don't know where to begin with fitness. Grocery prices are going up everyday, so budgeting for healthy food is getting more frustrating and complicated when you're on a tight budget. I'm single with no kids, however, I don't have family close to me. I moved so I could return to school next year. That's the shortest version of my story. There's more, but I'm not into oversharing. Thanks for reading my intro, if you've taken the time out of your day!

AnnPT77

Hi, Judi, and welcome!

If you're in that season of life, I'm post-season 😉😆: Menopausal, 69 y/o, severely hypothyroid (medicated), mildly arthritic, etc. But I lost from class 1 obese to a healthy weight at age 59-60, and am fitter than average for my demographic after becoming more active around your current age. I'm also single (widowed) and now living on a retirement income, no immediate family at all, just distant cousins - physically distant as well as socially distant.

Where to begin with fitness? Anything practical, ideally something you enjoy, that involves moving more. It doesn't need to be some gym-y thing, unless you enjoy gymming. It can be going for a nice walk, dancing in the kitchen, playing active VR or video games, some home yoga videos from YouTube, you name it. Look for something fun, but at least find something tolerable and practical. Any activity we enjoy is 100% so do often is more beneficial for weight management or fitness than some miserable thing we procrastinate or skip at the slightest excuse. Even active non-exercise hobbies count: Gardening, home improvement projects, window shopping at a mall, anything involving movement.

Whatever the thing is, aim for a manageable challenge. Overdoing is counter-productive for either weight loss or fitness. Overdoing causes fatigue, makes us drag through the day, burning fewer calories in daily life than we otherwise would, wiping out some of the exercise calories. Since most of us burn many more calories in daily life than in an exercise session, that's meaningful.

On the fitness front, recovery between activities is where the magic happens: Our bodies building back stronger and better. Overdoing short-changes that process.

"Manageable" is the part that avoids overdoing. As a person gets fitter, whatever they're doing gets easier. That's the time to amp up something - frequency, duration, intensity, type of activity - in order to keep the "challenge" part in the picture. It's that mild continuing challenge that creates fitness progress.

On the food front, lots of healthy foods are relatively inexpensive: Dried beans, grains, frozen veggies, some of the common types of fresh fruit, and more. Yes, many of these require cooking at home. That's hard in a busy life, I understand. In college, my roommates and I made our own yogurt from mostly powdered milk, made batches of dried beans into refried beans and froze them, made flour tortillas and homemade bread . . . quite a bit of effort, but less time required as we got more skilled, and very cheap. That may not be for you, and I get that. But there can be affordable options if we don't buy into the "must be trendy superfoods, must be 'health foods', everything organic" hype.

This last is a little bit conspiracy-theorist, but I feel like lots of things in the blogosphere make fitness, health, nutrition, and weight management out to be much more complicated and difficult than they need to be. If we in the general public realize that the basics are fairly simple, achievable with some modest initial investment in learning and practice . . . a bunch of skeezy marketers and influencers would lose their source of income. They're motivated to overcomplicate what's required, and a lot of the clickbait "news" reporting picks up on their trendy nonsense and amplifies it.

Where to begin? No one approach is right for everyone, but this thread is what worked for me on the eating front:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10636388/free-customized-personal-weight-loss-eating-plan-not-spam-or-mlm

That approach may not suit you, but it's one option to consider.

On the exercise front, what worked for me was starting small and experimenting to find things that embodied that "manageable challenge" idea. What that is will be very individual, too.

I'd encourage committing to start, then giving yourself time and grace to gradually find new habits that lead in a more positive and healthy direction. Small changes add up. Common sense about the basics can work, no need to overcomplicate in search of theoretical perfection.

You might surprise yourself with where you get in a few months with some doable changes, let alone a couple of years chipping away. I sure did.

IME, the improved quality of life is worth the effort it takes to get there, and then some.

Best wishes!