good evening

Hello!

You will probably have the most success if you change your lifestyle gradually, one small bit at a time, rather than try to wake up tomorrow and reinvent your whole routine from scratch. MFP is primarily a calorie-counting tool, that's how most of us use it, so since you're here, let's start with that.

If you haven't already, go through the guided setup. Put in your stats and MFP will give you a calorie budget. Eat that many calories every day for a while and you will lose weight. It sounds simple when I put it like that, and really it is, but there is a bit of a learning curve. Below are some tips and hints and general advice about how to use MFP that I've found work well for me, I hope something in there is useful for you.

• Your activity level in the guided setup is how active you are without purposefully exercising, basically how much time you spend sitting in a given day (more time sitting = less active). You don't have to exercise to lose weight, but if you're able to incorporate exercise into your daily life, it will be good for your overall health. Consult a doctor or physical therapist to determine what kinds of exercise are safe for you to do, especially if you have mobility or balance challenges or osteoporosis or similar conditions that may impact your ability to do exercise.
• In the guided setup, mark it to lose 1lb per week. Trying to lose too fast is setting yourself up to fail, and feel terrible the whole time you're doing it.
• To use the food diary to greatest effect, pair it with a food scale. Weigh out your portions of everything you eat, find entries in the database which match the label on the package in your hand, and eat the number of calories that MFP tells you to every day. A basic food scale will run you about $10-15, you can probably find one at Walmart or your local grocery store in the kitchen appliance aisle.
• A note about the database: there is a lot of junk in there, so it may take some trial and error to find reliable entries for the foods you eat. It's about 15 years' worth of mostly user-contributed data, so it's only as good as the people entering the data over the years, and food manufacturers change recipes/serving sizes periodically. Nutritional reporting requirements also vary from country to country and this is an international community; additionally, those same requirements do also change periodically, and no one is going through and updating the entries from 2011 that don't include (e.g.) fiber and added sugars broken out from total carbohydrates, which wasn't a thing at that moment in time so that information wasn't captured when whoever added that food to the database did so.
• It is not necessary to cut out entire food groups or nutrients in order to lose weight, unless your specific doctor has told you, personally, that you should avoid X, Y, or Z for medical reasons (avoid carbs for diabetes, avoid sodium for hypertension, that kind of thing). The thing about cutting out foods is that, they're all going to still be there when you reach goal. So, my thinking is that if I learn to live with them and learn how to fit them into my budget for the day now, that will help to ensure I don't gain all this weight back when I get to my goal. You've got better things to do in your golden years than go through all this a second time, yeah?
• Edit to add one more tip: Give yourself a week or two to practice logging your food, get used to doing that and using the app. Log honestly, as best you can, don't worry about going over your calories just yet. After two weeks or so, you should have some good data to look at and figure out where you can make a change. One small, sustainable change. Do that for a week or two, until it's easy, then look for another small change you could make. One thing at a time. See if there are things you could easily swap out for lower-calorie alternatives, or if you've just got to have the real thing (and I get that), maybe you could have less of it. This will also take some trial and error to figure out what's going to work for you long-term.

I've been here since JAN2020 @kathar2021

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