55-65 year old women's success?

I am 60 and I have lost 32 pounds in the last 5 months and it was not hard (about 8 more pounds to go). It seems like once I changed my habits, the weight just came off. The keys for me are
1. Good sleep (8 hours a night)
2. Drinking lots of water each day
3. Exercise (yoga 4-5 times a week does wonders for me. Makes my body stronger, reduces my stress and helps me sleep better and feel more stable and open hearted. It also helps me accept my body just as it is.)
4. Very little alcohol
5. Low sugar - I eat 3 servings of fruit a day but avoid chocolate, ice cream, cookies etc.
6. Less fatty foods (I avoid cheese, cream, mayonaise, etc. but cook with olive oil and always put home made salad dressing on my salads).
7. Lots of veggies and fruits which I love. Less carbs. I still eat sandwiches 4 times a week, but I tend to gravitate towards lots of veggies with dinners instead of the starches.
8. I start each morning with steel cut oats and applesauce and I eat a high protein fruited yogurt mid-morning with fresh berries. Eating lots of healthy food early in the day keeps me going strong and not hungry.
Once I started losing the weight, my increase in energy and happiness motivated me to continue and it just continues to fall off. I feel like maybe this is not true for everybody, but for me, the above changes have made it almost effortless. As long as I cook good healthy food for me, the rest just happens. I don't follow a particular diet or even count calories, I just choose healthy food choices.

Good luck! I feel like we each need to figure out what works for us. For me a huge part is getting sugar (cookies, ice cream, chocolate and alcohol) out of my life. My intense sugar cravings go away after 4 days of none of it and then it is easy. But if I try to eat just a little bit of it, I binge like crazy.

Good luck to everyone in the New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! I log in daily but track my food on my Fitbit. The tracking is in real time so it’s more accurate in giving your calories in vs calories out...no guesswork. It also tracks water, you can set your goals just like here on MFP, the database is huge, and foods can also be scanned in with the barcode. I have maintained my 60 pound loss this past year, and my mission this year is to get rid of the remaining 30.

cory17 wrote: »

I'm still on this journey. Anyone else have difficulty with the sodium in any outside/prepared food? Doesn't seem to matter what it is, my weight jumps 2-4 pounds.

Sure, more sodium than usual (in outside food or added with my very own hands) can cause a temporary scale jump.

A bit of water retention is how the body maintains electrolyte balance in that scenario. Unless sodium causes a medical problem for someone, that fluctuation is just how healthy bodies function. It's not fat weight, so - again, absent a medical issue - why worry about it? For me, it'll drop off a day or so after sodium intake returns to my usual levels.

Eating more carbs than normal, even within one's calorie goal, can cause a similar scale jump: A few grams of water is needed temporarily as part of metabolizing the carbs. The water weight drops off after the process is over. Again, not fat, part of healthy body functioning, I don't worry about it.

Restaurant meals, for me, often include more than my usual of both sodium and carbs. (I'm not a low carb or keto person, but restaurant meals for vegetarians - which I am - are often more carb-heavy than my typical at-home days.)

Long term weight trend, not the day to day bounces, is where actual fat loss (or gain) is going to show up. That's where I focus. Saves some stress.

I’m still here! After losing 5 lbs through the holidays I stalled out in January despite upping my activity. But I am now within 20 of goal and I am not stopping now!

Still here. Ladies if I can do it SO CAN YOU!!! 60 and maintaining since Oct 2017....

Still here too! Still maintaining; lost more than I wanted to and my doc wants me to put on a few more lbs. Have added a few things I quit eating back into the diet, just don't want to over do it. Too skinny doesn't look good when you get older anyway.

I really think that I will always be logging my foods- well for the very long future at least- STILL have no sense of "stopping when full"- it is not intuitive for me or anything yet- oh well- I will log and be happy for mfp

I am here! I don’t log food here anymore since I started logging on my Fitbit. Kinda like it better as it logs calories in/out in real time which is a little ymore accurate. I started leaning towards more plant based eating 3 weeks ago. I had already been eating relatively all whole food, only ate chicken/turkey breast on occasion and virtually no processed foods, so incorporating more greens, fruits, starch or grain, and a few nuts/seeds has been the menu. I am down 8.6 which puts me back to my lowest weight since October. I feel sure that a new decade will FINALLY be reached in February which will certainly make my heart happy!

Fabulous to know what everybody is doing to either maintain or lose weight for fitness. I LOVE you tube videos- so I mainly walk or do body weight exercises. Soemtines I life light weights to help sculpture my arms etc. I think i am doing pretty well for a 58 year old lady.