Loosing weight in your 50s

There may be other factors at play for you but age alone is no barrier to weight loss.

If you have your health and mobility then the simple "eat less, move more" works at any age. (Don't confuse simple with easy.)
If you don't have health and mobility then "eat less" alone is possible for everyone.

Personally I found it far easier to lose weight in my 50's due to food labelling and tools that help accuracy such as MyFitnessPal.
The other big bonus for me was that as the children were older and my career was more settled I got far more "me time" to use for my exercise hobbies.

Losing weight at any age is difficult. There are always things that come along to throw you off track.

I am 66 and sedentary and this past month I have lost over 2lbs a week. I just increased my calories to slow the rate of loss down.

My son is in his early 30's and wants to lose a few pounds. Because of his work life(office lunches and dinners) plus dating and going out with friends he struggles more than I do. It is easier for him to be more active but I have more time on my hands.

@texasredreb I got a very nice Bluetooth scale from amazon for under $30. It’s called a Renpho. It syncs with both my phone and MFP, and charts all kinds of crazy stuff besides weight and BMI, probably not accurately according to others here, but some of it just fascinating to mull over and look at the charts.

It’s an attractive digital and glass scale and seems accurate.

BTW, Apple’s Health app tells me I am 5’ 6.93” tall. How the heck does it know that?

Started at 50 and lost 75# by my 52nd birthday, it’s possible. It’s all about patience and consistency. That is all.

I’m 57 and lost 80 pounds this past year. This weekend I rode a 48 mile charity ride on Saturday and then ran 10 miles today. Yes - you can lose the weight and regain fitness. It just takes work and committment.

I'm 60, began when I was 57. I lost nearly 100 pounds in about 18 months, and have kept it off for 2 years.

Mugs203 wrote: »

Are you guys using MFP to determine calories per day to lose weight?

Yes. Why wouldn't one?

Btw, 67 here. Lost 40 lbs in my 60s. It's not any harder over 50 than under.

Mugs203 wrote: »

Are you guys using MFP to determine calories per day to lose weight?

Yes. I prefer to keep things simple.

Mugs203 wrote: »

Are you guys using MFP to determine calories per day to lose weight?

That's where I started, but I seem to be the pretty-rare case where MFP materially understimates my calorie needs, even given accurate profile settings and careful logging. Dunno why.

Standard advice here is to treat the MFP estimate as a starting point, eat back exercise calories (conservatively, if you're concerned they're overestimated), stick to it for 4-6 weeks, then adjust intake based on results to hit a sensibly moderate, sustainable loss rate.

I usually add - based on my own experience with a starting underestimate - that if one seems to be losing very fast, and at the same time begins feeling weak or fatigued, it's a good idea to eat a little more, because those are danger signs.

If one doesn't seem to be losing as fast as expected at first, I'd say still stick with the plan, other than double-checking that logging is accurate. There are various reasons that someone may have some water retention initially (menstrual cycle hormone fluctuations, new exercise regimen, many more) that temporarily masks fat loss, so waiting the 4-6 weeks will be a better reading on whether one's losing fat or not.

Losing too slowly can be frustrating, but losing too fast can be a health risk. To me, that means it makes sense to err on the side of slower loss until one has sound data to evaluate, especially for those of us who aren't kids anymore (because recovering from the weakness/fatigue/worse of too-fast loss will tend to take longer, for us: slower bounce-back).

Best wishes!